It was perhaps this last level of self-reference that led some critics in the mid-1960s to dismiss 8 1/2 as autobiographical trivia, brilliant on its surface but devoid of significant content -- a criticism already made within the film by Daumier, the writer. The world-wide success of 8 1/2 and its current status high on the list of the greatest films ever made have long since refuted such critics, but they were right on two counts: 8 1/2 is both autobiographical and brilliant. Its surface flow of images dazzles us with its sharp contrasts of black and white, startling eruptions from off-screen, unexpected changes of scene and a virtuoso display of all the possibilities and effects of camera movement. We find almost a catalogue of humanity in its stream of faces, some of them momentary visions while others persist throughout the film and long after in our memory, such as Saraghina, that lumbering monster transformed into the embodiment of joyous life and movement. But Fellini's brilliance reaches beyond the surface to include an intricate structure of highly original, highly imaginative scenes whose conjunction creates an unprecedented interweaving of memories, fantasies and dreams with the daily life of his hero and alter ego, Guido Anselmi. This more than anything, probably, made 8 1/2 the most influential film of the 1960s, liberating filmmakers everywhere from the conventions of time, place and mode of experience that had prevailed in cinema for decades.

In a film in which almost every scene is memorable, with its own pace and ambience, its characteristic forms of movement and emotional tone, some scenes are extraordinary: a childhood reminiscence of a farmhouse overflowing with warmth, love and security, with an ascent into an enchanted darkness where the magical words ASA NISI MASA promise wealth and happiness; a boyhood flight from the stifling confines of a Catholic school to the voluptuous marvels of Saraghina's rhumba, with its grotesque aftermath of cruel punishment and guilt; young Guido is told that Saraghina is the devil, but a Dantean descent into Hell reveals a Cardinal enthroned at the center of the Inferno, solemnly repeating that there is no salvation outside the church, a whirling, riotous harem scene which mocks the absurdities of male fantasy.

Federico Fellini began his career in the motion picture world in 1945, as writer and assistant to the neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini, but by the time he directed his own first film his vivid imagination had begun to replace reality as the central source of his inspiration. Through the 1950s he explored the fantasies and illusions which both sustain and destroy us, in films peopled with characters whose lives run outside the normal streams of everyday experience, circus performers, swindlers, prostitutes. Then La Dolce Vita, a huge sprawling evisceration of contemporary urban high-life, made him an international celebrity and faced him with that most stultifying challenge for an artist: After such a success, what can you do next?

Fellini responded, finally, with 8 1/2, making the challenge itself his subject and expressing the stultification in the confusion and inability to choose of his alter ego, Guido. He made this an opportunity to probe the mystery of artistic creation and the problems of human relations created by a society whose traditional education portrays women as either sacred or profane, either mother or whore. Serious problems, but his film is comic. Hence none of the questions posed is ever really answered; for, as Guido/Fellini tells us, he has nothing to say. But his complete mastery of film technique and form speaks for him, shaping a purely formal solution for Guido in an imaginary dance of acceptance and communion which leaves us, the spectators, feeling a glow of happy resolution as young Guido, now dressed in white, leads his clown band into the darkness.

One puzzle which remains unresolved for most viewers of 8 1/2 is the meaning of ASA NISI MASA. "Say the magic words, then when the picture moves its eyes, we'll all be rich." The words derive from a children's game, like pig latin, in which one takes a word, doubles each of its vowels and then puts the letter "s" between the two. So, run backwards, the root word is ANIMA, the Italian word for soul or spirit. Daumier dismisses all this as another idle childhood memory, devoid of all poetic inspiration. Yet in the film the utterance of ASA NISI MASA works like magic indeed, releasing the marvelous flow of joyful life of the farmhouse scene. And the childish promise was hardly idle; for it was indeed when the picture moved its eyes -- when Fellini found his true mŽtier in motion pictures -- that we all became enriched.
-- ALEXANDER SESONSKE

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