8 1/2 demonstrated how a film could be about a temperament: the events it dealt with were interior events, and its most important episodes happened outside time, in fantasy, dream and vision. In 8 1/2, Fellini renounced the political or social emphasis of neo-realism, and the new relation between the artist and the outer world that resulted has since become fundamental to much Italian cinema. Guido, groping blindly from within toward his millennial vision, is the blueprint for a new kind of film director, whose ideology originates not in any analysis of society, but in the artist's own constitution.

Everyone would perhaps agree that each one of us has a fundamental and recurrent 'pattern', to which his experience largely conforms. I take 8 1/2 to be the description of one such pattern, the mapping-out or 'anatomising' of a particular constitution. In every way, Guido's pattern defines the film; both its structure, since in the course of the film Guido works through one complete cycle of experience; and its subject, because Guido's predicament is shown to be caused by a conflict between his pattern and his conscious self.

8 1/2 is about an inner process which takes place in Guido on several levels, his reaching for artistic potency, for intellectual consistency and for spiritual purity. But Fellini shows Guido's development as occurring, not through his conscious will or intellect, but rather as springing directly from some interior bodily rhythm, to which Guido remains almost passive….

The riddling title, Fellini 8 1/2, goes far to clarify the film's problem; it points, beyond the opus number, to a fusion of the film's conflicting polarities, not only Life and Art, but physical and abstract, person and pattern—that is to the 'solution', the state of integration momentarily achieved at the end of the film.

Film is the ideal vehicle for the kind of experience Fellini wants to convey here—the sense that every event is subordinate to a prevailing inner rhythm…. [Watching] 8 1/2, one is peculiarly aware of film as a 'total art', harnessing enormous and diverse powers so as to bring the spectator into the fullest possible relation with the director's most personal experience. (p. 172)

Of all Fellini's films, 8 1/2 is the one in which the cathartic intention—the use of the 'white magic' of cinema to 'liberate the spectator'—is most explicit. (pp. 172-73)

Correspondingly, the language in 8 1/2 has an urgency unique in Fellini's work. In La Strada or La Dolce Vita the script, in Giulietta and his subsequent films the sets and costumes, have the central role, which here belongs to the exclusively cinematic means of sequential juxtaposition and rhythm…. The syntax of the film becomes the embodiment of Fellini's doctrine: that our experience is cyclic, that pleasure comes out of pain, true out of false, comedy out of tragedy.

The cyclic structure of Guido's experience is announced at the outset of 8 1/2, in the Crisis, Liberation and Fall, archetypally enacted in Guido's dream….

This pattern, of crisis, liberation and fall, is the key to Guido's behaviour. Just as the necessity of waiting on liberation forces on him his indecisive and conditional manner of action, so the mysteriousness and unreasonableness of his experience enforces his ambiguous ideological stance. He is caught in a machine, yet his moments of liberation seem evidence of a deus ex machina….

[The] pattern of 8 1/2 is that of melancholy; the ambiguous commerce between archetypal and real is typical of that state; and Fellini has himself described the mood of 8 1/2 as 'melancholy, almost funereal, but also resolutely comic.'… There is a 'double potentiality in melancholy, for Good or for Evil.'

Now it seems to me that this double potentiality provides the structure of 8 1/2: we are made to see Guido first as a sick man, then as a visionary artist. Guido's crisis, his inability to begin his film, results from his own interpretation of his experience as being fundamentally diseased, false: doubting its validity, he cannot express or reflect it in his art…. Fellini's theme can be summed up, that liberation consists in our acceptance of the interdependence of contrary states within our experience; only his failure to accept distinguishes the impotent from the creative individual.

First, as a sick man. Fellini makes us not only observe Guido's descent, but also participate in it. The pattern of crisis endlessly repeated soon becomes as alienating for the spectator as it is for Guido. And that initial ambiguity of dimension, of our entering in the middle of the traffic jam of Guido's dream, which we assumed to be reality, persists. (p. 173)

The white episodes continue to well up, like coherent messages from the unconscious, and with their slower rhythm and narrative unity, each offers a momentary respite against a present world where consciousness is staccato and fragmented. Each presents Guido with some variant of a visionary reality. (pp. 173-74)

Guido's film is an allegory of his own predicament. His wish to commit his will to the Church, or to his marriage, or to ideal love, is a wish to escape to so many 'new planets', to be liberated once and for all from the wheel of his temperament. This wish is what has defined him, and the making of the film itself is the last remaining hope of its fulfilment; so that his abandonment of it at the press conference really does constitute his personal extinction, the 'suicide' shown us.

Then, as visionary artist. For it is only here, when Guido, in losing each of his alternatives, has been stripped of his ego, that the real protagonist of the film, not the personality of Guido but the fatality of his temperament, is able to assert itself. These final minutes entirely alter our view of what has gone before. Unfurling out of Guido's extinction, the emergence of the vision unifies the film's interior oscillation into a single cathartic motion of crisis transformed to liberation. It is as though the movement of the whole film were to trace out this transformation as a kind of graphological curve; to define the rhythm by which sickness becomes vision….

The vision is an affirmation of the temperament, as a creative centre beyond the personality….

Once the vision has reaffirmed Guido's integrity, we see that his sliding from dimension to dimension may have been not evasion or confusion, but the necessary completion of a journey towards a view of life that must include several distinct worlds, a 'multiverse'….

At the beginning of 8 1/2, Guido has his seed, his idea of a film; but it is only when he has accepted its extinction that the flowering, the vision which is the true film he has to make, is able to appear. And in this affirmation Fellini's monumental fresco imagery at last finds a content fitting to its epic scale….

8 1/2 is pivotal in Fellini's work. What had remained implicit in the earlier films, a core of the personality, a certain rhythm of experience, here becomes explicit….

It is a reversal common to much Italian cinema, the transition from neo-realism to what might be called 'neo-symbolism'. The critic in 8 1/2 is the voice of neo-realism, who regards the subjectivity of Guido's script as evidence that 'Cinema is fifty years behind the other arts.' (p. 174)

What we have to accept meanwhile is the lack of any glimmer, in a work like Satyricon, of wholesome reality. It exists solely, as Fellini says, to 'realise his fantasy'; the inner world is presented not, as in 8 1/2, as part of a process, but as though it were sufficient in itself….

Yet while 8 1/2 defines the moment of perfect balance in Italian cinema, the subsequent descent into self, into archetypal realms, has resulted in a kind of profundity. The obvious parallel is with Mannerism; it arouses the same ambiguous responses, and it may, like Mannerism, become more fascinating to future generations, less starved of an art of above ground, and less nostalgic for the achievements of the High Renaissance of cinema that the years of 8 1/2 now seem to represent. (p. 175)

Timothy Hyman, "'8 1/2' as an Anatomy of Melancholy," in Sight and Sound (copyright © 1974 by The British Film Institute), Vol. 43, No. 3, Summer, 1974, pp. 172-75.