James Elias

FILM2004 Major Essay

Fellini's 8 and 1/2: a genuine reflection on the art of
filmmaking or just another example of Fellinian selfindulgence? Discuss.
Alan Stone writes in The Boston Review that Federico Fellinis 1963
film 8 is one of the most memorable in the history of this
century's most important art form.1 Concerned, however, only with
the process of its own creation, it can also be regarded as cyclical to
the point of solipsism. In this sense 8 is a reduction of itself to a
narcissistic self-portrait; it exploits every facet of itself, including
those representative of Fellinis actual life, as a means to express a
singular creative process. This refusal to reference anything beyond
its own substance effectively renders the film as a redundancy, a
tautological gesture that reveals nothing but an inaccessible
interiority, that of Fellini.
Perhaps the most notable example of such criticism is that of
Pauline Kael, the celebrated New York Times critic, whose scathing
review is referred to in Alan Stones own appraisal. Stone observes
that:
masturbation and masturbation guilt are important and
not so subtle themes in 8 [yet] Kaels criticism is
meant to cut deeper. She considers 8 a display of
mental masturbation: a narcissistic, indulgent "display of
self-imprisonment." Kael, by the way, absolutely refused
to tolerate the standard defence of so much of Fellini's
later art -- why does it have to mean anything? She

1 Alan Stone, 8 : Fellini's Moment of Truth, review of 8 , by

Federico Fellini. Boston Reivew, Summer, 1995,
http://new.bostonreview.net/BR20.3/stone.html

skewers the Guido/Fellini of the film for the line, I have

nothing to say, but I want to say it.2
Kael, however, acknowledges this last sentiment of Guido, whereas
Stone appears to disregard it: later in his review Stone identifies the
nascent disintegration of Fellini as filmmaker in 8 as his stylistic
tendency to emphasise images over ideas.3 However it is this
privilege of the image over language that absolves 8 from
solipsism, legitimising Guidos pursuit of artistic subjectivity at the
cost of human connection. Ironically, then, Alan Stones defence of
Fellinis film comes to echo the aesthetic criticisms voiced by
Daumier in 8 , specifically:
a first reading makes plain the lack of a central idea that
establishes the problematic of your film or, if you wish, of a
philosophical premiseand therefore the film becomes (in
French) a series (in Italian) of absolutely gratuitous episodes.
Because of their ambiguous realism, they may even be
amusingOne wonders what the authors really intend
Is Fellini simply anticipating Every conceivable negative attack that
can be made upon 8 in order to render any further criticism
superfluous?4 A more productive reading would argue instead that 8
establishes within itself a complex dialectic, with Daumier
functioning as an aesthetic antithesis to Guido as the artist. If
Daumier thus embodies the intellectual and ethical standard, then
what does Guido represent as the antagonist? Peter Bondanella
interprets Guidos triumph as his radical gesture of artistic creation,

2 ibid.
3 Stone, Moment of Truth.
4 Peter Bondanella, The Films of Federico Fellini (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 110.

an essentially irrational, illogical, and ultimately inexplicable

epiphany Daumiers objections dissolve as if by magic.5
This essay will attempt to demonstrate that Bondanellas reading
can be made more comprehensive if Guidos, irrational, illogical
gesture is reinterpreted as a realisation of Kierkegaards leap into
faith by logic of the absurd6. Guido as the radical subject then
casts Daumier as the embodiment of the universal, that is, as
representative of the logic, rationality, ideology, and intellectual
consistency typical of contemporary European art film.

Fellini however denies the influence of Kierkegaard. In interview, he

states: In one way such comparisons flatter me, because they put
me in the company of respectable writers; in another they sadden
me, because literary references are not necessary to understand my
films. The critics who got nearest to the meaning of 8 were those
who didnt look for any influences.8 However, he continues: On the
other hand, I cant comment on the pertinence of such cited
influences because I dont know the authors to whom they refer.
Kierkegaard and Mozart I know by name [only].9 Significantly,
however, both stress their work as an anti-philosophy; a means to
communicate ideas through intuition or absurdity as opposed to
logic. Thus, Fellinis ignorance of Kierkegaards writings offers the
possibility that he reached a similar expressive agency
coincidentally.

5 ibid. 111.
6 Ronald M. Green, Developing Fear and Trembling, in The
Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay et al.
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998), 273.
7 Bondanella, Films of Fellini, 109.
8 Costanzo Costantini, Fellini on Fellini, ed. Costanzo Constantini,
trans. Sohrab Sorooshian (St. Ives: Clay Ltd., 1995), 57.
9 ibid. 58.

