Federico Fellini's film about not being able to make a film. The most-influential film about filmmaking ever made.
Italy, early 1960s. Guido Anselmi, an internationally-successful film director in his early forties, is unable to begin work on his next film — a science-fiction project that the studio has already committed significant resources to. He retreats to a spa for a break. The production company arrives. His wife arrives. His mistress arrives. The film unfolds as a blur of meetings, memories, fantasies, and dreams in which Guido's failure to produce the film he has promised becomes the film he is producing.
The film does not, strictly, have a conventional plot. Guido's interior life — his childhood memories of the Catholic boarding school, his fantasies of a harem in which all the women in his life would be his subjects, his recurring inability to commit to either his wife or his mistress — is the film's material. The film closes with a long sequence of all the characters in his life dancing in a circle around a circus tent, and with Guido, briefly, conducting them.
8½ is the foundational text of self-reflexive cinema — films that are, at the level of their structure, about the difficulty of making the film. The pattern has been imitated for sixty years. Birdman (2014). The Player (1992). Adaptation. (2002). Living in Oblivion. Synecdoche, New York. Day for Night (1973, François Truffaut's direct response to 8½). All of them are in conversation with Fellini's film.
Federico Fellini directed seven and a half features before this one — counting Variety Lights, which he co-directed, as a half. He titled this one '8½' because it was, by his accounting, his eighth-and-a-half film. The title is the film's first joke and its first thematic statement: the film is, openly, an unstable artifact whose status as a complete work the film itself questions.
Marcello Mastroianni, by 1963 already one of the most-recognisable European actors after Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), plays Guido as a clear surrogate for Fellini himself. The character's Catholic boarding-school memories, his complicated relationship with his wife, his creative paralysis, his fascination with women who exceed his capacity to understand them — all are recognisably Fellini's own material.
What the performance does is allow the audience to engage with what could have been an unbearably self-indulgent character. Mastroianni plays Guido with charm, weariness, and a recurring small comic register that prevents the film from collapsing under the weight of its own concerns. The actor's specific gift was to make European art-cinema introspection feel approachable rather than punitive. Guido's failure to make his film is, partly because of Mastroianni's performance, watchable across two hours and twenty minutes.
Nino Rota composed the score, as he had for several of Fellini's previous films and would for several more. The film's main musical motif is, by survey of working composers, one of the most-recognised pieces of European film music of the 1960s. Rota would later compose the score for Coppola's Godfather films, dying in 1979.
The film's commercial reception was significant for an art-cinema release. 8½ won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and Best Costume Design. It grossed strong returns internationally for a subtitled Italian feature. The film's success contributed to the broader 1960s art-cinema commercial peak in which European films routinely found significant American distribution. The model has not been quite repeatable since.