Fellini’s 8 ½ : The Collective Unconscious
It’s dark and claustrophobic. The silence reeks of inexplicable discomfort below the underpass. An array of vehicles stranded languidly, with no intent of awaiting the road to be cleared. Passengers are poker faced with lustful eyes and sadistic glee of being audience to a man’s end. The man encircled by a sea of vehicles, passengers with strange expressions, wipes the steam off his car’s windshield. The steam creeps around the bourgeois glass shields, slowly filling up the entire car. He struggles to escape but is imprisoned. Sardonically, the images gently move to the passengers showing no apathy to the man’s asphyxiation, devouring every slam of the wrist on those steamy windshields, as though it is some kind of fetish. He suddenly levitates free from the car, and glides across the bevy of vehicles. He escapes in to the air out from the underpass into light, brushing past the clouds and experiences momentary bliss of weightlessness watching a huge unconstructed edifice. A caped man on a horse stops across the beach to announce “Counselor, I’ve got him”. The tormentors hold the reins of the rope that is tied across the ankles of the flying man, as though holding back a kite from touching the sky. He snaps the rope and has a free fall from the sky and plummets into the lashing sea. In a flash we see his hand raised for help, snapping out of his nightmare in to the realm of reality. The opening scene of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ is a grandiose depiction of the Jungian integration of unconscious with the waking consciousness. It marks the subtext of the film from here on, the decent of man in to hopelessness, fighting from his bourgeois life of being a stagnated director and finding solace in his dreams.
8 ½ is a film about film-making stricken by artistic crisis of Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), who is about to make his next big film. Its title refers to the fact that, up to then, Fellini had made seven features and two episodes in composite films that added up to about a half. 8 ½ is clearly about Fellini and is autobiographical in Nature. Fellini was born in a middle class family in an Italian town called Rimini. He had a conventional catholic upbringing and later moved to Rome. The film which is being made is also partly about the Catholicism in post war Italy. Guido is struggling to complete the film for which he has lost all inspiration and motivation. The entire film looks like a subject intoxicated on a psychoanalysis couch, answering questions about his life to a psychic shrink. Reality is interspersed with dreams about his past; his wine bathed pristine childhood, his sexual awakening by a prostitute called Saraghina, his inabilities in school, his fascination with women, the longing for family. All form archetypal constructs of his dream space, the “collective unconscious” as how Jung puts it. He is haunted by his past and is suffering from psychological repression. In the midst of all this he has to finish the film which he envisages to be a portal, “ a simple film that would bury everything that is inside of us… no lies whatsoever” but strangely, he loses the intellectual inspiration for the film. The producer of the film has also invested on a giant edifice constructed to be a launching pad for a spaceship that would save humanity. He announces a press conference to make Guido serious about completion of the film as he watches him gradually disowning it. At the gathering, Guido is swarmed by predatory journalists asking him questions about the film, his life, his beliefs and his inadequacies. Unable to bear this torture he hides under the table and shoots himself.
The Popular Double Mirror construct: The double mirror sounds like a cinematographic constructbut it is actually about an art form in an art form. Like a photograph of a girl holding a photograph. 8 ½ is not just a film about filmmaking but it is also a film about a film that reflects upon cinema. Guido is almost the alter ego of Federico Fellini. Fellini recalls his travails during the film.
The glasses were emptied, everybody applauded, and I felt overwhelmed by shame. I felt myself the least of men, the captain who abandons his crew. . . . I told myself I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make
Fellini used Guido to liberate himself from his cinematic contraptions by putting up his own life on celluloid. It was in a way what was happening on screen was in fact his own redemption from his absurdity. There are particular sequences which are dramatized but most of them were part of Fellini’s childhood. These sequences are not shown as they would have occurred, but more in light of Fellini’s cinematic expression of his childhood. The Saraghina sequence is exemplary in making us understand this. In his childhood, Guido ran around the streets wearing black cape along with his school friends. The kids once go to the beach to watch Saraghina, the prostitute perform a rumba for them. She looks evil with dark circled eyes, buxom, bare footed and her dress torn form sides. These smaller details of Saraghina are captured with extreme close-ups. The church priests catch him on the beach, shown in a comic chaplinesque fashion. Guido is punished in school for this “heinous” act. He seeks the answers for his deeds from god. A subtle depiction of irony: Guido bows down to mother Mary just after the church dignitary told him that Saraghina is the devil and the subsequent scene we see a shot of Mother Mary slowly fading, almost juxtaposing in to Saraghina’s desolate home. The point is that even his childhood dream sequences are glorified and self referencing with cinematic emphasis , a double mirror of sorts.
