A comparison of these two films would appear, at first glance, to be so obvious as to be uninteresting. The thematic similarity is clear and definitive: the directors of the two films, both understanding that that most direct way to examine a thing is through it’s opposite, examine reality and the creation of reality through films that purport to be about cinema and the creation of cinema. I attempt this comparison for the simple reason that when the two films are mapped on top of each other striking variations are revealed. The conclusions that follow are incomplete and reductive, but perhaps point towards something better.
I would like to propose the following arguments, which are not I suspect original but which I hope bare repeating: that Fellini understands everything to be important, and that every moment and detail of the world both as it is and, crucially, as it is lived, matters. In Fellini’s films there is a solidity to things and to people. Within 8½, as in all of Fellini’s films, there are no extras: every person who appears on screen is complete. As in Shakespeare, all characters exist. Within his long, long tracking shots of crowds, everyone is present: we watch and sense that though their appearances may be momentary, each person continues to live unwatched outside the frame. Fellini’s cinema, a thing within the world, is a gesture towards this world that is uncontainable, perfect, complete. As Guido’s film is unfinished, so in a sense is Fellini’s – it cannot be finished, because the laws of space and time prevent Fellini’s camera from capturing all that there is and will ever be.
If 8½ is a film that struggles to contain all of the world, Le Meprís is a film made in order for there to be a world. It’s purpose is to create, cinematically, a subjective reality of image, moment, sensation, which is in fact the only conceivable and viable reality, and as such is erected almost as a barricade again all the nothing that lies outside the edge of the frame. For Godard, reality is inadequate; there is not enough of it. There may not be any of it at all.
To elaborate: Guido cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy because Fellini makes the two equally real; for Fellini, one mans reality is a reality equal to the reality. Memory, particularly, is ever present, in active dialogue with the now. All that is and was becomes recurrent, eternal, verifiable. When you look away from the thing it remains there nonetheless. Godard on the other hand presents the real as a sort of Schrödinger’s cat: only really there for as long as you look at it, and defined moment by moment by a particular gaze and manner of looking, by who looks, and by why they are looking. The real is neither within nor without the individual, but negotiated constantly between people, and is therefore nowhere. The world does not exist beyond the sensations and exchanges through which it is experienced. A moment that has passed does not exist in the present if the present has no relation to it, and if that relationship is not shared, agreed upon. When Camille stops loving Paul it negates both the past existence of that love and Paul’s present continuing love. It is possible to love and then not to love; once the love is gone it is as if it never existed. It is significant that the film is structured around omissions, most particularly the act of Camille’s first betrayal, which we do not see but which is (or at least, would seem to be) confirmed by later events. The crisis of the film is not this act itself, but the failure later to negotiate this act and its implications. The act itself is therefore irrelevant to, and absent from, the world. It is absent from the film because it does not, in a sense, happen. Having neither weight nor meaning beyond that which is imposed – with this imposition, formed of mutual misunderstanding, failure, constituting the only true act and reality of the film – it is nothing, not just unreality but non-reality (not reality’s absence but it’s opposite). Camille’s death is similarly omitted – she is alive, and then she is dead. The specifics of the event hardly matter. The only reality is in the two states that are themselves transitory. Through omission, the gaze is turned on us, watching: all we see is all that there is. This is our responsibility and the role we must play.
Both films contain films-within-films. Borges (in “When Fiction Lives In Fiction”) remarks of the play within Hamlet:
“…that the stolid, heavy-handed style of this minor play makes the overall drama that includes it appear, by contrast, more lifelike. I would add that it’s essential aim is the opposite: to make reality appear unreal to us” (Borges attributes the former observation to De Quincey)
Guido’s film – unfinished and, with it’s half-built spaceship set, absurd – reminds us of cinemas failings and inadequacies, undermining 8½ itself and re-asserting the primacy of the external world of the spectator (and of Fellini, and of us all). The film within Le Meprís, frightening and oblique, directed by Fritz Lang (stepping out of reality to play himself), blurs into Le Meprís itself, which we see being filmed over the opening credits. That the film-within-the-film may itself somehow also be the film itself, may be Le Meprís, suggest that the film that it is within is the world out here, where we are. Our world is more real than 8½, but it may be less real than Le Meprís.
Fellini’s cinema presents and acknowledges itself as a small part of a whole, whose edges blur out into that whole; Godard’s cinema is itself the only whole, and is surrounded by vacuum. Fellini we watch in order to understand better that which is outside of it; Godard we watch because there is nothing else that we can do. The latter fact would be nihilistic if the film itself wasn’t so achingly gorgeous. Both films make problematic our relationship with the real and the unreal, and present us with our own inability to differentiate between the two. Fellini balances this fearful ambiguity with the assertion that there is a world out there, a reality that is constant and, occasionally, tangible; Godard negates this. Fellini’s film has a sadness to it but also a joy and a hopefulness; Godard’s film is monstrous.
Some similarities should be noted: both films are impeccably cast and scored; neither film resorts to recognisable tricks, nor particularly resembles any other film; both are almost incomparably beautiful.
