Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) is industrial filmmaking’s greatest self-portrait, but good luck finding a camera on screen. All of the action takes place prior to the shooting of a science fiction epic for which director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) has lost his inspiration. While recovering at a mineral spa, he fends off the thousands of decisions his collaborators require of him: the histrionic production designer needs to know how big to build the spaceship; an aging French actress wants to know about her part, which may or may not exist; the producer wants to know who the lead is going to be. So pathological is Guido’s indecision that he invites both his mistress (Sandra Milo) and his wife (Anouk Aimée) to visit simultaneously. While everyone’s busy waiting for Guido’s genius to bear more fruit, his erotic fantasies—stretching back to childhood—seamlessly blend into the surreality of his film’s production. An incorrigible raconteur, Fellini claimed that on the eve of 8 ½’s production he found himself sharing Guido’s plight and drafted a letter to his producer saying that the film had to be shut down. But, in an eleventh hour Fellini-esque development, his crisis was cured that same night when he wandered into a crew member’s birthday party.
Fellini talked of his sets as “picnics” and ascribed “the same mixture of technique, precision, and improvisation” to both cinema and circuses. His assemblies of bopping, giggling humanity also recall parades, pageants, and all manner of religious rites. In his cinema, the beautiful and the strange gathered for ecstatic pursuits on-screen. And much the same happened off-screen. Costar Claudia Cardinale, playing yet another of Guido’s erotic fixations, later said that Fellini “couldn’t shoot without noise.” The carnival played out on both sides of the camera with Fellini and Guido as the respective epicenters of twin whirlwinds. Each one performs auteurism, solidifying the archetypal image of glamour and genius associated with postwar European filmmakers as the concept gained traction in arthouses worldwide.
Film Forum’s run of 8 ½ is worth celebrating, because it includes a new 35mm print struck from the original camera negative. According to an on-screen disclaimer that precedes the film, the print was created in an exclusively photochemical process without a digital intermediary or restoration. For non-Italian speakers, however, there’s a catch. The lasering technique used to embed subtitles into the film emulsion produces a washed-out effect when the white titles are superimposed as white swathes on the image. According to distributor Janus Films, the technique used to generate the titles was “the only method possible” for the project. This quirk makes 15% of the subtitles partially or entirely obscured. That’s the trade-off of having a print that’s as close to the original negative as any since the mid-1960s. (Even prints struck at the time may have involved intermediary elements, which are typically created to avoid printing directly from the delicate original camera negative.)
It’s certainly a trade-off, but it shouldn’t necessarily be a deterrent for celluloid-worshipers or those generally interested in cinema’s material history. (Weenies can take in the undoubtedly pristine 4K restoration also screening at Film Forum.) The snag produces an additional perverse pleasure in a film teeming with them. Throughout his body of work, Fellini, along with most of his colleagues in the Italian film industry, dubbed all dialogue in post-production. This permitted him to fill his noisy sets with music that seeped into the gestures of the cast and kept the party afloat. It also created in his work, and that of most Italian cinema of the period, an odd distancing effect. Even in exceedingly well-dubbed films of the era, the dialogue never seemed to originate from the mouths that speak it. Instead, the words hover above the characters, as a narrator’s might. This disjunction is deepened by this print’s vanished subtitles, fashioning a dissociative state where meaning is only ever triangulated from disparate elements. The concrete qualities of language stretch taffy-like, a suitable accompaniment to film’s glide between fantasy and reality. Italian speakers are out of luck, but the rest of us can enjoy the thwarted subtitles as one more loose electron running rampant through the film. Besides, as the man himself wrote in Fellini on Fellini, “Dialogue is not important to me. The function of dialogue is merely to inform.”
Final Note: For anyone curious about the neglected field of film subtitles, Film Forum suggests checking out Bruce Goldstein’s short essay film, “The Art of Subtitling," a lovely and truly edifying appreciation of the process.
8 ½ screens tonight, May 5, and until May 8, at Film Forum on 35mm.
