8½

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s marks the moment when the director’s always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly among flashbacks, dream sequences, and carnivalesque reality, and turning one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life, as he struggles against creative block and helplessly juggles the women in his life—including Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale. An early working title for was The Beautiful Confusion, and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act.

Film Info

  • Italy, France
  • 1963
  • 138 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.85:1
  • English, French, Italian, German
  • Spine #140

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • High-definition digital transfer of restored film elements, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Introduction by filmmaker Terry Gilliam
  • Audio commentary featuring film critic and Fellini friend Gideon Bachmann and NYU film professor Antonio Monda
  • High-definition digital transfer of a new restoration of Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, a 52-minute film by Federico Fellini
  • The Last Sequence, a new 52-minute documentary on Fellini’s lost alternate ending for
  • Nino Rota: Between Cinema and Concert, a compelling 48-minute documentary about Fellini’s longtime composer
  • Interviews with actress Sandra Milo, director Lina Wertmüller, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro
  • Rare photographs from Bachmann’s collection
  • Gallery of behind-the-scenes and production photos
  • U.S. theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: Writings by Fellini and essays by critics Tullio Kezich and Alexander Sesonske

Cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Essential Fellini

Essential Fellini

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • High-definition digital transfer of restored film elements, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Introduction by filmmaker Terry Gilliam
  • Audio commentary featuring film critic and Fellini friend Gideon Bachmann and NYU film professor Antonio Monda
  • High-definition digital transfer of a new restoration of Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, a 52-minute film by Federico Fellini
  • The Last Sequence, a new 52-minute documentary on Fellini’s lost alternate ending for
  • Nino Rota: Between Cinema and Concert, a compelling 48-minute documentary about Fellini’s longtime composer
  • Interviews with actress Sandra Milo, director Lina Wertmüller, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro
  • Rare photographs from Bachmann’s collection
  • Gallery of behind-the-scenes and production photos
  • U.S. theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: Writings by Fellini and essays by critics Tullio Kezich and Alexander Sesonske

Cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

8½
Cast
Marcello Mastroianni
Guido Anselmi
Bruno Agostini
Bruno Agostini
Sandra Milo
Carla
Anouk Aimée
Luisa Anselmi
Barbara Steele
Gloria Morin
Caterina Boratto
The Beautiful Woman
Claudia Cardinale
Claudia
Credits
Producer
Angelo Rizzoli Jr.
Cinematography
Gianni Di Venanzo
Screenplay
Ennio Flaiano
Screenplay
Federico Fellini
Screenplay
Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay
Brunello Rondi
Music
Nino Rota
Director
Federico Fellini
Production design
Piero Gherardi
Editing
Leo Catozzo
Sound
Alberto Bartolomei
Sound
Mario Faraoni

Current

8         ½: When “He” Became “I”
8 ½: When “He” Became “I”
Until the time when he was consecrated as a great director, Fellini didn’t have an easy relationship with writers, his contemporaries who used to gather in the evening in Via Veneto’s many cafés. In those circles, the filmmaker was merely tolera…

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8½: A Film with Itself as Its Subject
8½: A Film with Itself as Its Subject
8½: a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film, which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8½ surely goes beyond any predecessor in hav…

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Explore

Federico Fellini

Writer, Director

Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini

One of Italy’s great modern directors, Federico Fellini was a larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique. While his most popular—and accessible—film, the darkly nostalgic childhood memoir Amarcord, is a great entryway into his oeuvre, , a collage of memories, dreams, and fantasies about a director’s artistic crisis, is perhaps his masterpiece. In his early career, Fellini was both a screenwriter for neorealist pioneer Roberto Rossellini and a newspaper caricaturist in postwar Rome, competing influences he would bring together with startling results. After such early works as I vitelloni, Fellini broke away from neorealism’s political strictures with the beloved La strada, and from there boldly explored his obsessions with the circus, societal decadence, spiritual redemption, and, most controversially, women, in such films as Nights of Cabiria, Juliet of the Spirits, and And the Ship Sails On.