Eight and a Half (Otto e Mezzo) by Miller D. A.;

Author:Miller, D. A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BFI Publishing
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

What is eliminated with the train ending, then, is the only thing it doesn’t share with the other – namely, the train itself – and the screenplay’s overheated last sentence helps us understand why. We know this train. It is the train of nineteenth-century novels, where it is driven by Jacques Lantier over the body of Anna Karenina; the train of golden-age detective stories, where its passengers regularly go missing, or are found dead; the train of early cinema, where it threatens to run down Lumière’s spectators; the train of Hollywood genre films, where, if the Western doesn’t rob it, the war film blow it up or the horror film fill it with phantoms, the thriller earmarks it for equally unlucky encounters between strangers.24 Last but not least, it is the train of Fellini’s own autobiographical I vitelloni (1953), where, as Tatti Sanguinetti has noted, it takes the hero on a journey from which he will never be allowed to return. Yes, we know this train; from the beginning of locomotion, representation has hardly given us another. Freighted with fatality, it clickety-clacks to the very rhythm – ‘powerful, unstoppable’ – of the death drive.

By all accounts, Fellini’s train was eminently worthy of this tradition. Everyone reports being spooked by it. To Tullio Pinelli, one of the screenwriters, it was ‘funereal’, ghostly; to Anouk Aimée, it was ‘mysterious’ (‘Where were we going? Were we dead?’); and to Lina Wertmüller, then Fellini’s assistant director, it frankly ‘stank of death’. In the Ronald photograph, it is striking how pointedly the pattern of light and dark reverses that of the opening traffic jam, as if in conclusive response.25 Then, despite the gloomy congestion in the foreground, there was light at the end of the tunnel; now, it is the foreground that is bright, while the perspective disappears into darkness.

Wertmüller claims that, in rejecting the train ending, Fellini laudably chose the fragrance of life over the stench of death. But he also, more problematically, preferred an extrinsic ending to an intrinsic one. As we’ve had ample occasion to observe, GA’s digressive flights of fantasy all end by landing him back in his starting position with renewed heaviness. If anything, his crisis gets worse over the course of the film, repeating itself in spirals of increasing intensity. This repetition is what the train ending threatens to continue, presumably until GA is totally undone, and his epiphany with him. If there is a problem with this train ending, it is that it suits 8½ all too well. It figures the perpetuation of what has been the film’s death-driven logic all along.

It is not surprising that Fellini should finally want to reject this unstoppable locomotive dissipation in favour of the circus ring’s holistic binding, even though, as we’ve seen, the ring is soon overshadowed by melancholy. After all, melancholy might be a psychic price worth paying in order to preserve – as a ‘loss’ one never gets over – what one would otherwise have lost for good: people, the past, self-ideations.

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