Fellini’s 8½ is rereleased in cinemas: it is the director’s compellingly fluent and sustained meditation on films as dreams, memories and fears, and the way they offer a fascinating but illusory way of rewriting and reshaping one’s own life. The opening dream sequence is more sensationally disturbing than ever, still one of the most incredible things in cinema. And then we wake up to a reality that has the weightless quality of a dream. Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a celebrated film-maker, a version of Fellini, who has arrived at a midlife crisis and creative block (watching 8½ on the big screen is a way of seeing just how tired Mastroianni looks). After a stay at a ridiculous health spa, Guido retreats with elegant diffidence to a handsome hotel to take meetings with producers and interested parties: weird, almost hallucinatory exchanges that look more like the encounters from Last Year at Marienbad or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They must discuss his latest unnamed project – which appears to be an indulgent autobiographical reworking of his own life that includes versions of his wife, mistress, and various other women, but also needing a scene with a full-scale spaceship that has, staggeringly, been built on location. Everyone wants a piece of Guido, everyone makes demands, especially clamorous journalists. (“Are you for or against eroticism? Are you afraid of the atomic bomb? Do you believe in God?”) It exerts an irresistible pull.
