3 Indian directors talk about how grand opera ‘8 1/2’ continues to flame their artistic courage

8½ emerged as a radiant child of the auteurist mood that immersed European cinema in the late 1950s. Now directors became heroes. They could open shows. The perfect antithesis to a star who could alone sell a film.

It’s been 50 years since Guido’s confusion made a spectacle of itself and fascinated filmgoers. Not to forget,too many failed imitations worldwide.

A luminous classic,it’s a permanent feature in almost all the list of greatest films ever made. Before we give in to the trap of adjectives,we asked three filmmakers to tame this defiant beauty of cinema in their words.

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra (,i>Rang De Basanti,Bhaag Milkha Bhaag): I don’t know how to define cinema or how to define art. What has always intrigued me is that like true art,true cinema is also perpetual. That’s where the line blurs between art and cinema,thereby making it eternal.

For me,he (Federico Fellini) has always stirred pain and erotica,humour and darkness in a sublime way. 8½ will remain a journey,not a destination. One of the most sincere pieces of work to be expressed by any director,it has a deep connect with my subconscious. I remember watching it first at the Bombay Film Festival more than two decades ago,somewhere it gave birth to the filmmaker in me.

How can a movie which came out in 1963 (before I was born) shape the way I make movies?

I don’t know. Even the famous Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin explained in bewilderment,“8½ is more mysterious than the cosmos.” It sure is,thus is the way of Fellini. Maybe the reason 8½ means so much to me is because Fellini was reflecting his own crisis in that of the character,in his own words,“…and what about the crisis? What’s the character’s crisis?” Its inability to identify with something he had imagined and to be unable to write it down touched me. To keep having the feeling that,“you can’t do it anymore,” is something I also experience as a director.

Fifty years later,this movie made in Italy tiptoes into the consciousness of an Indian filmmaker resulting in Rang De Basanti,Delhi-6 and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag; movies born out of my own crisis,my own reason for identification.

8½ was first called ‘La Bella Confusione’ (The Beautiful Confusion). A neo-realist Fellini opens the movie in a dream,imprisoned in traffic,Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) escapes out of the car and flies high up into the sky towards freedom. Is he free? NO! He still has one leg tied to a cable of the member of the production staff working on the beach down below. “Bring him down” are the orders and Guido is pulled back down to earth. He wakes up in his room at a hotel and spa where he has taken refuge under the pretext of sickness that has enabled him to delay the filming for another two weeks. “What interesting things are you working on right now?” asks the doctor. “Another hopeless film,” answers the film critic,who comes into the room wearing a bathrobe. This resonates in me and I find myself in an eternal crisis of what to make now?

Fellini taught me that movies are a ‘director’s medium.’ That a director is the true author of his work and must assume the responsibility whether it’s the success one may achieve by selling out or the failure by remaining true to your thoughts.

I raise a toast to five hundred more years of 8½. To Fellini I bow.

Sriram Raghavan (Ek Hasina Thi,Johnny Gaddaar,Agent Vinod):

Fellini has made some terrific neo-realistic films such as La Strada,I Vitelloni and the exquisite,Night of Cabiria. But the term Fellini-esque perhaps came into being after 8½,one of the greatest films about filmmaking ever made. It conjures up surreal dreamlike

images that can simultaneously be grand,real and absurd.

I first saw the film on the big screen at the FTII. I loved the surreal images,the performances,the music and gorgeous women but I honestly didn’t understand the film. I came out humming ‘the Saraghina tune’ but deep in my head wondering what was that about. I had grown up on a diet of Hindi and Hollywood films and this was a new language in storytelling.

It’s said that a classic is something that never finishes what it has to say. I saw 8½ several times over the course of three years and every time there was something more about the film that I would discover,love and understand.

It’s every filmmaker’s dream to make a film that’s loved by audiences and critics,and a box office success too. The dream is usually followed by a nightmare. What next? 8½ is about this confusion. It’s a fantastic premise. A movie about a director making a movie without a script.

A film director at a shoot is surrounded by a hundred or more people all the time,but at the same time,is perhaps the loneliest of them all.

8½ is about the filmmaking process,the chaos,creativity,thrill and anxieties of a filmmaker who jumps between reality,

fantasy,his past,and his imagination. I am sure every director has gone through pure Guido moments.

A Hindi melodrama some years ago had a tagline,which I thought was fabulous and funny. It was ‘Shot entirely on location… in a woman’s heart’. 8½ is shot entirely on location… in the filmmaker’s head.

Rahul Dholakia (Parzania,Lamhaa): I was introduced to filmmakers such as Fellini,Godard,Truffaut and Wajda by a close friend and student of cinema,Alan Twigg. Alan,though my college mate at St. Xavier’s college in Bombay,was also my guru in cinema. He is the reason why I moved from a career in advertising to study cinema in New York. It was then that I came across the work of this remarkable Italian filmmaker,best known in film schools for his brilliant film,8½.