"Movies have to be free...free from the lateness of reality" F. Fellini.
8½ (pronounced Otto e mezzo in Italian) is a 1963 film directed by Italian director Federico Fellini.
The film's title refers to 8½ being Fellini's eighth and a half film as a director. His previous directorial work consisted of six features, two short segments, and a collaboration with another director, Alberto Lattuada, the latter three productions accounting for a "half" film each. (wiki)
It stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director who suffering from directors block is sent to a sanitorium to take a cure in order to finish his latest movie, a Science Fiction epic. We soon learn that Guido's heart is not in the project. His state of mind is represented to us by a series of flashbacks, fantasy sequences and marital crises. Guido rediscovers life through a series of mental shifts. Fellini himself said "It is not fundamental to comprehend this movie, it is a film to be felt, When filming I am living in a dimension in which I am completely absorbed, like a trance".
8 1/2 has this trance like quality. The shifting light, the extremes of light and dark, black and white, the strange characters, the wind noise that comes and goes. It is a cinematic dream scape and a masterpiece. The women are beautiful, the clothes absolutely up to the 1963 fashion high watermark and sharp as a knife and smoking cigarettes has never looked as appealing on the big screen. Rent it, buy it or if you're lucky enough go see it at a cinema.
8½ won two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design (black-and-white). Acknowledged as a highly influential classic, it was ranked 3rd best film of all time in a 2002 poll of film directors conducted by the British Film Institute. (wiki)
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