Fellini's 8 1/2 [DVD] [2008]

Guido is trapped. Everyone expects his next film to be even greater than his last, but the director is experiencing a crisis of creativity. This is writer's block, delivered to the big screen in black and white, the blank page filled with the moving images of angst. An intensely personal experience, the director's pain is ruthlessly exposed to public view.

"8½" explores creativity and its interplay with dream, memory, consciousness, and the magical, unconscious process by which ideas germinate and flower. The film drifts harvests allusions to earlier Fellini works - characters and settings reappear or are caricatured, making ironic reference to their earlier successes. (The film opens with Guido trapped in a traffic jam, escaping to float away above the scene like the opening shot of Christ flying over Rome in 'La Dolce Vita'.)

Guido is haunted by his previous experiences - the women who have filled his life and the ghosts of his earlier creations. Fellini explores the workings of the human mind. We all try to make sense of our thoughts, to create a logical narrative which will order our lives and give it recognisable shape. In our mind, life follows a straightforward narrative, a chronological path - it has pattern, it has direction, it has coherence.

But life isn't really like that. Fellini repeatedly presents us with images of roads, queues, corridors, life moving along predictable straight lines. But, though film passes in a straight line through the projector, image after image, one frame at a time, it is not bound by its two dimensional format. The film maker can jump from time to time, place to place, creating disorder and surreal juxtapositioning of the narrative.

Life, too, can be random, disorganised, chaotic. Our experiences are mediated by our memories and thoughts; we impose a logical order on life, rather than experience it. Life is a constant menu of choice as we struggle to make sense of the unpredictable and fit it within the logic of our own narrative architecture. If life is chaos, how can we understand creativity, how can we predict it, how can we tap into it with certainty?

Writer's block is not ultimately about a creative drought - it is about a sudden failure in self-confidence, a fear that your next idea won't work, that you will go to the well and find it dry. And Fellini's imagery in "8½" repeatedly returns to the spaceship he is building as the centrepiece of his latest film. Will it get off the ground, will it fly? Characters complain about the costs, predict that it won't work, echo the voices of criticism the creative artist hears whether awake or asleep.

"8½" is stream of consciousness, part personal nightmare, part nostalgia, part flashback, part an on-screen grappling to comprehend the place of vision in the face of self-doubt and disillusionment with the whole circus of celebrity. There are images of decay, of growing old, of loss of vitality. Here we have the director, a man who comments on life, who is constantly being asked his opinions about life and art, a man who watches and tries to understand ... but a man who is oppressed by his own celebrity, by his exposure to the observation of others, by their failure to understand that he simply wants some peace and quiet.

The theme constantly returns - experience triggers memories, memories define our interpretation of experience. Life is a narrative, but there can never be a satisfactory narrative explanation of life. The story is never scripted, it never follows a robust screenplay. The past we can order ... the future is beyond imagination ... but the present is a doorway in which we are trapped, never entirely sure how to proceed. It is a doorway which opens onto a vista of a decaying future, of time running out, of mortality. We live life in snapshots ... then have to try to make a feature film of it!

To some extent, this is pure self-indulgence. But life is self-indulgence. We make characters of the people we meet, we fit them into our own narrative of life. Here Fellini makes people out of the characters he has created, then reduces them to ephemera, to characters again, given fleeting moments on the stage. There is no democracy in our memories or in art - we are the dictator, and we can remember or forget people.

And Fellini throws all his characters and memories into the ring and watches them interact. Ultimately, "8½" is a joyous film, optimistically celebrating the human carnival and the creative process. It's a film which overflows with vigour, courage, and humour. An astonishingly wonderful film which you can watch again and again and still see aspects and details you missed before. Utterly stunning!