Introduction
Thank you, Brittany (Friesner).
It is a great pleasure to join you for this IU Cinema online screening of Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8½.
Since the time I became president of IU in 2007, the IU Cinema has gone from an aspiration to one of the finest university cinemas in the nation—not just in the opinion of those of us who have frequented it, but also in the opinion of such luminaries of the cinema as Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Werner Herzog, and many other award-winning actors and filmmakers who have visited it.
The Cinema celebrated its 10th anniversary last month, and in that time, it has presented nearly 3,000 public events, with more than 312,000 tickets issued and nearly 2,300 unique film titles screened. More than half of the cinema’s programming has been completely free of charge.
I want to extend my congratulations and most sincere thanks to all of the staff of the IU Cinema, past and present, who have helped to make it one of the cultural gems of the Bloomington campus. I had the pleasure of honoring the Cinema’s founding director, Jon Vickers, with the IU President’s Medal for Excellence last fall at a socially distanced screening of Cinema Paradiso at Indiana Memorial Stadium as he stepped down from his role as the cinema’s first director. Jon and the entire staff, including Brittany Friesner, who now serves as interim director, have done a superb job of developing the Cinema into one of the nation’s finest university cinemas, bringing highly innovative programming to the venue, and making it a warm and welcoming place where members of the Bloomington community can engage more deeply with film.
And while the cinema’s physical space has not been open for events and film screenings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cinema has been used as a classroom space—and the Cinema staff has worked extensively with IU Classroom Technology Services to ensure that the space is as effective as possible for use in course work. And during the pandemic, the Cinema has continued to offer a wide variety of engaging film experiences through virtual conversations with filmmakers and virtual screenings like the one you are joining us for tonight.
Celebrating Federico Fellini
January 20, 2020 was not only the 200th anniversary of the founding of Indiana University, but it also happened to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time—and one of my very favorite film directors—Federico Fellini.
In January of last year, the Cinema began screening films that were intended to be a celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth. Unfortunately, most of those screenings had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.
The dominant figure of the golden age of Italian cinema, Fellini’s films have been ranked on a number of lists of the greatest films of all time, and his work has been cited as an influence by countless filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and many others.
He received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film four times—more than any other director in history—and he received an honorary Academy Award in 1993 in recognition of his place as one of the cinema’s master storytellers.
Fellini was born on January 20, 1920, in Rimini, a small town in northern Italy on the Adriatic Coast. As a young man, he worked as a humor magazine columnist, a cartoonist, and a comedy writer for radio and film. By the mid-1940s, he was co-writing screenplays with director Roberto Rossellini, with whom he worked on the films Rome: Open City and Paisan, which were two of the foundational films in the Italian neorealism movement. This movement was characterized by stories set among the poor and the working class, small production budgets, the frequent use of non-professional actors, and films shot on location.
By the early 1950s, Fellini was making his own films, and he almost immediately began to turn away from realism, experimenting with non-linear storytelling and employing wildly imaginative images that often highlighted the conflict between the dream life and the sometimes-sordid reality of his characters.
So, tonight, I am very pleased to be here to say a few words about the first film that is part of this semester’s President’s Choice Series, which features three Fellini masterpieces, 8½.
Fellini's 8½
The film, which won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design, is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. Film critic Roger Ebert called it “the best film ever made about filmmaking.”1
The late Italian film scholar and IU Distinguished Professor, Peter Bondanella, who was an expert on Fellini’s work, and whose 2006 Distinguished Research Lecture on Fellini helped inspire the establishment of the IU Cinema, wrote: “For many audiences, critics, and film historians, 8½ remains the benchmark film by Fellini, the work that justifies his status as a master and continues to reward the spectator after numerous screenings. …The film,” Bondanella continued, “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 on the very nature of artistic creation in the cinema.”2
8½ was filmed in 1962 at Rome’s legendary Cinecittà Studios, as well as on location at various sites around Rome. It was Fellini’s follow-up to the enormously successful 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, which, helped make him an international sensation. At the time, Fellini had made, by his count, seven and a half films. Hence the title, 8½.
The film tells the story of Guido Anselmi, a director whose latest project, a lavish science fiction film, is collapsing around him as he struggles against a creative block and helplessly juggles his romantic relationships.
It features Marcello Mastroianni, one of biggest Italian film stars of all time, and a distinguished cast of international actors. It also features a score by Nino Rota, who composed the music for nearly all of Fellini’s films. It was also final film Fellini made in black and white. When filming began, Fellini reportedly taped a note to himself near the camera’s viewfinder that read “Remember that this is a comedy.”
Roger Ebert wrote that 8½ “does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn't know what he wants or how to achieve it,” Ebert continues, “and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.”
With that, I invite you to enjoy Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½.
Source Notes
1. Roger Ebert, “8½,” May 28, 2000, Web, Accessed February 2, 2021, URL: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-8-12--eight-and-a-half-1963.
2. Peter Bondanella, The Films of Federico Fellini, (Cambridge University Press, 2002,), 93.