8 1/2 (1963) - Blu-ray disc review

Reel rating: 5/5

Reel commentary: ... every frame burns into one’s memory with the brightest of flames and proves, time and time again, to be a memorable piece of film history.

By Loron Hays

8 1/2, Federico Fellini’s most personal film, finally arrives on Blu-Ray courtesy of the Criterion Collection.  Sporting a peculiar and self-referencing title (the number of films Fellini had completed at that point in his career), 8 1/2, also happens to be one of the greatest films ever made.  Carrying the torch of modernism straight into the cinema, this black-and-white film from 1963 is the ultimate comment on making movies from Italy’s greatest director.

All images copyright © 1963 Embassy Pictures.

Opening with the now-familiar dream sequence of famous Italian director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) finding himself trapped in a car during stalled-out traffic before being tethered to a kite string by his producers, 8 1/2, is a feisty arthouse film that surrenders linear logic for autobiographical brilliance in which every frame becomes memorable and pregnant with meaning.  The situation of Fellini’s work and its inspiration is one of a creative block; it’s a breakdown of meaning for the artist and Fellini himself – hence its autobiographical nature.  Unsure of everything and everyone around him, Guido finds himself stalled out with no direction home.  He withdraws into fantasies, memories, dreams and weaves them into his daily life as a director on the line with a hit movie to make for a starving audience and a worried producer and a husband who isn’t shy about his lust for everything female.  Rest assured, 8 ½ is not a film about nothing and, by the end of the movie, Fellini has shared with his audience all he could ever wish to share about life and more.     

With honesty at its core, 8 1/2 comes across as a confession of sorts; it’s somewhat of a social statement where relationships toward women and attitudes toward art are not spared and linked to the idea of the hallowed and the profane.  Co-starring Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, and Edra Gale as Saraghina, the defining character statement on the sacrilegious beauty of femininity, 8 1/2s women are nearly as renowned and identifiable as the movie itself.

Once intended to be a movie about a famous writer with severe writer’s block, Fellini – as the years progressed in creative quagmire - found himself identifying more and more with the protagonist as he became more and more unsure of his follow-up project to the successful La dolce vita.  Deciding to tell his story of the unsure director after being visited by success, Fellini opened the camera to decode dreams and fantasies in a modernist style that continues to inspire and ignite creative minds.  As a study of the principles of tone, time, place and the degrees of experience, 8 1/2 weaves together Guido’s fantasies and his daily escapades into a highly-charged film where every frame burns into one’s memory with the brightest of flames and proves, time and time again, to be a memorable piece of film history.

Loron Hays

Frank Says: Jan 24, 2010 at 14:39 More 8 1/2 quotes: "Why piece together the tatters of your life - the vague memories, the faces... the people you never knew how to love? " "You'll wear white... with long hair, just as you do now." "IAccept me as I am. Only then can we discover each other." "I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves. Instead, I'm the one without the courage to bury anything at all. When did I go wrong? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same. "

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