Watch Fellini’s Academy Award winning 8 ½, staring one of Milos’s favorite actors, the sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni.  

Fresh off the international success of La Dolce Vita, master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work with 8 1/2. Marcello Mastroianni delivers a brilliant performance as Fellini’s alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality.  

FACETS Founder Milos Stehlik long admired Fellini’s films, but particularly enjoyed the artistry of Marcello Mastroianni’s cynical coolness. In the 1990s, FACETS Film Program Director Charles Coleman programmed a month-long retrospective of Mastroianni films, and Milos often selected some of his lesser-known works for FACETS Members Only screenings, like Elio Petri’s 1961 feature The Assassin. Writing about the time he met Mastroianni at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, Milos said: “Mastrioanni didn’t need to do much to act in films, because he had that indefinable quality of presence. That presence showed up on camera, and it certainly did in real life.”