Director on the Couch

8 1/2--the opus-number title of Federico Fellini's new film--is self-psychoanalysis in search of an answer. Fellini, who made La Dolce Vita, has a singular personal problem: why is he so preoccupied with making movies that speak of the emptiness of life? He gets his answer, but unless Fellini's problem has been preying on the mind of the viewer, he may not care to take on the director's doubts and confusions.

The cinematic catharsis is performed on two levels. The ostensible story tells of a director (Marcello Mastroianni) who has made a commitment to do a film, has the organization and backing all set, and is struggling to find an idea. On a more mystical plane, 8 1/2 casts light on his condition in a series of dream-and-memory sequences probing back into childhood. The film opens silently on a tunnel clogged with stalled cars and buses. As Mastroianni tries to start his car, fumes surge into it and he begins to suffocate. Mastroianni finally floats in fantasy out of the car, out of the tunnel and into the sky.

Pulled down from the sky like a kite, Mastroianni wakes up in a cluttered bedroom at a sleazy spa. Circling sycophants plague him with questions about the movie, tiresome actresses whine that they cannot possibly go before the cameras, reporters pepper him with questions ("Are you a Communist? Are you against the A-bomb?").

Fellini's admitted moral dualism, in which his Roman Catholic upbringing wars with his present nihilism, comes into play. Eager to have an audience with an elderly cardinal, Mastroianni is led, like a sheet-wrapped Dante, down into a fumy inferno where the cardinal is stewing his skinny bones in a steam bath. Then, in a dream, Mastroianni sees himself as the black-cloaked master of a harem surrounded by all the women of his life, who adoringly bathe him, dry him, and carry him to dinner wrapped in a blanket.

At length, Mastroianni, his staff and friends and his embittered wife sit in a cavernous theater to watch a showing of screen tests. A moment of fantasy: a critic, who has never ceased his sniping, is summarily taken up into the balcony and hanged. Reality again: everyone leaves the theater and a caravan takes them to an eerie Cape Canaveral set for the film, which is to be a science-fiction movie. Reporters badger Mastroianni once more, and he crawls under a table and shoots himself. This clears his head once and for all, and in a moment of revelation he sees that the way to turn chaos into creativity is to stop brooding about the hobgoblins of his dreams and to start working on a film about the real people who surround him. 8 1/2 is at least a wildly pictorial electroencephalogram, at best a fascinating ride down Fellini's stream of unconsciousness. Says he: "All I can say is that it did me good to make it. It was a liberating experience." But is that a reason for showing it publicly?

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