This possibility is reinforced through consideration of both artists

ideological stance towards the Catholic establishment. Just as
Fellinis film explicitly denounces the repressive function of the
Catholic Church, Kierkegaards Lutheran theology was a polemic on
the stagnant spiritual state of the orthodox tradition.10 Furthermore,
Kierkegaards notion of God can be understood as a manifestation of
subjectivity, as Derrida explains:
god is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret
that is visible from the interior but not the exterior[He] is
that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in
Kierkegaards sense, subjectivity.11
And indeed, Kierkegaard himself explains:
[God] is the unknown. But it is not a human being, insofar as
he knows man, or anything else that he knows. Therefore, let
us call this unknown the god. It is only a name we give to it.12
As such both Kierkegaard and Fellini were united in a search for
spirituality beyond the Catholic establishment.
Furthermore: There is evidence that Kierkegaard designed Fear and
Trembling as a text with hidden layers of meaning. In The Point of
View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard tells us that the most
important ethical and religious truths cannot be communicated
directly, as though one were writing on a blank sheet of paper.13
This notion clearly recalls Daumiers question: Do you remember
Mallarmes praise of the white page? And Rimbauda poet, my
10 Green, Developing, 258.
11 David Wood, Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard, in
Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. Jonathan Re et al.
(Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 53.
12 Wood, Wake of Kierkegaard, 70.
13 Green, Developing, 257.

friend, not a movie director. Do you know what his finest poetry
was? His refusal to continue writing and his departure for Africa
(off) true perfection is in nothingness
Daumiers blank page represents the invitation of didacticism, of
language that will inevitably be construed through the universal
frameworks of Daumier or that of the Catholic tradition. Instead,
Fellini circumvents this dilemma through transforming the blank
page from a meaningless linguistic void to a plane upon which
images can manifest and interact with limitless intuitive potentiality.
8 is unconcernedwith analysing the process of creativity;
[Fellini] is interested only in providing images of its process.14 Such
images resist mediation through universal frameworks, instead,
they function according to Kierkegaards indirect communication, a
notion beautifully summarised by Jean Paul Sartre:
When we encounter [Kierkegaards] words, they
immediately invite us to another use of language, that is to
say of our own words[they] are neither principles or
concepts nor the elements of concepts: they appear as a
lived relationships to totalitynot a single one of these
verbal alliances is intelligible, but that they constitute, by
their very negation of any effort to know them, a reference
back to the foundations of such an effort.15
This indirect communication is Fellinis success as creator of 8 .
For Guido, however, it is but the narrative telos of Fellinis film.
Autobiographically, Guido is in effect a nascent self-image of Fellini
as artist, and as such, 8 describes Guidos transformation from a
nascent self-image to a realised mirror image of Fellini as the creator

14 Bondanella, Films of Fellini, 100.

15 Wood, Wake of Kierkegaard, 61.

of the artwork of faith. But what is this artwork of faith, and in

what respect does Guido succeed in creating it?
Kierkegaards writings argue a return to the profound gestures of
humanity displayed before the challenges of primitive Christian
faith; gestures that had been successively abstracted into cheap
metaphors by the cultured Christianity of his day16. Perhaps the
most significant of these gestures was that of the sacrifice
exemplified by Christ, an act that allows the individual to transcend
empirical individuality17. Kierkegaard viewed subjectivity as
knowledge of the limitations of existence. If death offers the most
comprehensive description of these limitations, then self-sacrifice
was the most radical gesture of subjectivity: To give up ones life
for something is to take up a relation to the absolute, to appropriate
ones finitude, is to transform oneself it is to bring transcendence
into being.18
Thus for Kierkegaard art is the event that draws reference to the
gap between subjective knowledge and the absolute, that
hypothetical state of omniscience.19 As Heidegger would later
explain, art is the manifestation of the tension between the earth
and the world.20 It is the attempt to grasp at what lies beyond
subjectivity, and willing sacrifice is then an act of pure creation, a
transcendental manifestation that is woven from absence: Life is no
longer just life, butand here a word like spirit would commonly
appear.21

16 Green, Developing, 258.

17 Wood, Wake of Kierkegaard, 57.
18 ibid. 58.
19 ibid. 58.
20 Martin Heidegger, "On the Origin of the Work of Art," Basic
Writings - 1st Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition, ed. David
Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 174.
21 Wood, Wake of Kierkegaard, 58.

Guido himself references this spirit through telepathy, itself a

crystallised form of intuition. ASA NISI MASA is variously interpreted
as a reference to Jungs anima, which denotes the way in which men
must project animistic values onto women in order to make them
comprehendible.22 Yet perhaps this is better understood as a
reference to the spirit of German Idealism: the transcendence of
human subjectivity against the objective absolute. As such Guidos
flashback manifests a period when the expression of subjectivity
was not a duty but a privilege.
Essentially, it points to a time before a profound sacrifice was
required for Guido to validate himself through the leap into faith
detailed in Kierkegaards exegesis on the parable of Abraham and
Isaac, Fear and Trembling. Its pseudonymous author Johannes de
Silentio immediately suggests the significance of silence: Abrahams
refusal to question Gods motives or disclose Gods instructions
indicates that the nature of temptation extract[ed] from him a
pledge of silence.23 This silence is a means of displacing the
framework of intelligibility and justification away from a public,
universal standard towards one drawn from his relation to God.24
Just as Abrahams resignation of reason and morality is his only
means to realise Gods will, Guidos identical resignation is his only
means to resist the discourses of Daumier. The result is radical
alienation.
Importantly, silence does not refer to an absence of speech but an
absence of meaning. Kierkegaard notes the strange answer
Abraham gives to Isaac when asked where the sacrificial lamb is to
be found: God will provide. Abraham thus keeps his secret at the
same time as he replies to Isaac. He doesnt keep silent and he
22 Bondanella, Films of Fellini, 103-104.
23 Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay
(Melbourne: Penguin Publishing, 2005), 25.
24 Wood, Wake of Kierkegaard, 64.

