Dillinger Is Dead (Italian: Dillinger è morto) is a 1969 Italian drama directed by Marco Ferreri. It stars Michel Piccoli, Anita Pallenberg and Annie Girardot. The story is a darkly satiric blend of fantasy and reality. It follows a bored, alienated man over the course of one night in his home. The title comes from a newspaper headline featured in the film which proclaims the death of the real life American gangster John Dillinger.
The film proved controversial on its initial release for its subject matter and violence but is now generally regarded as Ferreri’s masterpiece. It was acclaimed by the influential French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma and afterwards Ferreri worked and lived in Paris for many years. Since the mid-1980s the film has been screened only very rarely.
Glauco, a middle-aged industrial designer of gas masks, is growing tired of his occupation. Having discussed alienation with a colleague at the factory, he returns home. His wife is in bed with a headache but has left him dinner, which has become cold. He is dissatisfied with the food and begins preparing himself a gourmet meal.
While collecting ingredients he discovers an old revolver wrapped in a 1934 newspaper with the headline “Dillinger is dead” and an account of the famous American gangster’s death. Glauco cleans and restores the gun while continuing to cook his dinner, then paints it red with white polka dots.
He also eats his meal, watches some television and projected home movies, listens to music and seduces their maid. With the gun he enacts suicide a number of times. At dawn he shoots his wife thrice in the head as she sleeps. Then he drives to the seaside where he gets a job as a chef on a yacht bound for Tahiti.
Themes
The film, and especially its surreal finale in which the character Glauco leaves home and finds a job on a yacht, has been interpreted variously. Author Fabio Vighi approached it from a psychoanalytical standpoint, suggesting the uxoricide is an attempt to “kill” something inside himself. Glauco repeatedly stages his own suicide throughout the film. The final murder, then, is a means to escape his life by eliminating the primary link to his bourgeois lifestyle, which he would otherwise be unable to leave.[1]
Writer Mira Liehm posits director Marco Ferreri followed in the style of the Theatre of the Absurd and did not apply psychology or logic to his characters but then placed his absurdist creations in a real world context. The home with its many luxuries, such as the gourmet dining and film projector, as well as the cleaning and decoration of the gun, are meaningless diversions which trap Glauco in a metaphorical prison and suffocate him. His isolation leads to death or an “illusionary escape.”[2] As Italian film historian Paolo Bertetto explained, “The escape to Tahiti means a total closure of all horizons, the paralysis of all possibilities; we are brought down to zero, stripped of all perspectives, and restored to the original nothingness.”[2]
Cast
Michel Piccoli as Glauco: a middle-age designer of protective masks which allow people to breathe under inhospitable conditions. Isolated, ennuyed and insomniac, he searches his house for diversion. Piccoli viewed the role as that of an “eternal child or this childlike rebirth of ‘mature’ man, between despair, suicide, simple insomnia, dream.”[3]
Ferreri had Piccoli read a few pages from Dillinger Is Dead and hired him immediately. Piccoli has said Ferreri did not direct his performance and only gave simple blocking instructions. He played the character as solitary and volatile, comparing it to his role in Agnès Varda‘s The Creatures (1966).
Release and reception
The film was entered into the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.[4]Dillinger Is Dead was the subject of controversy on its release for its violence and depiction of the parvenu set.[3] Critics have also called it director Marco Ferreri’s masterpiece.[2]
The influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma praised the film, interviewed the director and translated two of his previous interviews from the Italian magazine Cinema & Film. The acclaim opened the resources of Paris to Ferreri and he spent much of the next 15 years living there.
During that time he made his internationally best known films, including The Last Woman (1976) and Bye Bye Monkey (1978). Ferreri and Michel Piccoli became fast friends and worked together subsequently on films such as The Last Woman and La Grande Bouffe (1973).[5]
My Life to Live (French: Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux; To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes) is a 1962 French drama film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It was released as My Life to Live in North America and as It’s My Life in United Kingdom. The DVD releases use the original French title.
Nana (Anna Karina), a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties, leaves her husband and infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitute.
Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and Nana is killed in a gun battle. Nana’s short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written intertitle.
The film was shot over the course of four weeks for $40,000.[1][2]
Style
In Vivre sa vie, Godard borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma vérité approach to documentary film-making that was then becoming fashionable.
However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films.[citation needed] The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Influences
One of the film’s original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution, Où en est la prostitution by Marcel Sacotte, an examining magistrate.
Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma (the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht and his theory of ‘epic theatre‘.
Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitles appear before the film’s ‘chapters’ explaining what will happen next; jump cuts disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over; and so on.
Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard’s former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard’s personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.[citation needed]
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard’s Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana.
It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat, who is performing his own hit tune “Ma Môme” on the track that he has just selected.
Nana’s bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks in the 1928 film Pandora’s Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
The film was remade as She Lives Her Life in 2014 by director Mark Thimijan.
Reception
The film was the fourth most popular movie at the French box office in its year of release.[1]
Critical response
Vivre sa Vie enjoys an extremely positive critical reputation. Author and cultural critic Susan Sontag described it as “a perfect film” and “one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of.”[4] According to critic Roger Ebert in his essay on the film in the book The Great Movies, “The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt.”[5]
References
^ Jump up to:abcArcher, Eugene (27 Sep 1964). “France’s Far Out Filmmaker”. New York Times. p. X11.
A French production, the dialogue is mostly in French and German, with a few English language sequences. The most expensive European film produced up to its time, Lola Montès flopped at the box office.
It had an important artistic influence, however, on the French New Wave cinema movement and continues to have many distinguished critical admirers. Heavily re-edited (multiple times) and shortened after its initial release for commercial reasons, it has been twice restored (1968, 2008). It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in North America by The Criterion Collection in February 2010.
In the mid-19th-century, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) is a famous, past-her-prime dancer and courtesan who has led an eventful and highly scandalous life. (She supposedly holds a world record for number of lovers.)
She is now reduced to performing in a New Orleans circus, where an impresario/ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) has both befriended and exploited her by making her the central attraction. In the course of a single circus performance — which dramatically reenacts Lola’s life and career — flashbacks reveal, first, her affair with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg); second, her unhappy youth and marriage to her own mother’s boyfriend, Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny); and then her scandalous public breakup with conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau).
Along the way, her career as a dancer and “actress” has its ups and downs and she initially rejects the career advances of a younger version of Ustinov’s impresario. In a longer flashback, constituting most of the second half of the film, her career as courtesan reaches a peak: her affair with the Bavarian King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook), which incenses his subjects and leads to his eventual downfall in the March Revolution of 1848. In a final circus sequence, Lola — a “fallen woman” — ascends to the apex of the big top tent for a symbolic, death-defying plunge. She is last seen allowing herself to be touched, or kissed, by a very long queue of male, fee-paying circus patrons.
This would be the last film directed by Ophüls before his death of a heart attack in March 1957. As originally shown in France in 1955, the audience sees the events of Lola Montès’ life through the use of flashbacks. Use of the technique was criticized upon its release and the movie did poorly at the box office. In response, the producers re-cut the film and shortened it in favor of a more chronological storyline, against the director’s wishes.
According to Roger Ebert, a “savagely butchered version was in circulation for a few years” following Ophuls’ death.[1] The film critic Andrew Sarris and others eventually showed improved versions, progressively closer to the original, at the New York Film Festival in 1963 and 1968.
Restoration
Certain elements remained missing and believed lost, but the recent discovery and restoration efforts by Technicolor artists of the lost footage allowed a new version to be edited according to Ophul’s original intentions. The color version of the film with missing footage was digitally restored by a small team of restoration artists including John Healy at Technicolor under the direction of Tom Burton.
The black and white version of the film was repaired by Martina Müller and Werner Dütsch.[2] The color version including lost footage was shown at the New York Film Festival according to the director’s edit version on Sept. 26 – Oct. 12, 2008.[3]
Lola Montès was re-released by Rialto Pictures in November 2008 with the full Cinemascope aspect ratio restored and with five minutes of additional footage never before shown in any U.S. release.
