Its central character is Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), a film-maker based partly on Fellini.

Its title refers to the fact that, up to then, Fellini had made seven features and two episodes in composite films that added up to about a half. There's no doubt, though, that 8 1/2, made 12 years later, is his real masterpiece La Dolce Vita and Fellini's Satyricon his most spectacular epics, while Amarcord is the self-referential film that turns his most faithful supporters weak at the knees.Ĩ 1/2 is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there's a tough argument that belies Fellini's usual felicitous flaccidity. It's a marvellously sympathetic study of a travelling theatre group, which, perhaps because I was once an actor, seemed to me the best film about the theatre I'd ever seen. In fact, my favourite of his films has always been his first - Variety Lights, which he co-directed with Alberto Lattuada way back in 1950. But I have to confess that the longer he worked, the more I doubted Fellini. But there's a kind of critical resistance to his work that once caused him to write to me (I was then deputy film critic for the Guardian) to ask if there was anything I could do about the carping notices that invariably flowed from the pen of Richard Roud, my predecessor. And he seems to have a particular fascination for purely commercial directors - perhaps because his was the cinema of visually expressed emotions rather than intellectual rigour. After such early works as I vitelloni, Fellini broke away from neorealism’s political strictures with the beloved La strada, and from there boldly explored his obsessions with the circus, societal decadence, spiritual redemption, and, most controversially, women, in such films as Nights of Cabiria, Juliet of the Spirits, and And the Ship Sails On.At least half of all film-makers asked about the directors they most admire include Federico Fellini in their top three.

In his early career, Fellini was both a screenwriter for neorealist pioneer Roberto Rossellini and a newspaper caricaturist in postwar Rome, competing influences he would bring together with startling results. While his most popular-and accessible-film, the darkly nostalgic childhood memoir Amarcord, is a great entryway into his oeuvre, 8½, a collage of memories, dreams, and fantasies about a director’s artistic crisis, is perhaps his masterpiece. One of Italy’s great modern directors, Federico Fellini was a larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique.

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