Home Video Hovel: 8½, by Scott Nye

In Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, the protagonist – an artist – steps through a mirror, takes a surreal trip through a hotel where he witnesses unreal sights, and shoots himself but does not die. Fellini, in a sense, did the same thing with 8½, traversing the unspoken boundary that seals the artist from his audience – for a filmmaker, the very real barrier of the movie screen – letting himself refract uncontrollably in his audience’s mind, daring them to end his career in the process, only to emerge as alive as ever.
Marcello Mastroianni is Guido Anselmi, a renowned film director who’s hit a creative wall while attempting to mount a big-budget science fiction film. Fellini is Guido, too, of course. The title famously refers to the film’s numerical place in Fellini’s filmography (seven prior features and one short). Several details of Guido’s prior work refer heavily to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which was about as massive a cultural force as they come, winning the Palme d’Or and drawing massive audiences (it still ranks thirteenth for all-time Italian attendance, just behind Titanic), and generally gave Fellini a degree of carte blanche with both financiers and audiences for the rest of his life. Fellini certainly wasn’t as handsome as Mastroianni, but hey, what else are the movies for?
Fellini seems neither to laud nor lambast himself. The portrait is flattering only by proxy – so many other people in the film seem to revere him, but most of them seem quite silly themselves. The people whose opinion he values most – his wife, some close colleagues, perhaps the cardinal – all approach him cautiously and pityingly. To them he is something of a child, wandering in the darkness, lost in himself. Does he feel that way because they think so? Or does he value them more because they see it? The loneliness? The loneliness is not that of genius – that might be laudable – but of celebrity, which is cheaper and baser than genius, but is the real reason he’s celebrated.
The conflict between Guido’s discomfort for the nature of his fame and the driving force that led him there drives every interaction in the film. Everybody wants something from him; few want to know him. And so Fellini offers this, a way for everyone to know him, only to, in so doing, even still come up without a clearer idea. The film was perhaps the first (please remind me if something else hit prior) to be so nakedly autobiographical about the filmmaker at the point in their life when they made it, and certainly set the template for all who followed. Plenty told tales of childhood, even young adulthood. The electric sensation of the present informs every second of the film, as if this spectacular circus Fellini concocts actually existed somewhere, and he was there to capture it.
I’ve lived with 8½ for almost twenty years. Before my wife and I started dating, we – as the only people we each knew who genuinely wanted to continue our film school curriculum beyond the classroom – would watch some classic film together on Mondays on her 19-inch TV. I don’t remember many others from that time, but I remember 8½. It didn’t wow me right away; it burrowed into me and gradually came to bloom over years, decades, in ways I still misunderstand and misremember and grapple with. It is at times quite plain about its purpose, in its depiction of creative block, infidelity, monogamy, ancestry, nationality, religion, or industry. It is at others wholly esoteric, indefinable, touched by divinity and pure debasement.
I’ve never been able to talk about it other than through the most extreme terms.
The Criterion Collection first released 8½ on laserdisc in 1989, and then on DVD in December 2001, which still forms the basis of their new 4K edition. Most of us don’t know The Criterion Collection without 8½, and it is foundational to how I view their mission and purpose. This is actually the fifth edition Criterion has put out – a standalone Blu-ray edition was released in January 2010, and then an upgraded transfer in 2020 as part of their Essential Fellini collection. The new 4K edition uses the same transfer as that 2020 edition, though the Blu-ray packaged with it looks more like the 2010 transfer.
Each edition has been quite stellar for their time, and each time, the advantages of new formats and technologies has been clear. For those who have never owned the film or didn’t buy the 2020 box set, the new release is a must. The image is significantly more stable without sacrificing filmic density or texture; slight flicker is evident (a plus for me), and the color range is more even and detailed (the 2010 disc was much more heavily monochromatic). Motion is smoother, and lines are better rendered (there’s a striped wallpaper that’s always been particularly fraught on home video, finally rendered evenly here). Despite not featuring an HDR pass, the grayscale range is really stellar, and more detail is visible in darker scenes. Damage is nearly eliminated.
For those who do have the 2020 set, the decision is maybe a little more narrow, as that transfer is still quite strong. The improvement is evident in terms of detail, density, color range, and texture, and aside from 35mm screenings, I’ve never taken more sheer pleasure in watching the film than I did with this new transfer. If you bought the 2020 box set as an introduction to Fellini and weren’t converted, the new transfer won’t do much to change things. For fellow Fellini acolytes, though, I can very happily report this is a really exceptional transfer that makes it well worth putting yet another disc with the same supplements on your shelf all over again.
This is not any manner of detraction. Criterion’s original DVD was one of their most packed at the time, a two-disc edition with big, meaty special features that made for a handsome edition. One new feature on the 2010 edition (carried over here) is the excellent investigation of the final sequence for the film that Fellini filmed, abandoned, and destroyed.
The disadvantages one finds in re-releasing such old pieces – video quality is quite poor, and some of the perspectives have become better refined through the years – pale in comparison to the quality of access. The supplements feature direct interviews with Fellini and several of his collaborators (including a very lively Sandra Milo), while the commentary track provides three perspectives, including some who knew Fellini during the time of the film. Appreciations and reflections are also available from Terry Gilliam, Lina Wertmüller (who worked on the film), and Vittorio Storaro.
The disc does lose the chunkier booklet from the Blu-ray, so those looking to wholly unload that edition may want to reconsider, but the new essay by Stephanie Zacharek is characteristically stellar of her. The film has unfortunately suffered the slings and arrows common to our age, questioning the value of a film that puts the ostensible suffering of its protagonist and maker – a rich, successful, renowned filmmaker – as its main subject. Ironically for those still insisting on pushing it, it’s a question the film very directly asks itself, but which nevertheless Zacharek gives fuller and more contemporary consideration to, quite well, reflecting on the film in its historical context as well as its continuing resonance, which it stubbornly has maintained.