8½

Federico Fellini built the title as arithmetic: 7 features, plus the film co-directed with Alberto Lattuada and his segments in two portmanteau pictures, together counted as a half. He had decided to abandon the project before shooting began. In April 1962 he began a letter to his producer Rizzoli confessing he had lost his film, was interrupted by a machinist calling him to the launch party, and during the toasts worked out that he would narrate what was happening to him. He taped brown paper by the camera: Ricordati che è un film comico, remember that this is a comic film. The actors never saw a full script, only a sheet with the day’s lines; per Italian practice, music played on set and dialogue was fixed later in dubbing. An ending set in a train dining car was shot and dropped; nothing survives but stills. The Academy filed the picture as Federico Fellini’s 8-1/2. It won foreign language film and black-and-white costume design, and lost in directing, in story and screenplay written directly for the screen, and in black-and-white art direction. A good fit if you take a film failing to cohere as the event, and like hunting for Fellini inside Mastroianni’s Guido. Not for viewers who want telling up front how memory, daydream and present are ordered.