The Carl Jung Construct of Guido’s dream world: Carl Jung who was Freud’s student disagreed with the stereotyping of the unconscious. He maintained that the unconscious, which is the unperceivable contour of humans, is not merely a reference point for various projections of dreams. He argued that the unconscious is in fact a sum of the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Fellini was very much inspired by Jung’s philosophy on dreams. His childhood memories and his association with women are all part of his personal unconscious, now resurfacing through his personal crisis. The glamorized childhood, the harem that has him coexisting with his wife and all his love interests is a depiction of that collective unconscious constructed through the medium of cinema. One cannot be looked at as a disjoint entity from the other; both “compliment” each other’s existence.
The spacio-temporal alchemy: 8 ½ was a far cry from the narration of sequences in contiguous form. Some critics pointed out that the spacio-temporal space in 8 ½ was difficult to discern, whether it is a dream sequence or if it is indeed reality that was shown. However, it is far from it. Deft cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo and the director’s precision makes it easy to differentiate. The dream state is faded into the reality with masterful wizardry. For instance, the initial dream sequence of Guido falling down the sky is beautifully faded into his hand raised as a call for reality. Fellini gives considerable attention not to give visual friction of his mis-en-scene. Guido is sleeping beside his mistress in the room. We see Guido’s mother waving at the solid wall of the room. She appears out of nowhere but the viewer is aware of the real space and also the dream space at this point. Slowly the wall turns translucent and then finally turns into glass. As she moves away the glass wall, the scene is different and shifts to an abandoned area. We are gradually taken from the dream space to the real.
Another form of editing used is the use of visual irony. The dream sequence at the abandoned area where he meets his wife along with his parents ends with a long shot of vast open area in white color and his wife Luisa is standing in the centre. Immediately the scene is cut to Guido walking along a closed corridor with no doors open and the predominant dark color heightens the irony and thereby differentiating the two worlds. Many dream sequences in the film appear disjoint and forcefully altered to give an effect of confusion borne out of troubled childhood. Case in point is the altering of space and time in many of the shots in the Sarghina sequence.
Nina Rota’s music aids the narrative in creating layers of sound and music. Be it the operatic feel while showing the “existential inmates” of the fashionable spa or the nondiegtic sound in the background to which Saraghina dances which is contrasted by the understated diegtic hymn that she sings on the beach. Sometimes the sound is completely digetic to heighten the effect of horror; the opening dream sequence only makes us hear the moaning, the sound of hands wiping the glass or the sound of air beneath the clouds.
Guido, the Sisyphus of Fellini: Outwardly, 8 ½ may be a film about a film that is waiting to be deconstructed, bit by bit by the protagonist’s philosophical blockage but the undercurrent is clearly about the absurdity of life. Guido is surrounded by the people who hold no meaning for him anymore. Fellini shows how every character is trying to exploit him of his intellectual attention. Fledgling actors quote rehearsed lines of being a thinking actor to impress him: “I need to coexist with my character for a while before shooting” or the pseudo intellectual conversations around Italian Catholicism, Marxism vs Catholicism, left or right centric political affiliations, about the greatest writer being Fitzgerald(“ and then his writing became all about pragmatism or brutal realism”)and “Americans thinking too much about cholesterol”. All this bourgeois conversation is intersected by Guido’s question to the fledgling actress “Is your ice-cream good? This sequence beautifully highlights his alienation from all the chaotic idealism around him. He finds liberation in his dreams from his stagnation, the pointlessness of everything. His futile labor of lies and procrastination is only leading him to his peril. His longing for a sweet family, or how his sister’s possessiveness hurts him, his wife walking out on him, all of these only take him to a point of realizing the absurdity of life. 
The climax is quite worthy of a debate. Guido reaches his peak of frustration and the scavenging journalists hit the last nail in the coffin. He hides under the table and shoots himself. Fellini’s oeuvre gains meaning in what happens after this shot. Even the suicide shot is left as a puzzle in the viewers mind between reality and dream. Did he actually die or was it one more figment of his imagination. We see him leaving the premise while his collaborator is talking about how it was best not to have continued with the film anymore, which would have been a creative and financial disaster ( alluding that Guido had in fact called off on the film at the press meeting). He is then shown in the final dream sequence where he is the “ring master” and all the characters of the film and his dreams, circle around in white clothes, holding hands. He confesses to his wife that he has indeed changed. His creative crisis magically resolved. He picks up a megaphone and begins to direct everyone around the circle. He directs himself as a child (the source of his poetic inspiration as an adult) now dressed in a white cape as opposed to his earlier dreams where he was wearing a black cape, signifying the metamorphosis. The magnanimous launching pad, created for the spaceship that would save humanity, was actually a metaphor for Guido’s escape from internal conflicts through fantasy, into an evolved state of attaining togetherness with his “collective unconscious”
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Holy ****!
great, great article on one of the best movies ever made by human.
