Federico Fellini - 8½ (1963)

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (Otto e Mezzo) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a director whose film—and life—is collapsing around him. An early working title for the film was La Bella Confusione (The Beautiful Confusion), and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act. Criterion




8 1/2 : a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8 1/2 surely goes beyond any predecessor in having itself as its subject. Before 1963 Federico Fellini had, by his count, made seven and a half films; hence "8 1/2" is like an opus number: this is film #8 1/2 in the Fellini catalogue. Essay by Alexander Sesonske




Self-referential enough, but only the beginning. 8 1/2 is a film about making a film, and the film that is being made is 8 1/2. Notice how everything Guido says about the film he is making turns out to be true of 8 1/2, even the sailor doing a soft-shoe dance, how all the screen tests are for roles in the film we are seeing, how some camera movements create an ambiguity between Guido, the director in the film, and Fellini, the director of the film, thus taking self-reference one step beyond the work to its maker. Essay by Alexander Sesonske




It was perhaps this last level of self-reference that led some critics in the mid-1960s to dismiss 8 1/2 as autobiographical trivia, brilliant on its surface but devoid of significant content—a criticism already made within the film by Daumier, the writer. The world-wide success of 8 1/2 and its current status high on the list of the greatest films ever made have long since refuted such critics, but they were right on two counts: Essay by Alexander Sesonske




8 1/2 is both autobiographical and brilliant. Its surface flow of images dazzles us with sharp contrasts of black and white, startling eruptions from off-screen, unexpected changes of scene and a virtuoso display of all the possibilities and effects of camera movement. We find almost a catalogue of humanity in its stream of faces; some of them are momentary visions while others persist through the film and long after in our memory, such as Saraghina, that lumbering monster transformed into the embodiment of joyous life and movement. Essay by Alexander Sesonske




But Fellini's brilliance reaches beyond the surface to include an intricate structure of highly original, highly imaginative scenes whose conjunction creates an unprecedented interweaving of memories, fantasies and dreams with the daily life of his hero and alter ego, Guido Anselmi. This more than anything, probably, made 8 1/2 the most influential film of the 1960s, liberating filmmakers everywhere from the conventions of time, place, and mode of experience that had prevailed in cinema for decades. Essay by Alexander Sesonske




In a film in which almost every scene is memorable, within its own pace and ambience, its characteristic forms of movement and emotional tone, some scenes are extraordinary: a childhood reminiscence of a farmhouse overflowing with warmth, love and security, with an ascent into an enchanted darkness where the magical words "asa nisi masa" promise wealth and happiness; a boyhood flight from the stifling confines of a Catholic school to the voluptuous marvels of Saraghina's rhumba, with its grotesque aftermath of cruel punishment and guilt; young Guido being told that Saraghina is the devil, though a Dantean descent into Hell reveals a cardinal enthroned at the center of the Inferno, solemnly repeating that there is no salvation outside the church; a whirling, riotous harem scene which mocks the absurdities of male fantasy. Essay by Alexander Sesonske