Art is a Lie: Part II
I hope you will join me this weekend, July 6th, at 2 pm Eastern Time on ZOOM (link HERE) to discuss this course’s most messy, complex, and intriguing film….
“I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film to help bury forever all the dead things we carry around inside. Instead, it's me who lacks the courage to bury anything at all. Now I'm utterly confused, with this tower on my hands. I wonder why things turned out this way. Where did I lose my way? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway.” –Guido Anselmi, protagonist in Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2.
In a May newsletter about the work of director Michael Haneke, I referenced a very famous quote by Pablo Picasso: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2 also raises questions about the capacity art has to speak both truth and lies. In good Modernist form, Fellini explores the notion that perhaps the most honest art knows it is lying. But art that lies–and is transparent about its lying–is the art that most accurately reflects the inconstancy of the human condition. This autobiographical film is overtly and sardonically self-referential as the great director, Fellini, himself suffering a creative block, tells the story of an equally great director, Guido Anselmi, suffering through a creative block. Guido is a liar (to his wife, to himself), so he is, naturally, a great artist.
The fictional Guido has had a successful run with his filmmaking, so much so that he was a member of the Italian intelligentsia and a star director. But his current film is about the most challenging subject he has ever attempted to inhabit and explore: himself. This is precisely the predicament of 8 1/2’s director, Federico Fellini, a man who had, thus far, made eight successful films, including the recently released favorite, La Dolce Vita.
Guido is a deeply troubled artist, a conflicted playboy/ child/ genius. Educated in Catholic school and raised a devout Catholic, he is tortured by memories and fantasies that shame him as he rejects his childhood faith and embraces the duel religions of women and art. A married man, he also has a consistent mistress and is easily seduced by the many beautiful women pandering to him as a powerful, handsome film director.
In one of the film’s most notorious scenes, we see Guido’s fantasy harem, a farmhouse full of the women that have nurtured him, instructed him, or seduced him. He is tempted by many young, voluptuous women; bathed by the elderly women who cared for him in his childhood; analyzed and instructed by his wife’s friend, Rossella–a Jiminy Cricket to his lying Pinocchio. In perhaps the most troubling part of this fantasy, Guido banishes aging showgirl, Jacqueline Bonbon, upstairs to a new home for older (and no longer sexually enticing) women. She begs, but Guido has no mercy. She is no longer useful for him.
This film is by far the most complex and disorienting of all that we have watched thus far (even more than Memento!). It shifts from present day reality to memories of the past to fantasies to dreams. The filmmaking is fluid and often fast moving, typically not giving many clues about whether we are in Guido’s past, present, dream, or fantasy. Rewatching the film leads to better “decoding” of each of Guido’s mental states. But the film is more “Modernist” than it is “modern.” By this, I mean that the filmmaking does not attempt to merely (re)create an objective, sense-making, reality. Instead, it often follows a more “stream of consciousness” mode of storytelling, delving into Guido’s interior world, blurring the distinctions between past and present, fantasy and reality. This internal messiness is, according to many Modernist artists, less of a lie, more “real” than the streamlined mimetic versions of the real that are often packaged as “realism.”
Our entry into the film and Guido’s story is one of the most jarring, confusing parts of the narrative. We almost immediately know what we have gotten ourselves into!
Even if you don’t get a chance to watch the entire film, I encourage you to watch this opening sequence. It is one of the most memorable and artfully made opening scenes in film history:
**Don’t read this until watching the film or the above video.**
In this opening, we see a very modernist/ Freudian focus on the logic of the unconscious mind, what Freud refers to as “dream logic.” Guido is sitting in his car in a traffic jam, and a banal, innocuous situation soon turns deadly. Gas fills the car and Guido is fighting against suffocation. The inside of each surrounding car appears to him as staged tableaus populated by humans from his life (that we will later meet in the film). He struggles, gasping for air as he finally manages to climb out of the car’s sun roof. He floats up, up and into the clouds until he finds himself above the gargantuan set of his upcoming film on the beach. His freedom is short-lived as a rope is (somehow) attached to his leg, and several of the members of his production team pull him violently down into the ocean. But before we see the dreaded splash, Guido wakes up.
This is one of the many times that Fellini shows us that–as he has famously said–“Nothing is more honest than a dream.” The film includes other dreams and anxious fantasies that take place an abandoned mausoleum space where he meets his parents (and kisses his mother–who then turns into his wife–on the mouth. Hello, Oedipus!) and other important figures in his life.
When he ventures into his childhood memories, we see the origin of Guido’s relationship to women as comforter or seducer. In his young childhood, he is joyfully bathed in wine by caring, yet stern women. He later shares the nonsensical chant "Asa Nisi Masa" with a female playmate in the bed next to him. Although Fellini never divulged the meaning of this made up term (and the accompanying hand motions), many critics have noted a possible allusion to Carl Jung’s "concept of “anima,” the unconscious feminine qualities within a man. This reading makes sense in the context, as we watch the ways in which Guido’s encounters with his maternal carers and the sultry, grotesque Saraghina work together to define him. In the above mentioned fantasy harem sequence, we see Guido make the same “Asi Nisi Masa” hand gestures while being bathed by a group of women.
