One of the most memorable comments I’ve ever read about 8½ was by Broken Forum’s resident film geek. He noted that every great director eventually tries to make his or her own version of this film. The Wikipedia entry for it cites some examples, with even Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York being considered one such attempt. It’s Federico Fellini’s best known film and easily qualifies as one of the key films every fan of cinema must watch.

Upon watching this, it’s not difficult to understand why. My wife says that this film has no plot but I think it does. It’s essentially autobiographical as the character of its protagonist Guido Anselmi is inseparable from Fellini himself. Anselmi is a director recovering from a nervous breakdown during the filming of his latest film, a massive production that calls for the construction of an expensive spaceship prop. His producers are anxious for the project to go ahead while the French actress set to star in it constantly asks him to tell her something about the role she is supposed to be playing. He also has to juggle his mistress, a writer and film critic who is skeptical of the project, various journalists looking for a scoop and his wife and her coterie of friends who arrives to visit the set. Most of all, he is slowly coming to terms with the fact that under all that pressure, his creative energies are exhausted and he has no idea how to proceed with the film.

The film interweaves seamlessly scenes of Anselmi’s dreams, fantasies, his reminiscences of his childhood and the deteriorating situation on the set. The opening scene is a good example of the surrealism, with the director being trapped and apparently slowly suffocating inside a car while the occupants of the cars that hem him in just keep on staring. Many such dream-like scenes in other films, including Synecdoche, New York, often feel cryptic and require multiple viewings to work out what they mean. This is not the case at all with 8½. One of the amazing things about this film is that even while it jumps between the real world and the inner world of Anselmi’s imagination, you’re never at a loss about what’s going on or what the dreams mean. This means that the film is narratively dense and yet it flows so smoothly that you barely feel the time passing. It’s no wonder that this is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

The scenes also show an impressive and insightful grasp of human psychology. Casting a comparatively unattractive actress to represent Anselmi’s childhood sexual fantasy was a stroke of genius and it is revealing that though other women come and go, she always remains. (Fun bit of trivia: the actress that Fellini found to play this devil-woman, Eddra Gale, would later be cast in a minor role in The Graduate, surely a deliberate nod to 8½.) As far as I’m concerned, Fellini doesn’t make a single mistake. At one point I thought that the harem scene was starting to go on for too long, becoming a kind of wish-fulfillment self-indulgence on the part of the director. But then he goes on to subvert the scene not once but twice, beginning with the rebellion on the part of the women. It completely redeems the scene and gives us insight not only on how Anselmi’s treats women in general but also the specific roles that each of them plays in his life.

I’m not the creative type and I’m certainly not any kind of artist so films that are explicitly about the experience of being an artist, as this one is clearly about the frustrations of being a director, have never particularly resonated with me. This one is so well-made, so apt and perhaps most of all so humanistic that it blows all other comparable efforts out of the water. Since I’ve started watching films seriously I’ve seen many films that have thoroughly schooled me in why they’re considered the best ever made. Very few of them I would consider to be particular favorites. But 8½ is certainly one of these that both leaves me overawed by the sheer ability of its director and so personally enjoyable to me that I consider it one of my favorites.