Roger Ebert lauded the film’s camerawork and set design, but felt that Carol’s “wooden [and] shallow” performance as the titular character prevented the film from achieving greatness.[1] Nonetheless, it is today among Ophüls’ revered works.[5]Dave Kehr called it a masterpiece, and wrote that “certainly this story of a courtesan’s life is among the most emotionally plangent, visually ravishing works the cinema has to offer.”[6]
Its title refers to it being Fellini’s eighth and a half film as a director. His previous directorial work consisted of six features, two short segments, and a collaboration with another director, Alberto Lattuada, the latter three treated as “half” films.[3] The plot concerns a director (played by Marcello Mastroianni) who suffers from stifled creativity as he attempts to direct an epic science fiction film.
Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), a famous Italian film director, is suffering from “director’s block“. Stalled on his new science fiction film that includes thinly veiled autobiographical references, he has lost interest amid artistic and marital difficulties.
While attempting to recover from his anxieties at a luxurious spa, Guido hires a well-known critic (Jean Rougeul) to review his ideas for his film, but the critic blasts them as weak, intellectually spineless, and confusing. Meanwhile, Guido has recurring visions of an Ideal Woman (Claudia Cardinale), which he sees as key to his story. His vivacious mistress Carla (Sandra Milo) comes from Rome to visit him, but Guido puts her in a separate hotel and mostly ignores her.
The film production crew relocates to Guido’s hotel in an attempt to get him to work on the movie, but he evades his staff, ignores journalists, and refuses to make decisions, not even telling actors their roles. As the pressure mounts to begin filming, Guido retreats into childhood memories: spending the night at his grandmother’s villa, dancing with a prostitute (Eddra Gale) on the beach as a schoolboy, and being punished by his strict Catholic school as a result. The film critic claims that these memories are too sentimental and ambiguous to be used in Guido’s movie.
Granted the rare opportunity to have a personal audience with a Cardinal in a steam bath (a scene which Guido plans to replicate in his movie), Guido admits that he isn’t happy. The Cardinal responds with quotes from the catechism and offers little insight into his condition.
Guido invites his estranged wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée) and her friends to join him. They dance, suggesting that the couple still has a chance to reconcile, but Guido abandons her for his production crew. The crew tours the steel infrastructure of a life-sized rocket ship set built on the beach, and Guido confesses to his wife’s best friend Rosella (Rossella Falk) that he wanted to make a movie that was pure and honest, but he is struggling with something honest to say.
Carla surprises Guido, Luisa, and Rosella outside the hotel, and Guido claims that he and Carla ended their affair years ago. Luisa and Rosella call him on the lie, and Guido slips into a fantasy world where he lords over a harem of women from his life. They bathe him (like at his grandmother’s villa) and spray him with powder, but a rejected showgirl starts a rebellion. The fantasy women attack Guido with harsh truths about himself and his sex life, and Guido literally whips them back into shape.
Fed up with delays, the producer (Guido Alberti) forces Guido to review his many screen tests, but Guido still won’t make any decisions. The screen tests are for roles portrayed earlier in 8½, such as Carla, the prostitute, the Cardinal, etc. When Luisa sees how bitterly Guido chooses to represent her in the movie, she flees the theater, declaring that their marriage is over since Guido is unable to deal with the truth.
But Guido’s Ideal Woman arrives in the form of an actress named Claudia. Guido takes her to visit a proposed set, explaining that his movie is about a burned-out man who finds salvation in this Ideal Woman. Claudia listens intently, but concludes that the protagonist is unsympathetic because he is incapable of love.
Broken, Guido calls off the film, but the producer and the film’s staff announce a massive press conference at the rocket ship set. Guido attempts to escape from the frenzied journalists, and when pressed for a statement, he instead crawls under a table and shoots himself in the head.
The crew begins to disassemble the rocket ship, since the film is canceled. The critic praises Guido for making a wise decision, and Guido has a revelation— he was attempting to solve his personal confusion by creating a film to help others, when instead he needs to accept his life for what it is. He asks Luisa for her assistance in doing so, and she says she’ll try.
