Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 28 January

Fifty greatest films #31: 8½ (Fellini, 1963)

For the second time in about a week I’m going to admit that I – a supposed expert in these matters – have a bit of a blind spot in classic film appreciation.

Last week I had to own up to not having seen a bunch of David Lynch films and this week it’s that for far too long a time I’ve confused Fellini’s 8½ (1963) with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).

Black and white? Check. Stars Marcello Mastroianni? Tick. Music by Nino Rota? Of course. Anita Ekberg dancing in a fountain? Nope, not this time.

I had seen both during my youth and watched La Dolce Vita again in 2020 for an earlier version of this project, but I didn’t get as far as 8½ that time. (In the 2012 survey, La Dolce Vita was rated equal 39th and 8½ was 10th. In 2022, La Dolce Vita didn’t crack the top 50 – equal #60 in fact – and 8½ had dropped to equal 31st.)

Rewatching 8½ a week or so ago, I realised how much more ambitious it is – psychologically and visually.

Mastroianni is, once again, a dissatisfied middle-aged man. This time around he is a film director with creative block – a thinly-veiled version of the maestro himself. In production on a big science-fiction epic, he drifts around the place avoiding decisions, fixated about the problems he has had with the women in his life, and feeling like his ideas no longer have any value.

The film includes fantasy sequences and is heavily influenced by Fellini’s experimentation with Jungian psychoanalysis (and some LSD) and his fascination with dreams and the unconscious. It’s a film about a creative crisis made by a director going through a creative crisis.

For a production so challenged by the maestro’s indecisiveness, the finished masterpiece is remarkable. It helps that Mastroianni is simultaneously one of the coolest movie stars ever and someone who can look completely broken inside at the same time.

Unlike many films in the top 50, 8½ was recognised for its greatness immediately. (At least by most people – Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it a “structural disaster” but, as my dad says, “no one comes out of a film humming the structure”.) It’s one of the touchstone films of the 60s and is still one of the greatest portraits of an artist ever made.

Editor’s note: Over the past couple of years, I have been on a quest to watch (or rewatch) the top 50 films in Sight & Sound’s 2022 list of the greatest films of all time. The films from 50 to 36 were written up for RNZ Widescreen and, when they told me that this project was a bit too obscure for them, I moved it here.

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Where to watch 8½