Summary
We open on Guido, a famed film director, stuck in a traffic jam. Various cars and school buses surround him; the people inside seem frozen in rictus yet stare at him intensely. Suddenly, steam begins to emanate from the car's dashboard, and Guido struggles to escape from the car's window.
Escaping from the car, he takes flight and finds himself above a beach, his ankle tied to a rope held by a man below. Beside the man is clergyman who says, "Down for good," prompting Guido to fall to the ground.
Guido wakes up from this dream surrounded by doctors at a spa where he has checked in to take a break from the film he is making. The doctor asks him if he's making "another film with no hope" and prescribes him a drink of the spa's holy water at 15-minute intervals each day. Daumier, a writer, enters Guido's room and confirms that he's read Guido's script but assures him they'll talk about it later.
Guido retreats to his bathroom, and we see his face for the first time when he looks in the mirror. A phone rings, and he doesn't answer it.
In the spa's outdoor plaza, a hoard of stylish, mostly elderly vacationers drink from glasses of holy water poured by nuns. Guido lines up for his glass and imagines the woman giving it to him is an angelic woman dressed in white, but he soon snaps out of his vision.
In the plaza, he finds the Daumier, who admits that he believes Guido's film lacks a central conflict or philosophical premise that ties its plot events together. Guido assures him that he'd still like to make the film, but he is distracted when he notices his old friend, Mario.
Mario explains that he's at the spa to treat his liver and calls to a young, beautiful girl, Gloria. Guido assumes Gloria is Mario's daughter, but Mario explains that he left his wife and that Gloria is his girlfriend. Gloria mentions that she didn't like Guido's last film but is a big fan of Daumier's. Guido asks if she's an actress, and she affirms that it's her ambition to act, but she's currently writing her doctoral thesis on the solitude of man in contemporary theater.
Guido goes to the train station, waiting for a train that finally arrives. Although he cheerfully assumes the person he's waiting for didn't come, he soon sees he was wrong—his mistress, Carla, gets off the train wearing a silly, fur-trimmed gown. Guido explains that he had to get her a reservation in a different hotel, since his was full.
Guido takes Carla to her hotel, where we learn that they are both married, and that Carla wants Guido to get her husband, Luigi, a job. She admits she had a dream in which Luigi killed them both.
In Carla's hotel room, Guido draws thick, ridiculous eyebrows on Carla's face and asks her to pretend that she's a stranger entering his room by chance. She tries, but the innkeeper catches her. She and Guido fall into bed, and he tells her he loves her.
Asleep next to Carla, Guido dreams that he's at his father's tomb, chatting with his father, who refuses to answer Guido's questions yet complains that he wished the ceiling above his coffin was higher. Two of Guido's colleagues arrive and urge Guido to resist letting his father play on his emotions.
Guido helps lower his father into a freshly dug grave. Guido's mother appears and begins to kiss him, turning into his wife, Luisa. She asks, "Don't you recognize me?" and is left alone in the cemetery.
Analysis
In this first section of 8 1/2, Fellini introduces us to the stream-of-consciousness structure that he will use to shape the film and guide us through Guido's conscious and subconscious. As he does throughout the film, Fellini disorients the viewer by depicting a dream-world, yet withholding clues that specifically identify it as a dream. Since Guido's waking life is often just as surreal as his dreams, this tactic grants them equal importance in fleshing out Guido's character. This schism between Guido's public and private life will be a major source of tension as he struggles to make a film.
In these dreams and fantasies, the camera nearly always takes on Guido's point of view through either over-the-shoulder or "point of view" (often referred to as POV) shots. This is painfully evident in the opening sequence, since Fellini withholds an image of Guido's face until long after the dream ends, showing us the dream through Guido's eyes. Even as Fellini initially obscures the fact that Guido is dreaming, therefore, he lends the sequences an eerie, surreal mood that situates Guido as the dreamer, not a subject of the dream.
Fellini also introduces us to the omnipresence of the color white, which will constitute one of the film's major symbols. The spa itself is blindingly white, as is the dress that the woman in Guido's fantasy wears as she hands him a glass of water. Consequently, the color white becomes a symbol of purity and rejuvenation. Notably, everyone but Mario—whose love has given him new life, and who therefore wears white—wears black in this section.
Daumier's unrelenting criticism of Guido's film also begins here and, much like the intertwining of dream and real life, will act as a structuring device throughout the film. Daumier's points are nearly always ironic, since they function as critiques of the film in which he is a character—not just Guido's film, but Fellini's 8 1/2. For example, Daumier tells Guido that his film lacks a central premise and is therefore composed of "gratuitous episodes." As we will see, this could be said of 8 1/2 itself, an irony that establishes one of the film's central questions: what makes a good film?
Fellini's overarching use of non-diegetic music, to which we are introduced when a theme from "The Barber of Seville" and a suite from "The Nutcracker" play over Guido's spa day, likewise establishes the absurdist tone to which the film will largely hold throughout. Importantly, the music cuts out during Guido's fantasy of his ideal woman, Claudia; this silence largely characterizes Guido's dreams and fantasies throughout the film. By alternating between dramatic scores that play over comical scenes and the silence that permeates Guido's dreams, Fellini helps to establish the surreal mood for which the film is famous.
