Fellini's 8½

In his book The Films of Federico Fellini, Peter Bondanella notes both the impact and the artistic and autobiographical nature of Fellini's 8½ (1963), by stating:

For many audiences, critics, and film historians, 8½ remains the benchmark film by Fellini, the work that justifies his statues as a master and continues to reward the spectator after numerous screenings... The films occupies an important role in the director's complete works, not only because of its obvious autobiographical links to Fellini's life but also because it focuses upon the very nature of artistic creation in the cinema.

It is true that whilst watching 8½ it is practically impossible for one not to notice the blatant parallels between our protagonist, Guido, and Fellini himself. Both are directors who are having difficulty expressing what they want to say - yet with 8½ Fellini somehow manages to say it all. Also, much like Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), a lot of Fellini's 8½ is to do with the "very nature of artistic creation in the cinema" Bondanella speaks of. Whilst in the later and more radical Persona Bergman attempts to deconstruct cinema completely - making the viewer constantly aware that what they are viewing is a fictional construct - Fellini focuses on the struggle of the director - mirroring himself - by presenting us with the story of a man who, like Fellini, does not to what to say and, in doing so, manages to create what is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece which is somewhat ironically all about making films.

In his book Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s, Peter Cowie observes that "8½ could not have existed prioer to the New Wave, but all too few New Wave films aspired to the same level of intellectual surmise as Fellini's masterpiece." The same could be said about Bergman's Persona; however, unlike Persona, Fellini's 8½ was made during the early, formative years of the New Wave. It is evident that whilst the emergence of the New Wave allowed him to create such a film as 8½, Fellini manages to outdo those films which influenced him, allowing him to create this masterpiece which has gone on to influence countless other auteur's films - including Bergman's Persona.