In his biography of Federico Fellini, John Baxter argues that Otto e mezzo is a film devoted to self-analysis and to toying with reality. Such themes, he alleges, are generally explored within a literary context. I mention this in order to defend my comparison of Otto e mezzo with a work of literature. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, has much in common, thematically, with the Fellini film. Both works are heavily autobiographical and introspective. They draw upon episodes from their creators' early lives. Aside from its covert references to Parnell, the Irish statesman scandalized in Joyce's youth, A Portrait of the Artist does not focus on events in the macro-world. Neither does Otto e mezzo. In each work, rather, the artist has chooses to evoke his past in highly subjective and emotionally charged terms. He recounts experiences which are not shared with the rest of society. In so doing, Fellini deviates from the Italian neorealist tradition. Neorealism, the movement pioneered by Rosselini, De Sica and Zavattinni, concerned itself with the sweeping social problems of post-war Italy. Many of these, including the high unemployment rate of the late forties and fifties, were encased in the platform of Italian socialists. For them, the deviation from neorealist themes, apparent even in early Fellini films, became a cause for attack. The Marxist critic Aristarco lambasted La Strada as "'a traitor to the neorealist cause'" for its "'refusal to consider the historical forces that shape the social order [in Italy]'" and well as for its "'mystical abdication of control over human destiny'" (Marcus, 145). Undoubtedly, Aristarco could have made the same complaint against Otto e mezzo. What he, and other critics like him, failed to realize is that Fellini, like Joyce, is only concerned with personal truth. Theirs is a "mystical abdication" into metaphysical reality, a neorealism of the soul, born out of personal traumas and epiphanies. These are the aspects of past experience from which Fellini and Joyce derive Otto e mezzo and Portrait of the Artist.
Each work contains a protagonist who is the artist's alter-ego. In Otto e mezzo, it is Guido Anselmi, a neurotic director like Fellini; in Portrait it is Stephen Dedalus, a burgeoning writer like the young Joyce. These characters serve as objective correlatives, to use the term from Millicent Marcus' book, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. It is through Guido and Stephen that Fellini and Joyce resurrect key elements from their pasts.
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