Part of Essential Fellini.
One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ marks the moment when the director’s always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly among flashbacks, dream sequences and carnivalesque reality, and turning one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.
Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life, as he struggles against a creative block and helplessly juggles the women in his life — including Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo and Claudia Cardinale. An early working title for 8½ was “The Beautiful Confusion,” and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that — a shimmering dream, a circus, a magic act.
Restored by Istituto Luce – Cinecittà and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale for the Fellini 100 Project.
“The best film ever made about filmmaking…. I have seen 8½ over and over again, and my appreciation only deepens.” —Roger Ebert (May 28, 2000) “In terms of execution I cannot remember a more brilliant film. In image, visual ingenuity, subtlety of pace, sardonic humor, it is stunning. We see a wizard at the height of his wizardry….” —Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic (Jul 12, 1963) “Above its knowing virtuosity is a naked sincerity, and each time you revisit the film’s ever more familiar haze, you realise it’s a film to grow old with.” —Ian Mantgani, Little White Lies
