Let’s Dance

For some reason, I am thinking of Fellini’s masterpiece 8½ today.

8½ is more than a film really, it’s a dream: Images colliding into one another, seemingly unrelated themes running in and out of each other, the blurring of what is real and what is a dream...

Mostly I’ve been recalling two scenes, one of which is the famous opening scene. There have been many interpretations of this scene, and the movie itself, but for me personally this scene describes an artist’s predicament.

One sees the world around, primarily for what it is, but then one peels the surface to reveal some of its rarefied beauty, its inherent ugliness, its perfunctory existentiality; and then even deeper, its futility. Oh the suffocation! You try to transcend, to metaphorically ‘rise’, higher and higher, each moment bound in ecstasy. Yes, you can see it, it’s in your head, you only have to keep going, and you will truly be free...but of course, you are pulled back by everything that is mundane, even futile—yet oh so necessary.

The other scene that has always stayed with me, and epitomises the creative process in my mind, is a little scene where the main character Guido (Marcello Mastroianni playing a Director) is walking in a wood panelled corridor. The scene, as with most scenes in the movie, comes somewhere between the exigency of doing, and the liberty of imagining. This is one of those exigencies of doing—the ground work, the humdrum stuff, the wrangling with and for the money, the management of what are already very fragile egos—not the least your own, the juggling of the impossible with the won’t happen with the vision in your head. Here we have the director on his way to some such fire to douse and suddenly, out of nowhere, he does a little jig.

I simply love that scene. To me it evokes all that the creative process boils down to. That somewhere in the cosmos, against all odds, there is a little tune playing that only you can hear. And sometimes, when it all gets a bit much, the only thing you can really do is dance to that tune.