8 1/2

"Here is Stone on the complexity of '8 1/2': 'Almost no one knew for sure what they had seen after one viewing.' True enough. But true of all great films, while you know for sure what you've seen after one viewing of a shallow one."
                                                                 --Robert Ebert

8 1/2 is an at least partially autobiographical exploration of a director suffering from paralyzing writer's block. It begins with and is interspersed by dream sequences (this is really what made me want to watch it--I'm reading the Satanic Verses, which are full of dream sequences and I guess I'm a glutton for punishment). The sense that you're in a dream permeates the film, and Fellini captures the dream sensation really well: for instance, the feeling whenever you're walking that everyone is looking at you, like you're the center of the dream (which, of course, you are). The spa that he visits to seek a cure for his writer's block also flirts routinely with the dream sensation--people talk to him without stopping, interrupting each other, like a dream in which you can't rest. In other scenes everyone walks, almost as if they're floating, to the mud baths and to the steam rooms and to the mineral water, in an almost fascist identical way, but they're dressed in white, so it also makes you think of heaven. Then again--his life is sort of a bad dream: he is constantly walking into situations for which he is entirely unprepared. People ask him questions about his film; actresses want to know what the plan is; there is a gigantic set constructed that he doesn't know what to do with; he can't make any decisions about who to choose for each role--all things that you always hope won't happen in real life.

It's very meta: Fellini is directing a movie about a director who is lost about what movie to make. He is experiencing pressure from the writer and producer and his assistants. He's experiencing pressure from his wife and his mistress (those pressures may have something to do with each other). In the course of the film, childhood memories emerge, especially as related to women and to Catholicism, which are at odds with one another. Catholicism reprimands his fascination with women's sensuality (and occasionally even his film making); his mistress and the sensuality of countless other women, on the other hand, threaten the order of his marriage (to a distinctively non-sensual woman--from her clothes to her glasses to her figure). He wonders whether he ought to remain married to one women or whether he ought to engage in all of the relationships that he wants to; this dilemma culminates in an imagined harem. He also looks to one imagined ideal of a woman to provide him relief from his inner turmoil. When he meets this woman in real life, she questions him, in the same way that everyone else does. He decides that she is not the solution that he hoped for. Her repeated critique of him is that he doesn't know how to love. This is related to the solution that he finally embraces at the very end of the film--to accept all of the characters from along the way of his life and to bring them together: this is the film. He brings together characters from the past, from the present, and from the imagined future. In this act, he finally creates something. This is his acceptance of himself--not what he wants to be, but what he is. This is the beautiful confusion.