The combination of Guido’s narration and obscuring of his face-of his identifiable characteristics, of the emotional and physical readability that would turn him into a fleshed out, human character-renders Guido a disembodied voice in the scene, suggesting that he is, perhaps, less of a character than a stand-in for the directorial figure.Īndrás Bálint Kovács once claimed the “auteurial voice” in modernist film can exist personified in a character and/or narrative self-referential procedures indeed, Guido transitions from recounting the film to “directing” Claudia. The close-up shot displaces him, rendering him a bobbing figure in the moonlight the light falls on Guido’s face in a way that reveals only a part of his face at a time, the rest of his face rendered as dark and unreadable as the car interior behind him. The sequence begins with Guido’s recounting a film about a flâneur-esque male protagonist who meets “the girl of the spring,” who is “beautiful,” “authentic” and “radiant.” He proclaims the relation of the girl to the film’s male protagonist: “There’s no doubt that she’s his salvation.” Throughout Guido’s narration, Guido’s face is never totally present on the screen. The sequence opens with close-up shot of Guido characterized by high-contrast lighting and resultant strategic abstraction of his visage, both of which highlight Guido’s lack of character-ness. The sequence makes use of high contrast lighting, camera movement and shot reverse-shots to obscure the divide between the physical and the mental landscape of the scene, thereby giving weight to the subjectivity of the female protagonist. Along the journey, Guido meets Claudia Cardinale, an actress and Muse figure whom he casts as his ideal woman, and they embark on a car ride to an abandoned village where Claudia begins to imagine her role in his film. Dreams, memory, reality-each is indistinguishable from the others in Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, a film which follows a disenchanted director named Guido Anselmi on a psycho-artistic journey through his own life.
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