Never Seen It, #200 of 200: 8½

You've made the right choice. Believe me, today is a good day for you. These are tough decisions, I know. But we intellectuals—and I say we because I consider you such—must remain lucid to the bitter end. This life is so full of confusion already, that there's no need to add chaos to chaos. Watching 200 movies they've never seen before is part of a blogger's job. I congratulate you. You had no choice. And he got what he deserved for having attempted such a frivolous venture so lightheartedly.

8½

1963

Frederico Fellini

I used to think of 8½ as a punchline. A literal punchline. It would go something like this: "What movie are the kids watching for movie night tonight?" "I think we're finally gonna watch Fellini's 8½." The joke being that 8½ is widely known as a challenging and pretentious arthouse film, and no normal film viewer would or even could forgo their summer blockbuster shoot-'em-ups to even begin to attempt to understand what the fuck a film like this bullshit was even about. I used to make this joke, long before I myself knew what 8½ was about, or had attempted to view it.

This wasn't an original joke. I stole it from somewhere. Where I stole it from has been lost over time. And I'll be honest, the joke didn't really seem all that funny after I included it on the Never Seen It list, most especially because the alphabetization rules dictated that it would be the final film I'd be watching on that list. I used to make the joke out of ignorance, but it was time to put up or shut up.

One of the purposes of making this list and spending half a decade crawling through each film and attempting to write a short essay for each and every one was that I wanted to be better at watching film. Not just the mass-produced popular films, but the critically acclaimed ones too. I wanted to understand what makes a movie a good movie. I wanted that feeling of watching something that you don't quite understand on the first pass but needing to experience it again and read about it and talk about it because it creates this little tiny ember inside of you that glows and glows until finally you get it and it burns within you for the rest of your life, so changed are you by this beautiful, perplexing work of art.

I don't know if I'm there, but at this late stage in the game, I'm coming around to this being how we consider a film "art"—the best-reviewed films are the ones that force us to talk about them. This might come off as cynical, but I promise that it's not. Think about it. Think even just about the last two films that I watched for NSI—8½ and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Without a doubt, these are two of the most obtuse films out of the last 200 that I've seen. They are also two of the most universally acclaimed. Both films are constantly in the discussion of greatest films of all time. The reason that I'm proposing for this is that the answers are so mysteries that the resulting discussions end up retroactively justifying the artistic value of those mysteries in the first place. Not sure that you completely understood 8½? Well, that's what makes it incredible.

Well, okay, it's not just that. It's not the inscrutability. It's also the audience's willingness to engage with that art anyway. It's easy to make jokes, toss 8½ away because you "don't understand it." It's another thing to not really get it but stay with it, and then finally, finally get to the ending and be left with the ultimate concluding emotion: "HOLY SHIT." That's a good movie, man.

I some words to share about 8½ specifically, of course, but let's first hear from some of our Never Seen It participants from over the years. Below, I have left some space, and will insert anything that anyone has sent me regarding 8½ and their general thoughts about the wonder of being a fan of movies as art. Thanks, everyone, both for writing, and more importantly, for taking this journey with me by reading some fucking blog posts.

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Sam
(participated in Casablanca)

I'm into this idea that great artists teach you how to digest their work. On my first viewing of 8½, I wasn't ready for that lesson. I could only see a self-involved creative crisis that felt too high-minded to say anything universal. This time, I was able listen to Fellini's lesson. 

And he agrees with me! And that's partially what makes it great. He has so many ideas that he must get out, but is constantly berated by creative doubts, nagging practical concerns, and the struggle to articulate his truth authentically. It's because he is personally such a scoundrel, and we go on that journey to determine how self-serving it is to present his foibles so honestly. And how much of it is at the expense of his wife?

As the meta-narrative unfolds, early on, he highlights that it will be a loose connection of scenes and maybe those scenes only tangentially relate to them, but he really wants to put them on screen. Ultimately, it's way more cohesive than I remember, and the scenes are so striking, they allow for recognizable callbacks later. 

Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale elevate the abstract ideas into a real struggle; the director's nonsense absurdly run around the periphery of their lives. But whatever arrangement they need to come to is at the real center. 

The film is a masterpiece because there are so many memorable and beautiful scenes that are entertaining. But they effortlessly flow into his larger goal. If you are a doubter, give it a couple of years and come back. I get it now.

