In the various "Top Ten Movies" lists popular in film history, Fellini's "Eight and a Half" is almost always in it, and it is rarely even squeezed out of the top five. This is a movie about movies. For the first time, Fellini explored the inner life of a filmmaker (director) with such profound brushstrokes, making the film not only a "text" but also a "specimen". "Eight and a half" was widely admired by later film fans and film researchers, and the inspiration and influence it brought to later film creators is still alive today. The situation of the character (director Guido) in the film is precisely the situation in which Fellini made this film. Before filming "Eight and a Half", Fellini wanted to make a film called "Mastona's Journey", but could not find inspiration. In the film "Eight and a Half", the film that director Guido has been shooting but can't make is "Mastona's Travel".
Before shooting "Eight and a Half", Fellini had completed seven feature films and several short films. Therefore, the title of the film is "Eight and a Half", which refers to the total number of films made by the director at that time. Many see Fellini as one of the terminators of Italian neorealist cinema (the other being Antonioni). When he first entered the film industry, he worked for a period of time as a screenwriter and assistant director for Rossellini, a representative of neorealism. Early Fellini also inherited some of the traditions of neorealist films, and his later explorations were completely different from those of neorealist directors. Bazin called Fellini's film "psychological realism." He believes that "Fellini did not depart from realism nor from neorealism, but rather he surpassed and perfected neorealism by poetically rearranging the world".
Perhaps, Bazin is referring to Fellini's earlier works, such as "The Road", "Nights of Cabia", etc., in those films, the focus on reality is indeed the main feature of Fellini's films. It is a pity that Bazin died in 1958, four years before the birth of "Eight and a Half". When he saw "Eight and a Half", I wonder if he would still insist on classifying Fellini's films into neorealism? Later film scholars tended to classify Fellini's films as "modern films", comparing him to Bergman, Antonioni, and other filmmakers based on modern philosophy. The difference is that Antonioni's films introduce rational elements of modern philosophy into the film text, while the dream mechanism in Fellini's films is more rooted in religious complexes and some kind of pansexual theory. He declared his idol more than once to be the psychologist Jung (a student of Freud), saying, "I prefer Jung's intellectual humility in the face of the mysteries of life. For a man who needs to find in the world of creative fantasy As a person of self, Jung appears to be kinder and kinder, and can nourish people's hearts. Freud's theory allows us to think, while Jung allows us to imagine, dream, step by step to the dark labyrinth of the soul, to experience the soul The presence". Jung's ideas guided Fellini in his quest for the mystical power of cinema, a power beyond the reality of life that allowed Fellini to go further than the neorealist tradition, or even go the other way. The influence of "Eight and a Half" in the world film industry is far-reaching. The film even became a genre like Westerns and sci-fi, and was widely borrowed by directors everywhere. Almost every director with a cinephile complex in the world has made or is making his own "eight and a half" films, such as American director Woody Allen's "Once Upon a Time in Stardust" (1980), and German director Wim Wenders, The State of Things (1982).
The main reason why this kind of film is called "movie about film" is probably the use of the metaphor of "play is like life".
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