For Fans of Federico Fellini

When Fellini ran out of ideas for his next film, he made a film about running out of ideas. Guido Anselmi, the blocked director at the center of 8½, is the most honest self-examination any major filmmaker has ever allowed himself. The fantasies of erotic power, the retreat into childhood, the inability to commit to anything: none of it is flattering, and all of it is filmed with a visual extravagance that constantly undercuts any simple reading. Bergman called it the greatest film ever made by another director. It is at minimum the film about making films that every other film about making films is measured against.

The three hours of La Dolce Vita move like a fever dream of postwar abundance: celebrities, socialites, journalists, a famous foreign actress, a father who visits and cannot stay. Marcello Rubini watches it all and participates and feels nothing. Fellini saw something in the Roman media circus of the late 1950s that he knew would only get louder. The film gave the world the word paparazzi. It gave cinema the image of a beautiful woman standing in a fountain at night, a moment so composed and so empty that it still stops people cold.

Amarcord (the title is Romagnolo dialect for 'I remember') is Fellini's most accessible film and possibly his warmest. It is not a story: it is a year in a provincial Italian town, assembled from scenes that feel less like plot than like the way a particular smell brings back an entire childhood. The Fascist rally that the town endures with a kind of sheepish compliance, the enormous ocean liner appearing out of the fog, the adolescent boys waiting for a woman who may or may not come: Fellini captures the absurdity of collective memory without cruelty.