thoughts on Fellini's 8 1/2

Fellini is great. This film about filmmaking is a very cerebral gaze at how films get made. I've seen the film several times and this is the first time which some of the meanings became very clear to me. It seems that Fellini shows a filmmaker and the trials and blocks he goes through to make a film. The flashback sequences seem to be windows into the filmmaking process. When I was writing my screenplay or reading about film theory, history, and practice I often had flashbacks which Fellini makes very clear. He thinks about his parents, his childhood at school, the lovers he's had, all are stories within the story about his struggle to make a film with a giant spaceship in it. And he doesn't make the film. I suppose it's a warning to filmmakers about the stresses you could encounter while trying to write a film and then trying to make it.

I often catch myself in blocks or dream like flashbacks to my childhood or to lovers I've had, or when I was back in school, or when I just couldn't think of anything, and I questioned what I was doing and if it really mattered that I wrote a film. In the scene where Fellini goes to see the Bishop or Cardinal to confess his sins was informative to me. It seemed that Fellini needed some kind of direction or clarification. Some way out of his block that he was stuck in.

Yet he returns again and again to his past. What was he trying to discover? What was he looking for in his past that might make him write the film? I guess it is a writer's problem to constantly relive life to write. Someone said that was how writers operate. They go over life again and again, reliving the pain and joy until it's empty and they feel unblocked enough to write or shoot. Yet the yearning returns. The search for life or a story something that explains things or makes life livable.

I should watch it again. This film was after La Dolce Vida which turned Fellini into an international phenomenon. It also singled the end of the Italian neo-realism movement. After Fellini Italian film lost much of it's momentum. Of course there was Pasolini and Bertolucci, but in terms of a movement things didn't progress as much after Fellini. He was the apogee of the neo-realist movement. And 8 1/2 is his magnum opus.