This portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man is the most brilliant, varied and entertaining movie I’ve seen since Citizen Kane. I saw it twice in as many weeks, and the second time I discovered many points that had escaped me in the first viewing, so headlong is its tempo, so fertile its invention... Is there not something Shakespearean in this range of human experience expressed in every mode from high lyric to low comic, from the most formal rhetoric to the most personal impressionism?

Just as La Dolce Vita confirmed popular suspicions about the depravity of the rich and gifted, 8 1/2 confirms the popular view of the life of a successful genius. We see Guido’s conflicts between his love for his wife, his desire for his mistress, his ideal of innocence, and his dreams of a harem, and we are given to understand that he must come to grips with himself as a precondition to “creation.” The multi-ringed circus of 81/2 is such a luxuriously externalized version of an artist’s inner life that it’s more like the fantasy of someone who wishes that he were a movie director—someone who has soaked up those movie versions of an artist’s life, in which in the midst of a carnival or a ball the hero receives inspiration and dashes away to transmute life into art. It’s a deluxe glorification of creative crisis, visually arresting (the dark and light contrasts are extraordinary, magical) but in some essential way conventional-minded.

Even more than La Dolce Vita, 8½ is a clear demonstration of how Fellini became Italy’s national director and its ambassador to the world – the ambassador who never left home. The totality of his films is more than the sum of its parts, but all his films are contained, at some degree of compression, in 8½:they all lead up to it or lead on from it. Rich even by his standards, his supreme masterpiece first conveys its wealth through its sumptuous visual texture. Since Nights of Cabiria, for which the designer Piero Gherardi joined his entourage, Fellini had already put more of his country’s visual excitement into his movies than any other director except perhaps Kurosawa. In 8½, with Di Venanzo lighting Gheradi’s sets, Fellini excelled even his own previous efforts at pulling his tumultuous homeland into shape.