Do you have a psychoanalytical explanation for the ‘Asa Nisi Masa’ scene? Or the Harem sequence?
This is a wonderful article. Really enjoyed reading it. But, the fact of the matter is, that you can enjoy 81/2 without necessarily knowing any of these… It’s about artistic bewilderness, but u can actually appreciate 81/2 without being an “artist” per se. I had read an explanation for Guido’s character somewhere that said, “obsessed by eroticism, a sadist, a masochist, a self-mythologizer, an adulterer, a clown, a liar and a cheat. He’s afraid of life and wants to return to his mother’s womb.”.. I mean wow… But did I think of him that way? I don’t know. Great pieces of art just lends every viewer the latitude to bring himself in, without any inhibitions. Because,the gr8est service an artist can actually do, is being honest with himself and not think about an audience. A ephitet like “self-indulgent” then has no particular relevance in artistic criticism because art at its basic level is meant to be self-indulgent. What else can it be?
.. All things considered, I think this movie alongwith with Bergman’s “Persona” and Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche New York” represent the only instances when the medium had collimated all it’s phrased and unphrased resources to cover wordless secrets that only cinema can cover. These 3 films to me represent the farthest cinema has gone in all these years..
@Labor_day_sale Thanks!
@Sreehari: To tell you the truth, I was tempted to write about the Asa Nisi Masa scene but like you mentioned, I was so much in love with that part that somehow didnt feel like analyzing it. A psychic reading Guido’s mind utters these words and we are taken back to such a beautiful story of how this line came into being. Anyway, I couldnt agree more on art losing it’s essence when we try to dissect it. Like if we explain a joke then the it doesnt sound that funny. But what I have written here is my own interpretation of the film from a psychoanalytic and cinematic perspective. Like I too was “wow!” when I read about Guido wanting to return to his mother’s womb from what you’ve written. Art forms like 8 1/2 and also Bergman’s Persona have layers and layers of meaning. Every person can scrap through them to find newer meanings, these are art forms for which volumes and volumes have been written and rightly so. They have too many meanings to be deciphered, every new discovery adorns the art.
fantastic bit of writing … awesome stuff!
i have been delaying this movie, but now i feel i should rush home and watch it immediately. alas! i m in office :(
Outstanding!!
Boss, you outdo yourself by every post. When I saw the movie I didnt appreciate it as much as I do now. Its quite clear how much effort you have taken to write this. I like your point on the Jung interpretation of the film, also the editing of real world in to the dream world. Didnt quite get the sisiphus thing though. Hail PFC and Hail Cinema!!This is pure passion!!
good stuff. i was reading the article and going “yeah yeah i felt the same way when i saw the movie” except that you wrote it down beautifully. fellini is a master.
@Crazyrals @papaji: Thanks for the encouragement!
@Vivek: Thanks for following my posts. The Sisyphus angle is actually Albert Camus’ essay called “The Myth of Sisyphus” Where Sisyphus was punished by the gods to roll a mountain atop a hill while he knew that he would never make it up there. When he’d reach the top he would roll back with it’s weight and die. It’s his futile labor. Similarly, Guido is Fellini’s Sisiyphus carrying the burden of expectations and stagnation, he reaches his end in the same way while being aware of his futility and absurdity. Absurdism is a concept based on the pointlessness of life, in the realm of Existentialism.
You talk about Fellini, Three colors and Tim Burton. But at the same time you theorize about similarities between Kaminey and Pulp Fiction.
Wow. Maybe that similarity post was 1/2 and rest of the posts were 8, making it 8 1/2.
He he! I like your sense of humor! I should have reviewed “The Ten Commandments” instead
BTW, in my opinion Kaminey was poorly written True Romance of Bollywood if any comparison is to be made.
Okay Cartman, tell me what you think of this post?
Someone here at PFC stated that the climax of Kaminey is like that of True Romance. I was hoping the gun battles to be at the bigger scale with the bullets flying around. Watching the execution of the climax of kaminey left me disappointed. I dont like people comparing everything because I feel that I would have liked it more had I gone to theater empty mind i.e. without thinking about True Romance.
Interesting article.
