Like Baroque art, of which it is a belated golden ray, "8 1/2" is complicated but not obscure. It is more Handel than Beethoven—objective and classical in spirit as against the romantic subjectivism we are accustomed to. It's all there, right on the surface, like a Veronese or a Tiepolo….

[In] "8 1/2" Fellini borrows from everybody, just like Shakespeare. Borrowing on this scale is creative: "8 1/2" is an epitome of the history of the art. His borrowings are also creative because they are returned with his fingerprints all over them. The childhood episodes are Bergmanesque chiaroscuro, as the great scene on the beach when La Saraghina dances for the schoolboys, which echoes, right down to the brutal beat of the music, an even greater beach scene, that between the soldiers and the clown's wife at the beginning of Naked Night: but this is a Latin Bergman, sensuous and dramatic and in...