By Tom Swift
This is the first installment in a group of reviews I’m doing on the use of meta in film. Meta, vaguely put, is when a concept is abstracted from another concept which is then used to inform or complete the latter; some well known examples are A Midsummer’s Night Dream’s or Hamlet’s play within a play, Italo Calvino’s hypernovel If on a winter’s night a traveler(1979) - a novel imbedded with 10 false novels - or Roland Barthe’s Criticism and Truth (1970), a critique on traditional literary critique in France. Film achieves this most frequently by producing films about producing films or making a film about the failure of its own production, each using the film inside the film to establish a more oppositional realism, but each to their own respective ends. I will be exploring their ends, one by one and attempting to find out how deep each goes.
8 ½ (1963)
8 ½, the 8 1/2th film from Italian director Federico Fellini, begins with anonymity and hopeless despair in an existential dream sequence where a man, presumed to be the protagonist/director Guido, is trapped in his car, in the middle of rush hour, as it fills up with smoke. He bangs on the windows, but not one of the other commuters bat a lash; he’s forced to escape through the window and as soon as he does he is swept into the sky only to be pulled down to earth by familiar people. Guido’s dream is then interrupted, his room flooded by loud people he doesn’t know and he escapes into the bathroom where he rubs his face in confusion and jerks comically to banging pipes.
This film centers around Guido, a famed and revered director, attempting to put together his newest movie, which he tells everyone is complete, but which he himself fails to understand. The film switches off between waves of personal criticism and analysis and vignettes of Guido’s imagination and past. The fact that these two layers exist create an intrinsic dialogue and that’s where we will start.
The ambiguity between Guido’s dreams and the possibility that they are the film he is struggling to piece together emerges very early on, allowing each line to ring with refracted interpretations and smirk worthy self-evidence. It’s also clear from the beginning that Guido, being the director of the film, is the focal point between reality as his peers see it and the reconstruction of it into a film. “Could you create something true and meaningful on command, if the Pope asked you to?” an actor asks encapsulating the pressure on Guido to make a good film which will satisfy lots of people, not corrupt them and everyone has very high hopes and ideas for how he should manage that responsibility.
These levels of criticism drive the meta-for of this film: Guido is constantly critiquing and reshaping his own life as he is living it in the form of dreams, memories, projections and most importantly his film, but behind Guido is his cast and their projections; behind them an audience who all have an objective opinion on his outlook and the films he’s made and further behind them is us, the viewer of the film, who has a fourth wall, balcony seat, and the final say…except for that infinite regression behind us with the aliens and the hypothesized reality hologram we live inside, but shhhhhh.
8 ½ (1963)
8 ½, the 8 1/2th film from Italian director Federico Fellini, begins with anonymity and hopeless despair in an existential dream sequence where a man, presumed to be the protagonist/director Guido, is trapped in his car, in the middle of rush hour, as it fills up with smoke. He bangs on the windows, but not one of the other commuters bat a lash; he’s forced to escape through the window and as soon as he does he is swept into the sky only to be pulled down to earth by familiar people. Guido’s dream is then interrupted, his room flooded by loud people he doesn’t know and he escapes into the bathroom where he rubs his face in confusion and jerks comically to banging pipes.
This film centers around Guido, a famed and revered director, attempting to put together his newest movie, which he tells everyone is complete, but which he himself fails to understand. The film switches off between waves of personal criticism and analysis and vignettes of Guido’s imagination and past. The fact that these two layers exist create an intrinsic dialogue and that’s where we will start.
The ambiguity between Guido’s dreams and the possibility that they are the film he is struggling to piece together emerges very early on, allowing each line to ring with refracted interpretations and smirk worthy self-evidence. It’s also clear from the beginning that Guido, being the director of the film, is the focal point between reality as his peers see it and the reconstruction of it into a film. “Could you create something true and meaningful on command, if the Pope asked you to?” an actor asks encapsulating the pressure on Guido to make a good film which will satisfy lots of people, not corrupt them and everyone has very high hopes and ideas for how he should manage that responsibility.
These levels of criticism drive the meta-for of this film: Guido is constantly critiquing and reshaping his own life as he is living it in the form of dreams, memories, projections and most importantly his film, but behind Guido is his cast and their projections; behind them an audience who all have an objective opinion on his outlook and the films he’s made and further behind them is us, the viewer of the film, who has a fourth wall, balcony seat, and the final say…except for that infinite regression behind us with the aliens and the hypothesized reality hologram we live inside, but shhhhhh.
The film that Guido wanted to make about isolation, alienation and loneliness didn’t have time to wiggle its fingers before being aborted because while Guido was thinking about how isolated he was, he neglected to notice the gaggles of interested and concerned people surrounding him and helping him bring his fantasy’s to an entirely different level of realization. There is a late scene where Guido imagines himself in a Harem filled with all of the female characters who have appeared so far and they all want to please him and coddle him like a little prince until one of the older ones, 26, finds out she’s too old and must live upstairs from then on; chaos erupts against the misogynistic fantasy of motherly multitudes and a fight ensues between the animalistic vixens and Guido. Guido is obviously horny for them all and they all want something from him, except his wife and oldest companion, who is, for the record, tectonically beautiful and equally underappreciated. This scene is obviously outrageous, but it sets his abstractions of life at a very distant place, making his return to “reality” considerably more empathetic. This type of “elusive realism” defines how the film in question measures its meta angle.
Fellini was going to have a depressing ending, but thank my existential stars that he didn’t because it would have undermined the ambiguity of his meta stakes and made this review more difficult to grasp than it already is। At the end Fellini/Guido decided their film was shit and scrap the project as it was because they realized that film making/life is ultimately a massively collaborative process; just as living life is a horrible failure if you don’t learn how to grow and feed off the people around you (who will be there whether you’re an asshole or not), making a film about yourself in relation to the “other” will be a waste if you don’t intimately involve the “other” and consider your own intrinsic “otherness”. So, at the end of the film Guido quickly sets up all the actors from the film in an elevated ring, gets a band playing in the background and joins the cast to jump and juke around in the most acceptable frolic circle since ring-around-the-rosy got banned in Never Never Land.
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