vast and infinite

Federico Fellini: Playboy Interview (1966)

Playboy: Once you’ve liberated yourself from the past, what then?

Fellini: Then you are free to live in the present, and not seek cowardly flight toward the past - or toward the future, either.

Playboy: In what way toward the future?

Fellini: I mean that we must cease projecting ourselves into the future as though it were plannable, foreseeable, tangible, controllable - it’s not; or as though it were a dimension existing outside and beyond ourselves. We must learn to deal with matters as they are, not as we hope or fear they may eventuate. We must cope with them as they exist now, today, at this moment. We must awaken to the fact that the future is already here, to be lived in the present. In short, wake up and live!

Playboy: Though most of your protagonists, at the end of their spiritual odysseys, do learn to live with themselves as they are and with life as it is, some interpreters have seen their awakening as little more than a fatalistic resignation to the human condition.

Fellini: No, no! Not a fatalistic resignation, but an affirmative acceptance of life, a burgeoning of love for life. The return of Guido to life in 8½ is not a defeat. Rather, it is the return of a victor. When he finally realizes that he will never be able to resolve his problems, only to live with them—when he realizes that life itself is a continuous refutation of resolution—he experiences an exhilarating resurgence of energy, a return of profound religious sentiment. “I have faith,” he says, “that I am inserted into a design of Providence whose end I don’t and can’t and will never comprehend—and wouldn’t want to even if I cold. There’s nothing for me to do but pass through this panorama of joy and pain—with all my energy, all my enthusiasm, all my love, accepting it for what it is, without expecting an explanation that does not concern me, that does not involve me, that I am not called upon to give.” He is at peace with himself at last—free to accept himself as he is, not as he wished he were or might have been. That is the optimistic finale to 8½.

Playboy, 13, no. 2, February 1966; pp. 55-66