Fellini’s 8½

• Cert:
• Cat.no: NPD 1005
• Running time: 133 minutes
• Year: 1962
• Pressing: 2001
• Region(s): 2, PAL
• Chapters: 13 plus extras
• Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Mono)
• Languages: Italian
• Subtitles: English
• Widescreen: 1.85:1
• 16:9-Enhanced: No
• Macrovision: No
• Price: £19.99
• Extras: Gallery, Fellini Filmography
  

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  Director:

  Frederico Fellini

  (8½, And the Ship Sails On, City of Women, Ginger and Fred, Intervista, Juliet of th Spirits, La Dolce Vita, Roma, Satyricon, The Spirits of the Dead, The Voice of the Moon

Producer:

Screenplay:

Music:

Cast:

Guido Anselmi: Marcello Mastroianni
Claudia: Claudia Cardinale
Luisa Anselmi: Anouk Aimee
Carla: Sandra Milo
Rossella: Rossella Falk
Gloria Morin: Barbara Steele

Fellini’s 8½ was so-called because at the time he had made six solo films and three collaborations which count as a half each. It went on to be one of his most-acclaimed works, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1963.

The plot, such as it is, takes Fellini’s regular on-screen alter ego Marcello Mastroianni, as Guido, in a semi-autobiographical tale of a director who needs to follow-up a big hit, but what to do next? All he knows is that it’ll be filmed on the gigantic set of a rocket ship, but where’s the beef? Guido tries to make sense of it all while flitting between his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimee) and his mistress Carla (Sandra Milo).

I’m sure that cinema purists will say I’ve missed the point but this tale of self-indulgence really didn’t grab me at all, despite Fellini’s arty direction and was on the verge of putting me to sleep, but I refuse to give it the zero marks for conduct that it almost deserves because I reserve those only for Fellini’s Satyricon, a film billed in Keele’s Film Club booklet as something akin to Ai No Corrida (In The Realm of the Senses), but nothing could have been further from the truth. I sat through the entire two hours of that in case it picked up, or to find out what happened, but nothing did. Fellini took two hours of my life and I want them back.

I could not let that happen with 8½ in full, although I was curious to see at the start how the opener compared with that of Joel Schumacher‘s tale of urban disaster, Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas.

The film is presented in a non-anamorphic widescreen ratio of approx 1.85:1 although the Internet Movie Database claims an original ratio of 1.66:1. It’s a decent looking print in terms of the lack of artifacts, but the non-anamorphic nature of it lessens the impact of the black-and-white photography. The average bitrate is 4.26Mb/s, briefly peaking over 7Mb/s.

The mono soundtrack is functional, but nothing to get worked up about.

In the extras dept. comes a 12-picture Gallery and a summary of the man’s films under Fellini Filmography.

The disc contains a mere 13 chapters over the 133 minutes, the English subtitles are burnt into the print and the menus are static and silent.

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