Eight and a half

Otto e mezzo

Federico Fellini, Italy, 1963, Gaumont

Comment

The film opens with a nightmarish scene: a man is trapped in a traffic jam at the exit of a tunnel. There is no escape, the screen is saturated with cars that slowly move forward before coming to a halt. The man starts to panic, we cannot see his face but we hear his breathing speeding up, the blows he gives to try to get out of the vehicle, his fingers squeaking on the windows. The viewer is soon overcome by oppression: the filmmaker films the struggling man on the verge of asphyxiation, in a tight shot inside the car, while smoke fills the screen. The camera pans to reveal the other motorists, indifferent, entirely frozen and absent, motionless, except for a man who is caressing a woman inside one of the vehicles. Suddenly, the man on the roof seems to be sucked up into the sky. The camera rises slowly, at his pace, as he slides past the cars and flies through the air. The sound fluctuates throughout the clip: the sounds of panicked suffocation are replaced by the wind blowing, first softly and then gaining momentum to accompany his release as his figure floats through the air. The viewer follows the character: the silhouette disappears from our eyes while pov shots show us the clouds parting in its path and electric wires crossing the horizon. The origin of this miracle remains mysterious until the last shot: the man is tied to a wire, like a kite, and a man on the beach orders him to get down. As he cuts the line attached to his foot, his silhouette disappears into the sea and into the depth of of the shot, we hear from very close up the jerky breathing of a man waking up from a nightmare.