8 ½

8 ½ (Otto e mezzo) is usually considered the best and most representative film of the most influential director of Italian cinema, and one of the great masterpieces of the cinema of all times. There is a “before” and “after” 8 ½: this holds true for the internal trajectory of Federico Fellini’s career, whose signature style, the so called “Fellinesque,” would significantly change in nature after the film, taking on many of the traits—the oneiric, the insistence on memory and the unconscious, the unabashed assertion of a boldly private and flamboyant imagery—which are commonly associated with it. This holds true, moreover, for film culture at large. When 8 ½ was released in 1963, Federico Fellini was already a more than accomplished director, successful both commercially and critically. However, the scope and depth the innovations brought forth by the film would set his fame on a significantly new path, and were quickly recognized as breaking new ground for the medium of film as such. 8 ½ won Fellini his third Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In the heyday of the politique des auteurs and European art cinema, it made him into the quintessential example of the modernist film author. The film has regularly appeared at the top positions in most rankings of the best movies in film history ever since, and has been an avowed influence for directors of the likes of Bob Fosse, François Truffaut, Woody Allen, and Paolo Sorrentino, to name only a few. Its achievements in the most different compartments of film language still stand as exemplary and keep rewarding analysis and interpretation, be it Gianni Di Venanzo’s black and white cinematography, Nino Rota’s soundtrack, the complex alchemy of the screenplay co-authored with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi, or the way the star personas of the likes of Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale are absorbed in the narrative and thereby reshaped. And there is even more than this. With its bold narrative expedient—telling the story, full of resonances with Fellini’s own biography, of a film director in crisis who is attempting to shoot an autobiographical film—8 ½ shifted the boundaries of what a film can do: it gave a decisive contribution to the introduction of meta-cinema as one of the permanent possibilities of the medium; it improved on its ability to reflect critically, philosophically even, on topics ranging from the nature of art and creativity to gender relations and society; it opened new avenues with psychoanalysis, with its theory and practice, and also with the multifarious galaxy of practices and discourses which, in the history of European culture, deal with self-writing and autobiography.