A group of musical clowns, led by a young Guido, transform the rocket ship set into a circus, leading the men and women of Guido’s life down the steps of the set. Shouting through a megaphone, Guido directs them into a circus ring, and Carla tells him that she figured out what he was trying to say— that Guido can’t do without the people in his life. The men and women hold hands and run around the circle, Guido and Luisa joining them last.
In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: “Well then – a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It’s a warning bell: something is blocking up his system.”[8] Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist’s profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy “looking for the film”[9] in the hope of resolving his confusion. Flaiano suggested La bella confusione (literally The Beautiful Confusion) as the movie’s title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on 8½, a self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively)[10] to the number of films he had directed up to that time.
Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographerGianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn’t decide what his character did for a living.[11] The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had “lost his film” and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of 8½, Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he “felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make”.[12]
When shooting began on 9 May 1962, Eugene Walter recalled Fellini taking “a little piece of brown paper tape” and sticking it near the viewfinder of the camera. Written on it was Ricordati che è un film comico (“Remember that this is a comic film”).[13] Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director’s American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels “on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional – the realm of fantasy”.[14]
8½ was filmed in the spherical cinematographic process, using 35-millimeter film, and exhibited with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. As with most Italian films of this period, the sound was entirely dubbed in afterwards; following a technique dear to Fellini, many lines of the dialogue were written only during post production, while the actors on the set mouthed random lines. Otto e mezzo marks the first time that actress Claudia Cardinale was allowed to dub her own dialogue; previously her voice was thought to be too throaty and, coupled with her Tunisian accent, was considered undesirable.[15]
In September 1962, Fellini shot the end of the film as initially written: Guido and his wife sit together in the restaurant car of a train bound for Rome. Lost in thought, Guido looks up to see all the characters of his film smiling ambiguously at him as the train enters a tunnel. Fellini then shot an alternative ending set around the spaceship on the beach at dusk but with the intention of using the scenes as a trailer for promotional purposes only. In the documentary Fellini: I’m a Born Liar, co-scriptwriter Tullio Pinelli explains how he warned Fellini to abandon the train sequence with its implicit theme of suicide for an upbeat ending.[16] Fellini accepted the advice, using the alternate beach sequence as a more harmonious and exuberant finale.[17]
After shooting wrapped on 14 October, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro’s cinema.[18]
Reception
First released in Italy on 14 February 1963, Otto e mezzo received virtually unanimous acclaim, with reviewers hailing Fellini as “a genius possessed of a magic touch, a prodigious style”.[19] Italian novelist and critic Alberto Moravia described the film’s protagonist, Guido Anselmi, as “obsessed by eroticism, a sadist, a masochist, a self-mythologizer, an adulterer, a clown, a liar and a cheat. He’s afraid of life and wants to return to his mother’s womb…. In some respects he resembles Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce‘s Ulysses, and we have the impression that Fellini has read and contemplated this book. The film is introverted, a sort of private monologue interspersed with glimpses of reality…. Fellini’s dreams are always surprising and, in a figurative sense, original, but his memories are pervaded by a deeper, more delicate sentiment. This is why the two episodes concerning the hero’s childhood at the old country house in Romagna and his meeting with the woman on the beach in Rimini are the best of the film, and among the best of all Fellini’s works to date”.[20]
Reviewing for Corriere della Sera, Giovanni Grazzini underlined that “the beauty of the film lies in its ‘confusion’… a mixture of error and truth, reality and dream, stylistic and human values, and in the complete harmony between Fellini’s cinematographic language and Guido’s rambling imagination. It is impossible to distinguish Fellini from his fictional director and so Fellini’s faults coincide with Guido’s spiritual doubts. The osmosis between art and life is amazing. It will be difficult to repeat this achievement.[21] Fellini’s genius shines in everything here, as it has rarely shone in the movies.
