By Adam ScovellFeatures correspondent

Now 60 years old, the Italian director's fantastical masterpiece is still the essence of cool. But it's endured because of the heart beneath its stylish exterior, writes Adam Scovell.

What counts as "cool" exactly? It's not easy to pin down: as a notion, "coolness" is both frustratingly intangible and constantly in flux. In fashion, music and cinema, the genesis of "cool" feels heavily tied to the emergence of popular culture in the 20th Century – from the US jazz scene that first popularised the term, to the fashion world's post-war development of ready-to-wear clothing aimed at the newly emerging teenage market, as well as mass media such as pop music and cinema that became the dominant modes of creative expression in the same period.

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If there's any one element that defines "cool", it's perhaps a sense of calm confidence – a quality desirable enough to encourage emulation. This feels especially true in cinema, where films, filmmakers and performers labelled "cool" over the years are heavily copied. From the films of Jean-Luc Godard to classic Hollywood stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, "cool" in cinema has often been a mixture of fashion, flair and finesse. If considering what might constitute the ultimate example of cinematic "cool", however, then it's not a stretch of the imagination to believe it would look something like Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2 – all of which brings us to a film director and a magician.

In one particular scene in the film, filmmaker Guido and an illusionist are chatting on a terrace. "There are many tricks but part of it is real somehow," suggests the magician when discussing his art. He may as well be talking about the director's art too. Guido, played by the endlessly cool Marcello Mastroianni, is the protagonist in 8 1/2 and a fictional alter-ego for the Italian maestro. And, true to the magician's adage, 8 1/2 is both a film of fantastical trickery, and one that retains a beating heart beneath its stylish exterior. Turning 60 this week, it is still one of the coolest cinematic illusions of the 20th Century.

8 1/2 is a witty self-reference to Fellini's own career; the film being technically his eighth-and-a-half after seven features and two short segments for compilation films. The director is still arguably Italian cinema's most celebrated figure with a wealth of noteworthy films, from dramatic classics such as La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957) and La Dolce Vita (1960) to more surreal vehicles such as Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Roma (1972) and Amarcord (1973). "I always like to see life in a fantasy key," the director said in a 1963 interview with journalist Oriana Fallaci, summing up his creative vision.

With autobiographical intent, 8 1/2 follows Guido (Mastroianni), a film director in Rome who has hit a creative block on his latest project, a science-fiction film. He is surrounded by a flurry of hangers-on, critics, producers, performers and socialites, all clucking away while his marriage to Luisa (Anouk Aimée) falls apart. Close to calling off the film entirely, Guido slips between reality, fantasies and memories. The central conundrum he wrestles with is: would a more openly personal film be a catharsis for his creative block, or would such a project simply be seen as indulgent egotism?

At the same time, Guido embodies a calm cosmopolitanism with his made-to-measure Brioni suit, occasional cigarette and a nonchalant flitting between chattering people demanding things of him. Failing to make a film never seemed so cool.

A filmmakers' film-of-choice

"8 1/2 is the best film ever made about filmmaking," the late critic Roger Ebert firmly concluded in his review. Fellini's film unsurprisingly influenced a whole generation of filmmakers back in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to inspire: everyone from David Lynch to Guillermo del Toro has reflected his fantastical portrayal of film production. Among 8 1/2's most notable devotees is Monty Python member and director Terry Gilliam, known for similarly dreamlike classics such as Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

"8 1/2 is the essence of cinema," Gilliam suggested in an episode of BBC Arts series Close-Up (1995) when asked to choose a favourite moment in cinema. More than 25 years later, BBC Culture caught up with Gilliam to chat once again about Fellini's film. "He's very, very dear to me old Federico," the director enthuses. "I first saw 8 1/2 when it came out in the early 60s. I was in New York and at that point discovering European movies. My immediate reaction was that this was the clearest, most honest and truthful depiction of what it's like to direct a film, and I'd never directed a film at that point! But it proved to be true."

Gilliam recalls the shock of seeing Fellini's film: for him the "coolness" of it lay in its disposal of narrative in favour of mood and style. "For me and so many filmmakers," he suggests, "being introduced to European filmmaking was the great awaking. It didn't all have to be Doris Day and Rock Hudson doing things. You could fall into different worlds. I think that's why Fellini became cool. Hollywood at the time was churning out these very happy, safe, comfortable films and the Europeans were opening up all these nightmares and suddenly narrative was less important; it was more the mood and style, and they're really the heartland of cool!"

