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The launch pad on Claudia Verhoeven's home
office wall
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The frame shows a launch pad for a spaceship. Claudia explained:
"In the film this director is making a science fiction film...but he's having this crisis...he doesn't know how to go on, essentially, he doesn't really know what he wants to make, but he has to make this film, the project has to be launched creatively, metaphorically. But everything is falling apart."She recalls watching the film while working on her dissertation (later book) on Dmitry Karakozov, the would-be assassin of the Russian tsar. "When I was watching it while writing the dissertation, at first, it was the most depressing film," she said, relating how, at one point in the film, the screenwriter approaches Guido [the Fellini character] and criticizes the project even as the launch pad is being dismantled in the background. "All his hopes and his memories are coming to nothing—it all breaks down with this smug academic critic negating the potential creativity of this guy."
"But then...suddenly, the clown shows up from the side of the frame and says 'Everybody's ready! Come on! Come on!' And then Guido becomes the ringmaster of this crazy circus and he starts to do what he's supposed to, and that is to direct. And you get a sense that at that moment, when he does what he is supposed to do to fulfill his craft that everything will launch and elevate, and that's the moment when the picture moves."The reference to the moving picture is from a scene early in the film with one of Guido's childhood memories in which a girl shares with him a magic chant—"Asa NIsi MAsa"—and confides to him that "tonight is the night when the picture moves" (meaning the eyes of a painting will become animated and look back). "But really it's the soul [ANIMA] that animates a creative project and that's the kind of launch of it all."
"To me 8½ is the most optimistic movie—in spite of all difficulties, if you somehow throw yourself into the moment, with a leap or some sort of daring, and also something kind of funny, something light has to be there, then you can have transcendence in your work."
She mentioned another image, a note that Fellini stuck to the side of his camera during the filming of 8½. It read "Ricordati che è un film comico” ("Remember that this is a comic film").
"He had to remind himself to do it with a light treatment and I think that's important—things get really heavy and we're so involved; you have to remember to be a little bit lighter and a little bit more comical...and do it with some grace. The film and that picture of the spacecraft work for me the same way that the sticker worked for Fellini, so I have the scaffold and the spaceship there to remind myself that it's not so bad in the end."
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"Remember that this is a comic film"
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See also the interview with Claudia Verhoeven from May 13, 2010.
