Reaction and thoughts on today's film

For inspirational purposes, we're watching a film today in class. I'm generally excited and awaiting something wonderful.

SUCCESS! It's 8 1/2 by Fellini. Never seen it, but have heard it's essential cinema. Let's watch...

Done. I was confused at first, thinking this would be something like Godard, without the French. It had a very shaky series of juxtapositions that confused me at first, like the man suffocating in the car sitting in traffic, but eventually straightened out into something with a plot, which is a big change from Sans Soleil. The plot was also confusing, but revealed itself as a movie about... movies, or at least the creation of such. I find it somewhat providential we watched a movie about the creative process seeing as how I had a hard time coming up with a workable concept. So perhaps, for my approach, I'll use a lot of handsome Italian actors and actresses. Seriously, they are all very fashionable in a bourgeois sense of the word, or at least that's how Fellini depicts them.

Right. Onto the nitty gritty. One could infer a lot about this movie, like maybe how it frustrated Fellini in the process, or how he dealt with personal problems of his own. Or one could read the Wikipedia article on the matter (we'll just call this giving credit where credit is due). As a matter of art imitating life, one would somewhat correctly infer that Fellini had director's block, like the protagonist Guido, but in a great twist of fate, life imitated art in that he eventually frustrated one of his producers by not finishing a film for which he had built an elaborate set, like the rocket launching site in 8 1/2. What I get out of all of this is that the only answer to creative frustration is meta-art. Art about art. Don't feel like writing a paper? Write a paper about writing a paper, or at least incorporate some dialogue about your thought process during your most frustrated times. That's what I did for a German paper I had to write and which ended up taking on the life of the aesthetic writing I wrote. Basically 8 1/2 is the ultimate cop-out, albeit a well-done cop out. On the other hand, it's the most powerful statement of how art is not something without a body or a soul, it has so many layers and a mind of its own simply because it originates within someone. It's also a continuum, it is a moment or series thereof in the director's mind, and will continue in time outside of the work, and like any moments in our lives, affect it accordingly. Again, art imitates life and life imitates art. It's the circle of life, or a series of cliches for that matter.

I really don't feel like injecting explicit personal anecdotes into processes I'm working on, like Guido's, however, they provide such a good context within this film. What stood out the most of those injections was his childhood experience with guilt, a great Catholic emotion. How it's painted is as something so stark, so institutional. In black and white, the confessional booths or the court of church fathers before which young Guido appears stick out in my mind and I'm sure his. Overall, the aesthetic of film was a pastiche of these memories interwoven with the surreal plot of a director's life gone awry. How cool is that?