/2 (8 1) Movie Review

Otto e Mezzo
Federico Fellini's 8 1/2

In that fickle and specialized world of the “art film,” Federico Fellini had indeed been crowned “King of the World” (sorry, Mr. Cameron) following the worldwide reception that greeted his 1960 La Dolce Vita. Though he subsequently worked on a minor, short film for the omnibus feature Boccaccio '70, the search for ideas for his next major feature resulted in something unexpected, but ridiculously logical: a film about a successful filmmaker with a big hit on his hands who wasn't sure what to do as his next feature. It's hard to imagine anything riskier, and even harder to imagine a payoff as successful as Fellini's 8 1/2, a brilliant, irritating, immovable object of a movie that has become one of the basic building blocks of the language of modern cinema. Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) is the director in Fellini's vision, whose expenditures on sets for his next, only-vaguely-conceived movie are large enough to cause Guido distracting anxiety, as well as “director's block.” At the spa where Guido goes to take stock, the characters of his life—his wife, his mistress, his childhood memories, and his movies' characters—all come to visit him, either in the flesh or in the form of palpable fantasies. Many individual sequences in 8 1/2—Guido keeping all the women of his life at bay with a whip—are well known and well-remembered, but it's as a cohesive whole and through the power of its enormously influential, redemptive ending that Fellini achieves a sometimes messy but unmistakable greatness. There have been—and will be—lots of other fine movies about the making of movies. But from the opening shot of a terrified Guido trapped in his car to the final seconds of him in the center of the celebratory circus ring that is his life, 8 1/2 remains an incomparable experience. (The title is derived from the fact that Fellini had previously directed six features, plus portions of longer films that added up to a movie and a half—this, therefore, was film number 8 1/2. Years later, a Broadway musical based on the film would be—bizarrely enough—titled 9.)

NEXT STOP … La Dolce Vita, Ginger & Fred, Alex in Wonderland

1963 135m/B IT Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinal, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, Barbara Steele, Rossella Falk, Eddra Gale, Mark Herron, Madeleine LeBeau, Caterina Boratto; D: Federico Fellini; W: Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi, Federico Fellini; C: Gianni Di Venanzo; M: Nino Rota. Academy Awards '63: Best Costume Design (B & W), Best Foreign Film; New York Film Critics Awards '63: Best Foreign Film; Nominations: Academy Awards '63: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration (B & W), Best Director (Fellini), Best Story & Screenplay. VHS, LV, Letterbox VES, MRV, MPI