In the 1960s, social movements were surging, and the film industry was undergoing tremendous changes. In France, filmmakers who are ready to go are in full swing to explore more personal expressions that are different from traditional film narrative methods, while in Italy, which has also experienced post-war economic recovery, the realism of film is in full swing. The dominance was gradually replaced by modernist cinema that turned to the heart and focused on form, and then produced two modernist cinematographers - Antonioni and Fellini.
Unlike Antonioni, who grew up in the middle class, Fellini’s upbringing was very bumpy. The experience of running away from the circus at the age of 7 and moving around for a living as an adult became the source of inspiration for many of his works. Autobiographical elements are ubiquitous in Fellini's films, and it is these experiences, rooted in the poor Italian people, that give his work a bitter, sad but humorous style. In the "Lonely Trilogy", he focuses his perspective on buskers wandering around the world, liars in slums and street prostitutes. The theme of the film is "new realism", but the film no longer focuses on the external activities of the characters. In terms of intuitive representation, it focuses on expressing the inner world of the protagonist, and strengthens the tendencies of surrealism and mysticism, replacing the "social criticism" of neorealism with the expression of common human emotions.
In the 1960s, Fellini completely broke away from the aesthetics and techniques of Neorealism, and shot the famous "Trilogy of Betrayal". La Dolce Vita, which Fellini called his "self-confession", marked a turning point in Fellini's cinematography. Previously, most of his works focused on the lower class, and there was basically a narrative thread running through it, but after "Sweet Life", Fellini turned to reveal the decadence and spiritual emptiness of the upper class, and broke through the previous narrative pattern in terms of expression. In pursuit of the modernity of art, the structure of anti-plot and anti-drama is adopted. In 1963, "Eight and a Half" was released, which caused a sensation in the international film industry.
This work that combines hallucinations, memories, imaginations, dreams and reality consists of eleven paragraphs. Because the director has previously made seven feature films and two episodes that are roughly equal to half the film, the film is named "The Eight and a half". Fellini once said, "I only know that my purpose is to narrate the experience of a director with a chaotic heart." It may be easier to understand the film with this perspective. The beginning describes a nightmare of the male protagonist in the nursing home: trapped in the car, when he was struggling to open the door, he suddenly flew into the air, and then he was suddenly pulled by the rope and fell to the ground - the director used metaphorical scenes to explore the male protagonist Distressed and empty, a spiritual predicament that desires to be detached from reality but cannot extricate oneself. Seeing the thighs of a woman wearing a short black skirt, and thinking of the sexual enlightenment of being punished for peeking at lewd dances when I was a child, imagining that I am the king of women who wield a long whip for favor, to relieve the emotional crisis in reality, and there is no respite in the photo studio. Ji Zhan fantasized about taking out a pistol and committing suicide... In the end, with a wave of the male protagonist's magic wand, everyone he knew danced in a circle, and he and his wife held hands again - "He finally made it clear , tolerated himself clearly and thoroughly, and accepted reality."
There are many interpretations of the metaphor of this work, and I will not repeat them here. Fellini is not the first to use stream of consciousness to make movies. Pure cinema, Dadaist cinema, and Surrealist cinema that emerged in the 1920s challenged traditional cinematic narratives:
The pure film masterpiece "Mechanical Ballet" attempts to explore the boundary between "seeing" and "listening" in the film, combining objects and gears with similar shapes according to the rhythm of movement, trying to show "visual dance" and "seeing and seeing music". ";
The purpose of Dadaist cinema is to subvert and destroy. This group of artists is cynical, advocating total freedom of individuality, and full of dissatisfaction with traditional Western values. They don't want the plot, throw away the theme, and pursue bizarre pictures and grotesque ideas;
Surrealist films try to put the process of Freud's psychoanalysis on the screen, but they worship the role of the subconscious too much, and regard the performance of hallucinations and dreams, and the display of the subconscious as the ultimate task of the film.
These avant-garde films did not survive for very long due to their own limitations, but they made an unprecedented exploration of film language, the meaning of which was to discover another form of film beyond the traditional dramatic expression.
And "Eight and a Half" is the culmination of these. American film theorist Solomon believed that "Fellini is creating a new form of film". According to my understanding, he made this form that has appeared before into a masterpiece, so that younger generations know that "movie" Someone who can shoot like this." "Eight and a half", as a "work that reveals the secrets of the heart", melts reality and illusion together in content, and completely breaks the concept of time and space in the film through the visualization of inner activities in form - the previous explorer or confinement Focusing on form, or advocating content, Fellini achieved the perfect unity of form and content. From this perspective, the film history status of "Eight and a Half" is self-evident.
After "Eight and a Half", Fellini further released himself. He continued to use metaphor, satire and symbolism in his works. The structure completely abandoned the storyline and was full of mysticism. Almost every work will leave a legacy behind. A never-ending debate. Looking back on his creative path, like Antonioni, he has gone through the process from the beginning of neorealism to expressing the heart and then to metaphorical symbolism.
Fellini died in 1993 at the age of 73.
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