Fellini's 8½: Symbolist Painting Meets Dante's Divine Comedy

Sabrina Crivelli analyzes Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, focusing on its visual references to Symbolist painting and Dante's Divine Comedy. The film depicts director Guido Anselmi's (Marcello Mastroianni) creative crisis at a spa, where he struggles to start a sci-fi film. Fellini, inspired by Jungian therapy with Ernst Bernhard, abandoned neorealism for a dreamlike style blending reality, memory, and fantasy. The opening scene of Guido floating out of a car window recalls Marc Chagall's 'Over the Town' (1918), but here it symbolizes anxiety, not love. The Terme di Chianciano spa is portrayed as a purgatorial limen, with guests queuing for thermal water like penitent souls, evoking Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante. A staircase procession to the sauna references Gaetano Previati's 'Funeral of a Virgin' (1912-13) and Edward Burne-Jones's 'The Golden Stairs' (1876-1880). Claudia Cardinale's character, in white, embodies both Dante's Beatrice and a Symbolist ideal. The film's final procession in white signifies Guido's reconciliation with his past.