There isn’t a set, a character or a situation that doesn’t have a precise meaning on the great stage that is 8½“.[22] Mario Verdone of Bianco e Nero insisted the film was “like a brilliant improvisation…. The film became the most difficult feat the director ever tried to pull off. It is like a series of acrobats [sic] that a tightrope walker tries to execute high above the crowd,… always on the verge of falling and being smashed on the ground. But at just the right moment, the acrobat knows how to perform the right somersault: with a push he straightens up, saves himself and wins”.[23]
8½ screened at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival in April to “almost universal acclaim”[24] and was Italy’s official entry in the later 3rd Moscow International Film Festival where it won the Grand Prize. French film director François Truffaut wrote: “Fellini’s film is complete, simple, beautiful, honest, like the one Guido wants to make in 8½“.[25]Premier Plan critics André Bouissy and Raymond Borde argued that the film “has the importance, magnitude, and technical mastery of Citizen Kane.
It has aged twenty years of the avant-garde in one fell swoop because it both integrates and surpasses all the discoveries of experimental cinema”.[26] Pierre Kast of Les Cahiers du Cinéma explained that “my admiration for Fellini is not without limits. For instance, I did not enjoy La strada but I did I vitelloni. But I think we must all admit that 8½, leaving aside for the moment all prejudice and reserve, is prodigious. Fantastic liberality, a total absence of precaution and hypocrisy, absolute dispassionate sincerity, artistic and financial courage these are the characteristics of this incredible undertaking”.[27]
Released in the United States on 25 June 1963 by Joseph E. Levine, who had bought the rights sight unseen, the film was screened at the Festival Theatre in New York City in the presence of Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni. The acclaim was unanimous with the exception of reviews by Judith Crist, Pauline Kael, and John Simon. Crist “didn’t think the film touched the heart or moved the spirit”.[24]
Kael derided the film as a “structural disaster” while Simon considered it “a disheartening fiasco”.[28][29]Newsweek defended the film as “beyond doubt, a work of art of the first magnitude”.[24]Bosley Crowther praised it in the New York Times as “a piece of entertainment that will really make you sit up straight and think, a movie endowed with the challenge of a fascinating intellectual game…. If Mr. Fellini has not produced another masterpiece –another all-powerful exposure of Italy’s ironic sweet life –he has made a stimulating contemplation of what might be called, with equal irony, a sweet guy”.[30]
Archer Winsten of The New York Post interpreted the film as “a kind of review and summary of Fellini’s picture-making” but doubted that it would appeal as directly to the American public as La Dolce Vita had three years earlier: “This is a subtler, more imaginative, less sensational piece of work. There will be more people here who consider it confused and confusing. And when they do understand what it is about –the simultaneous creation of a work of art, a philosophy of living together in happiness, and the imposition of each upon the other, they will not be as pleased as if they had attended the exposition of an international scandal”.[31] Audiences, however, loved it to such an extent that a company attempted to obtain the rights to mass-produce Guido Anselmi’s black director’s hat.[28]
Fellini biographer Hollis Alpert noted that in the months following its release, critical commentary on 8½ proliferated as the film “became an intellectual cud to chew on”.[32] Philosopher and social critic Dwight Macdonald, for example, insisted it was “the most brilliant, varied, and entertaining movie since Citizen Kane“.[32] In 1987, a group of thirty European intellectuals and filmmakers voted Otto e mezzo the most important European film ever made.[33]
In 1993, Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote that “despite the efforts of several other filmmakers to make their own versions of the same story, it remains the definitive film about director’s block”.[34] It came number two on the 1992 and 2002 Sight & Sound Director’s Poll beaten only by Citizen Kane. 8½ is a fixture on the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics’ and directors’ polls of the top ten films ever made. It ranked number two on the magazine’s 2002 Directors’ Top Ten Poll and number eight on the Critics’ Top Ten Poll[6] and stayed within the top ten, but slightly lower in the 2012 poll (number four on the 2012 directors’ poll[35] and ten on the 2012 critics’ poll).[36] Director Martin Scorsese also listed it as one of his favourite films of all time.[37]
Themes
8½ is about the struggles involved in the creative process, both technical and personal, and the problems artists face when expected to deliver something personal and profound with intense public scrutiny, on a constricted schedule, while simultaneously having to deal with their own personal relationships. It is, in a larger sense, about finding a sense of meaning in life despite its being difficult and fragmented. Like several Italian films of the period (most evident in the films of Fellini’s contemporary, Michelangelo Antonioni), 8½ also is about the alienating effects of modernization.[38]
Later in the year of the film’s 1963 release, a group of young Italian writers founded Gruppo ’63, a literary collective of the neoavanguardia composed of novelists, reviewers, critics, and poets inspired by 8½ and Umberto Eco‘s seminal essay, Opera aperta (Open Work).[42]
The 1993 music video for R.E.M.‘s song “Everybody Hurts” draws heavily from 8½‘s opening dream sequence, with the band stuck in a traffic jam. Subtitles of the thoughts of people trapped inside cars appear on screen until everyone abandons their vehicle to walk instead; then they vanish.