But you overshot when you brought in Jung and ‘archetypes.’ Collective unconscious is different from the context in which you have used it. At times you use personal and collective unconscious as if a synonymous entity.
When you say,-
‘ His childhood memories and his association with women are all part of his personal unconscious, now resurfacing through his personal crisis. The glamorized childhood, the harem that has him coexisting with his wife and all his love interests is a depiction of that collective unconscious constructed through the medium of cinema’
- you are contradicting yourself. You are actually talking about personal unconscious here. There was no need to throw in ‘collective unconscious’ there.
Thanks for bringing in the argument! There are multiple interpretations of Jungian logic. I took his stimuli to the world, all that he derives from the world as a precursor to his collective unconscious. This is basis pages from books I’ve read on Jung’s interpretations of dreams, “I, Fellini” and also this other book called dream and archtitectural spaces of Fellini. My interpretation was more of what Fellini wrote about jung and his interpretations in these books. Personal conscious and collective unconscious are far different, as opposed to popular belief. The Fellinisque interpretation of Jung is what I have written here.
Forgot to mention, I must admit that I have read extensively on Jung only as part of research to write this post. I could be wrong because I havent had a professional pyshcoanlytic education or I didnt grow up on Jung. But what I mentioned here is an interpretation from what Fellini has written in his autobiographies about Jung.
OMG!! .. such a great discussion on a gem of an article on a magnum opus by Fellini!! … The article Im sure would have made Fellini proud!
Great analysis… loved every bit,as much as the movie!
Way to go bro!
Thanks! You make my day
(A)SA (NI)SI (MA)SA is quite clearly a reference to “anima”, the repressed female unconcious in the male subject depicted in Guido’s life, which continually dominate his thoughts and actions, the harem sequence is another symbolic “welling up” of his unconcious. Guido’s pursuit of women is a subjective one, he is seeking an unchanging dream of a woman in all the women he meets and desires, it is a lyrical obsession, what he seeks in women is the reflection of his own anima, his ideal; but since the ideal by definition is something that can never be found, he is in perpetual despair, it is this despair which propels him from woman to woman, and gives his condition a romantic excuse.
Fellini in 8 1/2 found himself, through his childhood revisitations, meanderings of faded memories, harem dreams, realization of the impossibility of consummate love, his inability to sever oedipal ties, claustrophobia of bourgeois life, prosaic religious indoctrination, absence of god, the perpetual conflict between reality and fantasy, this is the cornerstone of all cinematic art, thanks for the article neeraj.
cheers.
This is what I like about analysis. Why should art have a linear meaning and a singular interpretation. There could be multiple interpretations basis which you like the film or you dont. Fantastic point there with Anima.Had read about the anima significance elsewhere too. I’d like to marry your comment with Sreehari’s comment above. The repressed female unconscious in the male subject and the want of returning to his mother’s womb becomes prominent in one of Guido’s dream. He is kissing his mother in that barren area and when he opens his eyes ( still in the dream) he is kissing Luisa, his wife.
Very technically analyzed from a psychological POV. I believe the suicide was a dream, but as you say, it is meant to create a confusion as to its reality. It is one of my favorite alltime films and I worship Fellini. I reviewed it some time back here, albeit in poorer language
http://arseniksden.blogspot.com/2009/07/8-12-stars.html
Thanks AreSENik! I read your post too and I liked it! Reading your review, I realized I completely forgot about Claudia. She looked so divine. La Strada is another favorite Fellini film for me.
awesome neeraj. i wish u were in bombay. we could sit and discuss things for longest of hours.
btw have you watched Slavoj Zizek’s film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema?
keep writing.
Thanks Sarthak! I am glad you like my post. And yes, I just checked The Pervert’s guide to Cinema. Looks awesome! Its just what I needed to write this post! I now feel watching the film and rewriting this post
Wouldn’t have to see 8 1/2 for some 8 hours ( pausing and taking notes in the middle), read two books to understand the psychoanalytic dimension of dreams, read Fellini’s autobiographies and after all this my understanding of collective unconscious and cinema is still poor 
Thanks for the recco. Managed to get the torrent too!
Nice article. It’s interesting to see the way you interpret the whole movie using Jungian archetypes. Eventhough, I feel the movie is as much Freudian too.
On the other hand, I have to agree with Sreehari’s point above too. It is as much entertaining if you just look at it as a series of disconnected events, borne out of the imaginations and creative process of an artist who suffers from creative block. After watching Woody Allen’s parody of this film “Stardust memories”, the whole movie made much more sense to me.
Thanks for a wonderful article.