It's a movie about the most glorious success that can only be brought around through complete failure. It's a film that never begins, and still has always been there.

It's a story of dream-logic, held together by different kinds of connections that transcend temporal sequence and causal relationships. 8 1/2, even in its purest state, does of course blow the traditional temporal narrative, with a defined beginning, middle and end and a causal relationship between its parts, to complete smithereens, and in the jumbled landscape that is left behind, nothing can ever be as it was before, as what we are left with is a completely new world, of new possibilities and new kinds of beauty. I hope Fellini, in his Heaven, forgives me for it, because it seems to me that I'm in a way just continuing what he began. Of course, that's how I watched 8 1/2 the first few times, but now it seems that I'm always chopping it up, skipping at will between my favorite sections, always moving around it and rearranging it in new and unexpected ways.

I've never had a compulsion to have to watch movies straight from beginning to end, without interruptions. I must admit that by now, its already from the outset discontinuous and jumbled content has been spread all over the place for me. Thanks to the wonders of DVDs and MPEG encoding, I can keep it one mouse-click away whenever I'm working on my computer. It's a movie about which everything seems to have been said, and yet, everything still remains to be said. I've seen it more times than I can count, and yet, it must always be seen again. Since then, I've always kept a copy of it within reach (even though I am one of those people who can usually never hang on to my possessions for any length of time), and it has lost none of its power to continually amaze me. For the next couple of hours, I certainly lost track of place and time, as I was hypnotized, mesmerized and amazed by the images on the screen. Surely, this was a strange anachrony? My friend calmly remarked: 'Time doesn't exist.' Heck, I won't pretend to know just what he meant by that, perhaps it wasn't as profound as it sounded. As the film started, a girl who was there, who happened to be a make-up artist and hairdresser by profession, remarked on the odd juxtaposition in the opening scenes of hair-styles and dresses from different eras, the 30's and the 60's. It was at the beginning of a now already long-since destroyed relationship. I remember it quite clearly: I went to see it with a small group of fellow students at a friend's house. Fellini's films is one of the main reasons I came to love movies in the first place.

8 1 2 federico fellini 1963 torrent