8 1/2

I think for most film geeks the transformation from passive film watching to whatever it is I do now occurs almost instantly. A single movie does it, and for me that movie was Apocalypse Now. I rented it because I had decided to see every movie I could about Vietnam, and the final act moved me so strongly, in a way I had never been moved before, that I was forever hooked on that experience. It was like encountering something deeper than my own life, something grander than my own experience.

So that's how it began with me and the movies. Like an addict, I would search out the "Apocalypse Now" experience, and I found it with an astonishing amount of regularity in the beginning. Pretty soon the classics section at Blockbuster grew thin, and with much trepidation I decided to start watching foreign films. 8 1/2 was the first one I rented, on a terrible VHS copy that managed to make such an astonishingly detailed film seem like a Monet painting.

I'm not sure why I chose it, but surely it had something to do with the cover; plain black with the title in white and the word "Fellini." It's an immensely confusing movie on first viewing. Fellini makes almost no effort to accomodate the audience, but the justly famous first scene represents, for me at least, the very height of artistic filmmaking. It communicates conflicts and emotions through purely cinematic means, and warns us that the movie we are about to see will respect no artificial boundaries such as "realism" or even "plot" and "intelligibility."

Despite it's reputation as a highly personal and artistic film (in fact a revolution in style at the time), 8 1/2 isn't difficult to understand once you get past that first disorienting viewing. If you can give yourself up to the moment (the best you can do when watching movies) it becomes richer than almost any other film I can think of. And giving in to the moment, I think, is Fellini's major point with 8 1/2.

It's a movie about making a movie that happens to be the movie we are watching. We have a director who seems to be making an autobiographical film, but can't seem to find the connecting thread. We see his parents, his first sexual awakening, his catholic upbringing, and an astonishing and incredibly beautiful evocation of the magic of childhood. These episodes and others are intercut with the director at present, exhausted and depressed, failing to make sense out of his memories. His mistress arrives, and soon after, his wife. As his life seems to get more and more confusing, he seems to sink deeper and deeper into his fantasies and memories, always failing to make sense.

Claudia is his dream girl, a beautiful actress with a part in his movie. She represents salvation, as we are told. Late in the film he asks her "Could you devote yourself to one thing, and one thing only?" As if to say, "What's the truth? What am I supposed to do? Why can't I find that one thing that will give meaning to my life?" She tells him he doesn't know how to love. She is just a girl.

He ponders suicide, and the memory of his mother scolds him for running away. We hear a gun shot, and it's unclear whether this is fantasy or not, but in any case this leads us into a scene of such transcendence it might just as well be taking place in heaven.

A philosopher who seems to hang around in the film begins a long speech. The best we can learn, he concludes, is silence.

The director sits dejected in his car, the film abandoned, over (making the suicide both a figurative and literal leap into nihilism). But they're all there, all the people in his life. His parents, his lovers, his long suffering wife. He feels so full, he says. Not empty anymore, but full. The transition is important, because in abandoning the One he finds the Many, and finally learns to love in a way.

Fellini represents this moment with a parade. All the people in his life, who we have met and come to know like old friends in the course of the film, come back and join hands and dance around the circus ring until the lights go out. A small boy, our protagonist in younger days, is left alone in the spotlight, and marches out into the darkness alone.

Partly, perhaps mostly, a justification for Fellini's flamboyant personal lifestlye, 8 1/2 is also a bittersweet embrace of all the pain, confusion, and joy there is in life. Maybe learning to love as Fellini sees it leads us back to Nietzsche. To love one thing in this life is to love everything.