Existentialism and Cinema: The Dialectic of Bad Faith and Authenticity in Federico Fellini's 8½

Existentialism was a European cultural movement and trend during the second post-war period. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir were in the forefront of people’s minds as they came to influence the vast majority of cultural fields of those times. Even artists who did not directly deal with philosophy were influenced by Existentialism and its atmosphere, especially in literature and cinema. There were artists who developed tragic and anguished aspects of Existentialism, such as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, and those who meditated on other themes, such as the opposition between bad faith and authenticity. One of the authors who depicted this dialectic with precision is Federico Fellini, especially in his masterpiece Otto e mezzo, the story of a movie director who struggles with his inability to complete the script of his forthcoming film. This essay highlights similarities and differences in Sartre’s and Fellini’s conception of authenticity. In this movie there are at least two levels of narration. We argue that the story Guido (the director) is trying to complete is nothing but his representation of himself in the kingdom of bad faith. But there is also another level of narration, the tale by which Federico Fellini reveals himself as a man and as a director through the multitude of Guido’s masks.