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 39^th and 8½ was 10^th. In 2022, La Dolce Vita didn’t crack the top 50 – equal #60 in fact – and 8½ had dropped to equal 31^st.) 

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.

Where to watch 8½

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Brollie (free) or BeamaFilm (free via par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies) or digit­al rental

Australia: Streaming on Brollie (free) or BeamaFilm (free via par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies) or SBS.com (free w/ads) or digit­al purchase

Canada: Streaming on Criterion Channel

Ireland: Streaming on Prime Video

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel or Max or Kanopy (free via par­ti­cip­at­ing libraries)

UK: Streaming on Prime Video or BFI Player