There is no point in a catalogue the effects are many and marvelous. When certain nonsense syllables remind him of his childhood, we go back to his family's house-as spacious and safe as it seemed to him then-when he and his cousins were treading grapes in a tun, then were washed and carried off to bed in clean sheets in their nurses' arms. When his writer quotes one too many pearls of wisdom, the director wearily lifts a finger in command, two bravoes suddenly appear, slip a black hood over the writer's head and hang him on the spot. In a dream his dead mother suddenly kisses him passionately on the mouth when she pulls her head away, it is his wife. The telling imaginative touches keep tumbling out one after another. Then, in further fantasy, he faces all the facts of his past and present, accepts them, and decides to make a film out of the very elements we have been witnessing. The director, harassed by his producer to come to a decision after months of vacillation about script and casting, is paralyzed by apathy and ennui. The film is thickly laced with fantasy-with recollection, projection, wish fulfillment, and a dream girl who reappears throughout. His mind accommodates this with a perception of the gulf between moral myth and moral fact, then it flies off into a harem-scene fantasy. One of the best moments is his lying about the mistress to his wife with the face of truth and the wife's knowledge of this and her disgust-principally that he can sound so truthful when he lies and-one step beyond this- his knowledge of her knowledge. His wife arrives and is not deceived about the mistress. The director is joined by his married mistress who stays at a neighboring hotel. With him is his writer, a fair sample of the intellectual manque who clings to much European film-making as both a suppliant and a hair-shirt. The director is at a luxurious spa hotel trying to straighten out the script for his next job. The story is about a director stuck for a story, an artist in a creative slump, in the familiar nel mezzo del cammin crisis. It also tells us that he found himself stuck for a title. Before we step into the theater, the title tells us that he is clever, and that he sees the film as part of his personal history. It derives from the fact that, up to now, Fellini has made six full-length films and has contributed three "half" segments to anthology films. Like most autobiographical works Federico Fellini's scintillating new film 8 1/2 reveals something more than its author intended.
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