Free Republic

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ marks the moment when the director’s always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly among flashbacks, dream sequences, and carnivalesque reality, and turning one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life, as he struggles against creative block and helplessly juggles the women in his life—including Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale. An early working title for 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion,...

A quarter-century ago - October 31st 1993 - Federico Fellini died from complications of a heart attack he suffered a day after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary. His memorial service at Cinecittà in Rome a few weeks later was attended by 70,000 people. Twenty-five years on, for our Saturday movie date I thought I'd pick something from that heyday of "Hollywood on the Tiber". I came to Fellini's 1957 smash Nights of Cabiria the wrong way round - because I was writing something about Sweet Charity, the musical Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon drew from it a decade later. In...

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