KhrióMagazine / Inspire
06/07/2011
A little controversy #4: An (Irritating) American Explains Fellini’s 8 ½ to Italians
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In 1964 I was a teenager growing up in a small town in New Jersey, USA. Strangely, the local cinema – not known for its daring selection of films – was showing Frederico Fellini’s film 8 ½ which had premiered in Italy the year before. This was the first time I’d seen a ‘foreign’ film and, while I can now appreciate just how little I understood on that first viewing, it changed my life: here was a sophisticated, glamorous other world beyond that of the suburban tedium and strict Protestant fundamentalism which up to that point had defined the limits of my reality.
Today, in my 60s, I’ve seen 8 ½ some 30+ times and, despite my lack of Italian, think it not unreasonable to consider myself an expert of Fellini’s most autobiographical work. I now know that the film flips between a present in which a stressed film director is trying to decide on his next film project, this director’s memories of his childhood in pre-war Rimini and his dreams and fantasies.
Just after the famous harem fantasy scene in which the film director character Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) welds a whip to keep his women in place, he pronounces ‘Happiness is being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone’. Indeed honesty and deceit are a key theme: Guido is striving to make a film which tells no lies but his own life is built on lies – to his director, to his would-be actors, to his mistress and to his wife. (Never afraid to show masculine foibles, absurdity and deceit, Fellini it seems to me must be considered a feminist – ditto Mastroianni who, like Brando in the final part of Last Tango in Paris, has the honesty to portray men who it is hard to respect, like or forgive.)
Ah, the wife in 8 ½. This was my first glimpse of a modern, chic, European woman and my 17 year old self was forever captivated by this character as played by Anouk Aimée. Some 35 years later, as fate would have it in Rimini where I was for a conference, I met and (ah, those were the days) ended up in bed with a young Italian woman who, as well as being very beautiful, wore a pair of chunky black plastic glasses exactly like those worn by Aimée in 8 ½.
But, as I discovered over coffee on the balcony in the morning, this woman had never seen a single movie by Fellini! The shame – and doubly so for someone born and raised not far from Rimini. The glasses had belonged to her mother who had worn them in the 60s and I had clearly been seduced on false pretences.
Fellini a feminist? What do you think?