The European Network of Young Cinema NISI MASA was named after the phrase “Asa Nisi Masa” in 8½.
In 2010, the film was ranked #62 in Empire magazine’s “The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema”.[45]
At the Saint Vincent Film Festival, it was awarded Grand Prize over Luchino Visconti‘s Il gattopardo (The Leopard). The film screened in April at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival[47] to “almost universal acclaim but no prize was awarded because it was shown outside the competition. Cannes rules demanded exclusivity in competition entries, and 8½ was already earmarked as Italy’s official entry in the later Moscow festival”.[48] Presented on 18 July 1963 to an audience of 8,000 in the Kremlin‘s conference hall, 8½ won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 3rd Moscow International Film Festival[49] to acclaim that, according to Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich, worried the Soviet festival authorities: the applause was “a cry for freedom”.[28] Jury members included Stanley Kramer, Jean Marais, Satyajit Ray, and screenwriter Sergio Amidei.[50]
Jump up^Alberto Arbasino (1963), review of 8½ in Il Giorno, 6 March 1963: “The film is a step forward in the history of novelistic form. The block structure of La Dolce Vita already paved the way in both cinema and littérature. Otto et mezzo, however, not only outdistances by many years almost all films currently made but impacts our narrative at the most sensitive moment of the friction between convention and avant-garde, and may well provide a boost in the direction of the experimental, i.e. the future, as regards, among other things, the problems of being, of writing, and the relationship with reality.”
Jump up^Film scholar Charles Affron writes that “the status of 8½ as a ‘classic’ text can be recognized in the homage of its imitations and versions.” Cf. Affron, 5. Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella concurs: “As might be expected from the work’s important place in the history of the cinema, the criticism on 8½ is voluminous.” Cf. Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, 163
Jump up^8½, Criterion Collection DVD, featured commentary track.
Jump up^“The suicide theme is so overwhelming,” Pinelli told Fellini, “that you’ll crush your film.” Cited in Fellini: I’m a Born Liar (2002), directed by Damian Pettigrew.
Jump up^Alpert, 174-175, and Kezich, 245. The documentary L’Ultima sequenza (2003) also discusses the lost sequence.
Jump up^John Simon considered the film’s originality was compromised “because the ‘dance of life’ at the end was suggested by Bergman’s dance of death in The Seventh Seal (which Fellini had not seen)”. Quoted in Alpert, 181
Jump up^First published in the NYT, 26 June 1963. Fava and Vigano, 118
Jump up^First published in The New York Post, 26 June 1963. Fava and Vigano, 118.
Jump up^Gabriele Pedullà, Alberto Arbasino [2000] “Interviste –Sull’albero di ciliegie” (“On the Cherry Tree”) in CONTEMPORANEA Rivista di studi sulla letteratura e sulla comunicazione, Volume 1, 2003. Q: In some of your texts written during the 60s – I’m thinking above all of Certi romanzi – critical reflections on questions of the novel […] are always interlaced in both an implicit and explicit way with reflections on cinema. In particular, it seems to me that your affinity with Fellini is especially significant: for example, your review of Otto e mezzo in Il Giorno. A: Reading Musil, we discovered parallels and similar procedures. But without being able to establish, either then or today, how much there was of Flaiano and how much, on the other hand, was of [Fellini’s] own intuition.
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