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2004
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| Fellini's
Eight and a half (Otto e mezzo) |
Is this the greatest film ever made or pretentious twaddle that no sane man can sit through and understand? Is Fellini a fine auteur with a singular vision, or a fibbing megalomaniac with a penchant for childhood memories and an attractive alter ego in Mastroianni?
Ok, I reckon it's a great movie, art on film. He lays the childhood sequences on too thick, the plain oddness of the back-up characters is hard to take, the stars are beautiful yet unallowed to express their true qualities - but that is Fellini! he revels in controlling a huge orchestra, delighting in having the power to create the biggest movie in Italian history and focusing on his own complaint - what on earth shall I say?
The panic all directors and artists feel at some time, writ large, expensively, expansively on the screen. No wonder so many film makers rate this as their favourite film! It is made for them, it is of them! It includes within itself everything they want to be and everything they are! The dreams and the down to earh reality is all there in Fellini's master piece.
Of course, if someone asks you what it is about and you answer - a director who is a bit lost for ideas - it sounds an indulgent waste of time. But it is life, our life, everyone's life, it means everything in the very fact that it means nothing at all.
Fellini's eight and a half is truely brilliant. I beg you to watch it if you haven't already, and if you have, watch it again!
Further reading:
Fellini:
Italian cinema:
Filmography: