‘8 1/2’

The movie medium is sometimes described as a ribbon of dreams, but there have been surprisingly few great dream sequences on film. There’s one in Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, with a boy imagining his mother and a dripping slab of beef; and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries opens with a chill, funereal passage. Fellini’s 8 1/2, which in a newly struck print continues at the Paris, has as its opening perhaps the greatest dream scene of all: Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido stifled in a silent traffic jam, onlookers gazing blankly at him as he rises through the sunroof of his car, high into the sky. The rest of the film isn’t too shabby, either.

‘8 1/2’