Films about Films

Issue 241

Bran, Romania 2019

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Eventually every artist stumbles into creating art about creating art. If you obsess about your art, and if you strive to generate work that’s novel and interesting and valuable, then you might, sometimes, feel a little recursive: you’ll write novels about novels, lyrics about music, screenplays about filmmaking. The contents of your mind—that relentless focus on creating art—become the art. Although this isn’t an uncommon tendency in artists, it can be a trap, one that’s typically more solipsistic than generative.

In much the same way there shouldn’t be any surprise that fictional characters are often writers. Or that they work as writing teachers. This is what writers know best, it is what they think about, it is the environment they inhabit. So there are plenty of novels and films about college professors struggling to get tenure while also struggling with a troublesome writing project and not too many novels about plumbers struggling to expand a business.

Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is the pinnacle of this genre of solipsistic art—it is a magisterial, irrepressible film, one that enchants me with every viewing, even though the subject is, perhaps strangely, the making of the film. More bluntly: the subject of 8 1/2 is the creation of 8 1/2. Fellini had already made eight films, he felt pressured to create a masterpiece, questioned by critics, restrained by the production, so after a period of frustration and rewrites and overexcited producers, he created a film about the creation of a film. In general, that’s a perilous subject, and not the ideal set of ingredients for great art. Of course when you have Marcello Mastroianni playing the lead, the director in front of the camera, it does help, because the intellectual subject in the screenplay—the craft of filmmaking, the mystery of creativity—is shaped into an emotional, propulsive subject by a remarkable performance.

Viewers enter Fellini’s dreamworld through the eyes of Mastroianni as the director, experiencing the haphazard, chaotic, entropic nature of creativity, absorbing Rome’s streets and its characters in the same way that someone who struggles to create absorbs the environment. There are scenes, for instance, where Mastroianni observes something in his life, and then immediately recasts the scene for the very film that we’re watching. 8 1/2 gushes with ideas although it comes together because it is fundamentally rooted in emotions. Perhaps that’s a paradox, but the balance is necessary, as the usual alternative is to create soulless art that sounds like a dissertation, or to create emotive, sentimental art that lacks meaning.

And Fellini’s 8 1/2 is what came to my mind about twenty minutes into Zia Anger’s My First Film, a 2024 feature that somehow also provides an emotional thrust to an intellectual subject, the subject a film project that Anger shot a decade earlier. Primarily, we’re watching a film about the making of a film, with Odessa Young playing a young director named Vita. The narrative recounts the earlier failed project, in all its warts and missteps and disasters. If you’ve ever felt the shudder of an idea, then struggled to give that vision life, here’s a film that captures one version of that experience. A young filmmaker and unprofessional crew and the simplicities of youth can substitute, in some ways at least, for the constraints that exist inside of every mind. How much of this film occurs inside the director’s head, how much of it occurs in reality, isn’t a relevant distinction for the story, because that distinction begins to diminish as soon as you start to create.

The film within Anger’s film comes at a hinge point in cinema, the point in which a small crew and a few amateur actors could, for the very first time, create something profound without institutional support. The distance between the spark of an idea and the capturing of that idea had diminished far beyond what was previously possible. Just a few cameras, finally at a reasonable cost, and a few of Vita’s friends, are what it takes. And there’s charm to the innocence of the production that’s shown, however slapdash and crazed it looks to watch. What you see is that spark, that desire to create, in every scene—there’s a relentlessness to how Vita yearns to have her film come together, despite the setbacks that arrive every few minutes.

In 8 1/2 the effect is similar but the path taken is curiously the opposite—because in that film the grandiosity of the studio system is part of the charm. Creativity, the mind, a dreamscape, much of it is similar, but the year is 1963 so the parameters are different. Viewers see a hilarious, overburdened production, with hundreds of extras, endless sets, cranes and cameras and crews, to which the director as a character can’t escape—there’s no chance to think, no place to linger, no moment to dream. The constraints of a major director in 1963 are the opposite constraints in My First Film: in 8 1/2, there are business demands, phone calls, agents, stars, and the studio, endless requests from the crew, family obligations, the boisterous city of Rome; in My First Film, there’s a lack of money and no interest from any studio or film festival, the crew is apathetic, grumbling, the setting is rural New York. And even though these films inhabit different extremes, they’re remarkably similar because they both evoke the sensation of creation.

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The usual conceit of films is similar to the conceit with magic shows: the audience arrives and expects to be tricked. There’s a mysteriousness, a distance, between the stage and the audience that’s perfectly acceptable to maintain. There’s wonder in seeing a director capture a shot that you can’t believe or in seeing how the writer manages to reveal a surprise that you didn’t expect. To see behind the curtain has its appeal, but that’s actually a very different performance—you buy a ticket because you want to be tricked. But when you enter the mind of the director, in both 8 1/2 and My First Film, the distance between you and the stage begins to collapse. You, as viewer, struggle to put the pieces together, as if you’re fully inside the creation.

Toward the end of My First Film—which means, toward the end of both the film you’re watching and the film that’s the subject of the film—there’s a curious scene on a small dock. Vita’s father points out that the main character’s pregnancy looks like a pillow. In this scene, and in the last weeks of filming, Vita learns, the pregnancy has looked fake—the costume magic that’s supposed to trick the viewer hasn’t worked. For Vita, pained, stuttering, there’s an abrupt collision between her imagination and reality.

Vita: Has the belly looked like that the whole time?

Father: I like it. It’s like an allegory. Like a metaphor. It’s like an act of creation. Pillow is child, soft, weird, hot air, cumulus, myth, way up and way down. What does it all mean?

Crew Member: The belly should be realistic. Like, she really is pregnant. I feel like it depends what movie you want to make, if the show is based on reality, right?

You might argue that the story of creation is the archetypical human story, whether your focus is religious, artistic, or simply individual. And there’s plenty in this film about birth and death, collaboration, family, relationships, abandonment, women, even violence. It isn’t flawless, there’s some awkward moments, some peculiar scenes that stray, but that’s probably what it feels like to lose yourself inside a mind at work. More importantly, the film comes from an distinct sensibility: one that’s fresh, lively, and all too rare on the screen. How you interpret it might depend on how you think about the mystery of creativity. Regardless of your answer to that question, however, it is true that plenty of artists stumble into creating art about creating art and, very occasionally, it works.