The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films: Part One

Peter Hoskin and Matthew d'Ancona

27 June 2009

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Peter Hoskin and Matthew d’Ancona count down the first 25 of The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films

43.
8½
(Federico Fellini, 1963)

Self-indulgent to the point of parody, Fellini’s ‘eight-and-a-halfth’ feature is a cavalcade of autobiographical neurosis, a dazzling montage of playfulness at the border between art and reality. The biggest joke is that one of the most imaginative films ever made should be all about director’s block, seen through the weary eyes of Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido, Fellini’s screen alter ego.

‘Such a monstrous presumption to think that others could benefit from the squalid catalogue of your mistakes,’ says the critic Daumier to Guido, as if in anticipation of the reception 81/2 would inspire in real life. ‘And how do you benefit from stringing together the tattered pieces of your life? Your vague memories, the faces of people that you were never able to love...’ But the movie contains the answer to its own internal criticisms in some of the most memorable scenes in all cinema — the traffic-jam dream sequence, the imaginary farmhouse in which all the women in Guido’s life cohabit, the circus parade finale which is as extraordinary as the last shot of the knight’s entourage dancing hand in hand with Death in The Seventh Seal.

Truffaut’s Day for Night, Greenaway’s 81/2 Women, Fosse’s All That Jazz, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories: so many films pay explicit homage to this masterpiece. Yet it is best seen not as a sombre monument, but as a very Italian shrug of the artist’s shoulders at the simultaneous magic and absurdity of movie-making. Md’A