artistic ego

His films obsessively explore the collision between artistic vision and personal vanity, particularly in 8½ where a director's creative crisis becomes indistinguishable from existential narcissism.

He dramatized the director's wounded ego and need for control in films like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, blurring lines between his autobiographical pain and artistic creation.

His surrealist cinema celebrates artistic ego as a tool for accessing deeper truth, treating the director's vision as inseparable from the work itself, especially evident in Mulholland Drive.