As a successor and a rebel, Fellini did not follow the fashionable principles of realism, but created with Italian neorealism as an anti-thesis. He defines the external environment with personal feelings, regards reality as the reflection of the characters' psychology, and expresses the inner contradictions and haziness in a casual and flexible way, thus creating a romanticism unique to the "Fellini style".
The extremely prominent and distinctive feature of "Eight and a Half" is that it forms a unique "stream-of-consciousness" style in the time-space jump of editing. The title of the film, like the number of untitled music, makes the film have a certain "self-referentiality".
Fellini, as the successor and rebel of Italian realism, makes this film express the spiritual loneliness and confusion of modern people, and at the same time, in the form of the film, it also draws inspiration from psychoanalytic theory and stream of consciousness literature. 11 "flashback" paragraph structures of different lengths, dreams, memories, hallucinations, free associations, etc. all enter the film, forming a polyphonic structure of the stream of consciousness. The in-depth and fade-out of the editing technique makes the dream and reality intertwined and cannot be completely separated.
Taking a specific shot as an example, in a group portrait scene at the beginning of the film, the arms covering their heads, hanging down and sticking out of the window, and overlapping cars and characters form a very visually impactful picture. Although it has not really begun to enter the main content at this time, it has already allowed this emotion to invade the viewer's perspective a little bit.
In the well-known cemetery segment, the director also used a transition to realize the transition from "mother to wife", where the "Oedipus complex" and the concept of "anima" in Jung's archetypal theory are implicitly reflected. This vagueness and conflict in sexual concepts amplifies the protagonist's restless and chaotic emotions and tendencies. It seems that because he can't find comfort in reality, he turns to seek liberation in dreams, but he did not expect that dreams are only the bondage of another layer of reality.
In the picture below, the man puts on Pinocchio's nose, which seems to imply that this is a world full of dreams. Reality or fiction? Is the imaginary or real world in front of you?
There are many such metaphors and hints in the film, and the splicing of this broken and displaced stream of consciousness strengthens the film's expression of the interweaving of dreams and reality.
In addition, "Eight and a Half" also showed a bright autobiographical color.
Bordwell commented in "World Film History", "'Eight and a half' shows 'not a pure autobiography, but a personal myth: a life fused with fantasy', 'an unforgettable filming of a life'. A reflexive study was carried out by the film directors of the planned films'". With this autobiographical film, Fellini deeply analyzes the loneliness and predicament of the self, thereby showing the superego part of the film's "set within a set" structure.
References:
1. Zheng Yaling and Hu Bin. History of Foreign Films. China Radio and Television Press. 1995(07).
2. [US] David Bordwell, Christine Thompson. World Film History (Second Edition). 2014(02).
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