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Frank

(participated in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Casablanca, The Devil Wears Prada, Harold and Maude, Lawrence of Arabia, Little Shop of Horrors, No Country for Old Men, Paddington 2, The Shining, Singin' in the Rain, The Tree of Life, Vertigo, Young Frankenstein)

[written in the hospital]

I like this movie.

I don't know if I would have always liked this movie or if I had to watch a bunch of foreign movies to prime the pump first. It's out there.

I think I like it because it's a guy perceived as a genius unable to figure out what his next movie is going to be (Fellini) and then he just makes a movie about that. Instead of searching for truth in the human condition, he just literally takes the condition he is experiencing as a human and assumes it's true. It's also honest about Italian men infidelity and the insecurity that probably lies behind it, but I can't tell if that's a cop out excusing the behavior or really trying to be vulnerable.

A lot of "making movies" movies are in my experience either super cynical about the process or super nostalgic for the glory days when it was great to make movies. I love that this is neither and both. 

I'm glad it exists and I'm glad I saw it when I did in my thirties instead of in my late teens or early twenties, when I would have either: wrote it off as too confusing/impenetrable, or become pompous and insisted it's the greatest movie ever, you plebians. I'm sure when I'm in my forties I'll look back at me now and think I'm a fool, but I feel like I've hit a sweet spot on appreciating movies like this without it consuming my personality.

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Thanks to everyone else who helped out with NSI over the years, including: Sean (Apocalypse Now), Keelan (Ghost), Bridget (White Christmas), Stephan (Primer), Marie and Sarah K. and Meri (Casablanca), Allison (The Rocky Horror Picture Show and insights on Ben-Hur), Dwyer (Cape Fear, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Maeve (National Treasure, The Sound of Music, White Christmas) Sunny (Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Snowpiercer), Dranders (Avatar, Cloverfield, Drive), Pam (Ace Ventura, Alien, Casablanca, My Fair Lady, Rushmore, Saving Silverman), and Fisher (Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange, Do the Right Thing, It Follows, Mission Impossible, My Fair Lady, No Country for Old Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Raising Arizona, Saving Silverman, The Shining, Snowpiercer, Team America).

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Joe
(participated in all 200 films)

The cool part about 8½ was that, yeah, sure, it was a little out there, a little confusing, maybe I didn't understand quite what was happening during certain moments or scenes, but at no point did I have any questions about what 8½ as a whole was trying to achieve. I knew it right away because I love this meta shit so goddamn much that it hurts, and I immediately recognized the thing that I love. This was Fellini making the case for Fellini being a failure. This was a director's impostor's syndrome in 140 minutes. This was a movie about a movie being made and that movie being made feeling a whole lot like the movie that we're watching. 

I'm generally aware that one of the main takeaways from 8½, thematically, is that this is supposed to be a "portrait of the artistic process." Certainly that's true, but it seems simplistic in terms of what Fellini was trying to achieve. There have been a thousand films about making films, let alone the thousands more about making art besides film. But 8½ felt like it was more personal than that. 

If I'm being honest—or if, like 8½, I am crafting my own story and placing myself within it—the thing that resonated with me the most was the idea that Guido didn't know how to show his love directly, only indirectly. His wife Luisa says something to the effect of: "How sad it must be to not be able to reveal your true self." And she's taken aback when he reveals his truth... and it stings that that truth is revealed in a screen test for a movie. On the screen, in the art, never face-to-face.

I think a lot about how easily the words come to me whenever I sit down to write on this fucking blog, and how much harder it would be to say those words out loud, both because I'm awkward with speaking and because sometimes truth hurts, and it's scary. The blog is the place, and possibly the only place, where I can be my true self. Imagine how difficult that is for the people around me, that they can only know me here. Imagine how difficult that is for me, that I reveal my true self here and most people miss it. I'm stuck in a car and there's smoke pouring out of the vents and I'm banging on the windows to get out and all everyone does is stare, silently stare.

As is typical for Never Seen It, these are the preliminary thoughts. For the average films, maybe those preliminary thoughts turn into the final thoughts. The great films, on the other hand, stay with you, and the conversation continues. Is it true that this is a film "with no hope"? How much symbolism can we pull from the harem dream sequence? How much of this was directly from Fellini's life, and how much was creative embellishment? Was Claudia real? What does "Asa Nisi Masa" mean, and how good is that Typhoon album? It goes forever, or as long as you want it to.

But I can't document the entire journey. I can only give you 200 or so snapshots of it. Hopefully you can trace the journey yourself. Hopefully the conversation continues after this.

I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway.

GRADE: 4½ pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We start a new list next week, together this time.