doesnt lie.25 Similarly, Guidos mumbled dialogue throughout 8

is effectively a means to avoid the truth: Happiness consists of
being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone. This sentiment
directly parallels Kierkegaards, that Abraham cannot speak,
because he cannot say that which would explain everythingthat it
is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation.26
Guido longs to reforge the broken relationships that litter his
present, but the paradox of faith is that interiority remains
incommensurable with exteriority. No manifestation can consist in
rendering the interior exterior or showing what is hidden. The Knight
of Faith can neither communicate to nor be understood by anyone,
she cant help the other at all.27
However, Abrahams salvation rests upon this alienation, for "Infinite
resignation is the last stage before faithfor only in infinite
resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal
validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by
virtue of faith.28 Logic cannot determine Gods existence; the only
condition that can procure such faith is the effect of that very faith
itself. Thus, The only way Guido can transcend the dogma of
Daumier and procure faith in himself as an artist is to perform the
very act of creation itself, to create the film that will retroactively
validate himself as an artist.
This dedication to art is the absolute duty that cannot have the
form of a generality that is called a duty Kierkegaard sees acting
out of duty, in the universalizable sense of the law, as a dereliction
of ones duty.29 Guido cannot regress to the didactic or the ethical,
25 Jacques Derrida, Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know), in
Kierkegaard, A Critical Reader, ed. Jonathan Re et al.
(Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 155.
26 ibid. 157.
27 ibid. 158.
28 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 40.
29 ibid. 158

nor can he resign from creation, for absolute dutyimplies a sort of

gift or sacrifice that functions beyond debt and duty, beyond duty as
a form of debt[Guidos] gift of death [is] beyond human
responsibility, beyond the universal concept of duty, [it] is a
response to absolute duty.30
Guidos apparent alienation and self contempt is thus a profound
love that cannot be communicated, He hates them not out of
hatred, of course, but out of love, he longs to spare his loved ones
the pain of his alienation and ultimate suicide.31 Kierkegaard
explains of Abraham that, the distress and anxiety of the paradox
is that he, humanly speaking, is thoroughly incapable of making
himself understandablein the instant when his act is in absolute
contradiction to his feelings, only then does he sacrifice Isaac, but
the reality of his act is that by which he belongs to the universal,
and there he is and forever remains a murderer.32
Thus, in the universal established within Fellinis film, Guidos
suicide, an escape from ethical temptation, is all too real. However,
the paradox of the sacrifice and the subsequent leap of faith occur
in an instant, it:
cannot be grasped in time and through meditation,
that is to say in language and through reasonit remains
irreducible to presence or presentation, it requires a
temporality of the instant without ever constituting a
presentUnderstanding, common sense, and reason
cannot seize, conceive, understand, or mediate it,
neither can they negate or deny itsacrifice suspends
both the work of negation and work itself.33
30
31
32
33

Derrida, Whom to Give to, 158.

ibid. 160.
ibid. 160.
ibid. 160.

As such, the finale must be understood as a temporal, spatial essentially cinematic - celebration of the instant of Guidos leap; a
diegetic plane incommensurable with that hitherto established. This
plane manifests Guidos suicide as symbolic gesture, signifying the
double movement of resignation and leap; the creation of an
artwork faithful to his absolute duty, the artwork, of course, being
the film 8 itself. Thus, the finale reintegrates the duality of Fellini
as director and Guido as pseudonym: Guido as ultimately successful
director transforms into Fellini as director of the film 8 ; not a
tautology but a transcendental gesture of the duty of creation.

Bibliography:
Bondanella, Peter. The Films of Federico Fellini Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Costantini, Costanzo. Fellini on Fellini, edited by Costanzo
Constantini, translated by Sohrab Sorooshian. St. Ives: Clay Ltd.,
1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know) In
Kierkegaard, A Critical Reader, edited Jonathan Re and Jane
Chamberlain. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1998.
Green, Ronald M. Developing Fear and Trembling. In The
Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Alastair Hannay
and Gordon D Marino, 257 281. Cambridge: University of
Cambridge Press, 1998.
Heidegger, Martin. "On the Origin of the Work of Art." In Basic
Writings - 1st Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition, edited by
David Farrell Krell., 60 96. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Kierkegaard, Sren. Fear and Trembling, translated by Alastair
Hannay. Melbourne: Penguin Publishing, 2005.
Stone, Alan 8 : Fellini's Moment of Truth. Review of 8 , by
Federico Fellini. Boston Reivew, Summer, 1995,
http://new.bostonreview.net/BR20.3/stone.html

Wood, David. Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard. In

Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, edited by Jonathan Re and Jane
Chamberlain, 53 - 74. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1998.