Guido, the artist, seeks a sort of revelation through the making of his art; he hopes his films will both create and uncover meaning. But we become increasingly aware that a splintered, chaotic self — a mess of memories, desires, and circumstances — will struggle to present a coherent truth to his audience. How can the artist disentangle himself from the confused, knotty strands of his internal reality enough to produce something clear and true?
Guido’s associate screenwriter, Daumier– perhaps speaking as the voice of Guido’s super-ego–tells him: “This life is so full of confusion already, that there’s no need to add chaos to chaos.” He also argues that this messy, disruptive art — any art that is an honest reflection of Guido’s existential struggle — is not marketable because “In the end we need some hygiene, cleanliness, and disinfection.”
But the film continually reminds us that the artist is perhaps a sloppy child who has one foot in a make-believe world, the other tentatively planted on a more concrete reality. After we slip into the Guido’s childhood memories of awkward sexual awakening, mischief, and curiosity, Fellini shows us Guido as a suave, yet silly, middle-aged artist who often “plays” in order to shirk the responsibility of actually creating. But, of course, art is play. And children’s play is the act of creating.
In essays including "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” and “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva, Sigmund Freud discusses the relationship between the creative mind of the child and the creative mind of the artist. While a child can openly act upon his fantasies–performing them through the creation of an imaginative friend, etc.–an adult cannot do this without appearing delusional. That is, unless he or she is an artist, creating alternate worlds to inhabit and fictional friends as companions. Daydreaming–one of Guido’s common pastimes–is another way for creativity to manifest itself in the mind of all human beings, but it is especially vivid in the mind of the artist.
In 8 1/2, Guido has agency over his daydreaming and his performative acts of lying to and gaslighting his wife, Luisa. He does not have agency over the guilt and anxiety–filled waking and sleeping nightmares. He is at once a shame-filled child and a deceptive, manipulative trickster. This puzzling, inseparable mix is alluded to when Guido playfully wears a false nose and, at other times, slyly taps his nose. He is both Pinocchio and Don Juan, seducer and seduced.
In the film’s ending sequence, Guido embraces a spirit of messy play —and realizes that being honest about his own existential confusion is what will make true art:
“Everything’s confused again, but that confusion is me; how I am, not how I’d like to be. And I’m not afraid to tell the truth now, what I don’t know, what I’m seeking.”
Guido and his team of writers, producers, actors and critics drive up to the stark, imposing outline of his half-constructed, failed movie set. But this realistic scene quickly morphs into something far more surreal as Fellini’s typical circus music begins to play faintly in the background and we see many figures from Guido’s life — his parents, his teachers, the women he has loved — all dressed in white, walking calmly to the beach and the scaffolding for the cancelled film. The camera pans across the bright faces of these individuals as we hear Daumier’s questions in a voiceover: “And how do you benefit from stringing together the tattered pieces of your life? Your vague memories, the faces of people that you were never able to love?”
But Guido begins to ignore this criticism (the superego) and give in fully to play (the id) as he grabs a bullhorn and commands the bustling group of people from his conscious and subconscious life to make their way down the stairs. As they parade downward, the circus music wells up, and we recognize that these characters walking down the scaffolding of Guido’s now defunct film set are, in actuality, the scaffolding of Guido’s own fractured but full psyche. After this beautiful revelation, perhaps the moment of clarity that he was longing for, Guido proclaims that life is a celebration. He has the crowds of his past and present life join hands in a joyful circle as he jumps in and joins their dance.
The final moments of the film are delicate and rich as the tiny child Guido, wearing a long white cape and playing a flute, marches in the middle of the circle, followed by a few clowns playing instruments. The circle of Guido’s consciousness then disappears — and the child and his band are alone in a wandering spotlight. As the film ends, the child is completely alone, playing the flute in the spotlight, darkness fallen all around him.
**Although there is SO MUCH MORE to talk about with this amazing film, I will stop here.
Below are a few questions to consider when watching the film:
What role does magic play in the film (Rosella’s supposed clairvoyant gifting, the magician’s supposed ability to read minds, the childhood chanting, etc.)?
Note how often we see bathing occur in this film (large groups of men going into public baths, Guido bathed in wine as a child, Guido bathed by women in his fantasy, etc.). What do you make of this?
What significance does the character of Claudia (pictured below) hold in the film, and why does Guido not cast her in his film?
4. Why is the proposed film a science fiction film?
5. Consider the many scenes that deal with Guido’s lapsed Catholicism, including his shame over watching Saraghina, his meeting with the Cardinal, and various conversations about his faith or absence of faith.
6. How might this quote from Fellini relate to the film?
“THE Church never gave me joy. . . The Church frightens me to death. I am a Christian. I believe in the necessity of God. Because I believe in man. And God is the love of man.”
7. Consider the role of surrealism in this film.
8. BONUS: I love this short excerpt from a Fellini interview. In it, he diagnoses a problematic cultural shift away from the kind of attentiveness that his filmmaking demands. I cannot even imagine what he would be saying today! Do you think he deals with the issues he speaks of here in 8 1/2? Although the film largely deals with the artist’s own struggles and perception, he is often “tempted” by outside voices to consider what will please an audience…
Thanks for reading, everyone! I am delighted to hear/read any and all comments in response to this brilliant work of mind-bending art.
I will write again on Friday with reminders for Saturday!
p.s. I have included some portions from a blog post I wrote years ago for Relief Journal in this newsletter.
p.p.s. How much does the following scene crack you up?? LOL