![8½: A Film About Not Being Able To Make It](https://cdn.slatesource.com/6/7/8/6784a75a-2acc-485a-8df5-aa37996f750d.webp)

# 8½: A Film About Not Being Able To Make It

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/8-a-film-about-not-being-able-to-make-it)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/6/7/8/6784a75a-2acc-485a-8df5-aa37996f750d.webp)

## 8½ (1963)

Fellini could not think of what to shoot next, so he filmed a director who cannot think of what to shoot next.

Runtime

138 minutes

Director

Federico Fellini

Country

Italy

Award

National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Cinematography

Gianni Di Venanzo

## Block As Subject

Guido Anselmi is a celebrated director at a spa, hiding from a production he has already cast, built sets for and cannot begin because he has nothing to say. Fellini was in exactly that position after La Dolce Vita and resolved it by making the deadlock the film. The structure abandons chronology entirely: memories of childhood, fantasies of a harem containing every woman in his life, conversations with a wife who knows precisely what he is, and a producer's press conference staged as an execution. Nino Rota's score keeps a circus tempo running underneath, and the enormous rocket launch gantry standing unused on a beach is the plainest image of creative paralysis anyone has filmed.

> I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway.

journey·6 Scenes

# Watching 8½

Hope

/

Scene

The Traffic Jam

Suffocating

"Stuck in a car in a silent tunnel full of staring faces, a man floats out of the roof and is pulled down by a rope."

The title is a count of Fellini's own films: six features, two shorts and a co directed picture, which by his arithmetic made this number eight and a half.

The rocket gantry was built full size on a beach at Ostia and never used in the film within the film, which is the point. It cost a large part of the production's set budget.

Every subsequent film about the agony of making films is measured against this one: Day for Night, All That Jazz, Stardust Memories, Adaptation, Synecdoche New York. What separates it from its imitators is that it is not actually about self pity. Guido is charming, dishonest and entirely aware of it, and the film ends by forgiving him without pretending he has changed, which is a harder and more generous position than any of the films that followed managed.

[8½ on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056801/?utm_source=slatesource)