Part of Restoration Roundup
Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. An early working title for 8½ was “The Beautiful Confusion”, and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act.
This 35mm print was struck from the original camera negative at L’Immagine Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, and subtitled at TITRAFILM in Paris, one of the world’s few surviving 35mm subtitling facilities. The print was created entirely photochemically, with no intermediary digital source or restoration. Lasers were used to etch the subtitles directly into the film emulsion, the only subtitling method possible for photochemically-created prints.
Some of the laser-etched subtitles will occasionally be partly or completely washed out against white backgrounds, making portions of the text difficult to read. Some extended passages of dialogue are affected. “White on white,” unavoidable and common in 35mm prints, once plagued black & white foreign language films. The problem has largely disappeared since the rise of digital projection. Despite this issue, we feel this is an extremely rare opportunity to experience Fellini’s extraordinary imagery in a newly-struck first generation 35mm print.
“8 1/2 is the best film ever made about filmmaking…. I have seen 8 ½ over and over again, and my appreciation only deepens. It does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn’t know what he wants or how to achieve it, and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times “Simultaneously critical of its director’s self-importance and childishness and celebratory of the possibilities of the medium…. Rarely is a film about a man’s personal anxieties and vices this fun.” —Max O’Connell, IndieWire “No one should think when watching his movies that they’re learning the facts about Fellini…. He was never one to let the facts stand in the way of a good story. His films charm us with the invention of a life, the marvelous being made otherwise marvelous; not the small truths of anecdote, but the evocation of how it might have been.” —Michael Newton, Guardian