Professor Frank Burke of Queen's University, Canada, and editor of the recent volume A Companion to Federico Fellini (2020), discusses how the director inhabited the contradiction of embracing the spirit of the era while simultaneously critiquing it. "Fellini inserted himself in a quite timely fashion into the world of the 1960s," he tells BBC Culture. "La Dolce Vita had presciently taken on celebrity culture and the society of the spectacle, and 8 1/2 focused on a celebrity filmmaker and offered what was, for its time, over-the-top spectacle. Both the seeming celebration yet simultaneous critique of extreme subjectivity mirrored [the battle between] the emerging "do-your-own-thing" individualism of the 1960s, and its opposite: a left-wing assault on bourgeois individualism."

Critique aside, the film undoubtedly thrives off visual splendour and the alluring cinematography of Gianni Di Venanzo. It was the last film Fellini would shoot in black and white, and it is a creative choice that feels especially appropriate; the stark, highly contrasted visuals render everything with a stylish gleam, from the bonnets of cars to Guido's impossibly polished shoes. The social milieu the film is concerned with means that it naturally plays with glitterati daydreams of excess and consumption. Though he was skewering the vacuous nature of such a crowd, just as he had done in Le Dolce Vita, it still gives him an excuse to revel in a social group who had the best of everything; food, clothes, cars. It's the newly formed consumer society in all of its shining brilliance, even if that brilliance loses its ability to dazzle as Guido's creative block worsens.

"Everything happens in my film," suggests Guido. "I'm going to put everything in it." The ambitious fictional director ultimately fails, calling off his production, but Fellini certainly succeeded. Indeed, for all the film's obvious autobiographical bent, Fellini quickly became keen to distance himself from his alter-ego upon its release, remonstrating with interviewers. "But he's a failure that director," he fired back to Fallaci, "he's failing. Do I strike you as a failure, me?"

How it divided opinion   

This brazen satire didn't go down well with all reviewers. "8 1/2 suggests some of Fellini's problems as a director," wrote critic Pauline Kael, "but they are not so fantastic nor so psychoanalytic as the ones he parades." In other words, she suggests, the chief fantasy of the film is the presentation of the filmmaker and the battles he faces. To Fellini, he was offering a genuine depiction of the obstacles he felt he had to contend with in making his films. To his critics they were a diversion from what some saw as his true problem: his shift away from his more straightforward narrative work to the incredibly indulgent, surreal films of his later life.

Yet other critics, in fact the majority, fell head-over-heels for 8 1/2. "Discussion of the film widened and writings on it proliferated as the months went by," wrote Hollis Alpert in his book Fellini: A Life (1986), "And so it went, as the film became an intellectual cud to chew on." The irony being that in the film itself, these very chattering classes who were poring over 8 1/2 are portrayed near-demonically, as a kind of abstract swarm that pester Guido to the point of forcing him to slip into dreams and memories as an escape.

8 1/2 doesn't open in this media-saturated world but with a fantasy that is one of cinema's great dream sequences. Guido escapes a traffic jam in a tunnel, flying through the air before finding himself floating like a kite, dizzily looking down on a beach and seeing his foot tied to a piece of string. It was this dizzying slippage between dreams and reality that really inspired Gilliam in particular. "That beginning has affected so many different filmmakers who have tried to emulate it," he believes. "The traffic jam, the floating, and then there's a rope around your ankle and someone pulls you back down to Earth. I just thought that was the most sublime and beautiful way of describing the artistic experience. Reality and dreams blend together so it's hard to know which you're in. And they both inform each other in strange ways. He captures that better than anyone."

Fellini was more than a casual influence for Gilliam: he would go on to work with several of the director's collaborators, eventually resulting in meeting Fellini himself several times. "When we were making The Adventures of Baron Munchausen [1988]," he recalls, "that was my moment of being in Fellini territory as I was on his turf [in Rome] with his former designer, costume designer and cinematographer. When Jonathan Pryce and I were filming Brazil we first met Fellini on set – I'm not sure which film [of his] it was – and he was like a giant! Everything about him was big and intimidating and wonderful. And then a few years later when Dante [Ferretti] and I were looking for locations for Munchausen, Dante said 'Ahh Federico is in a little bar in down in this village, let's go and say hi to him!' So, we go and Mastroianni was there, too. This was in between films for Fellini: he wasn't this towering presence then, but much smaller. When directing a film, and having that whole world around you, you become gigantic. And when you haven't got a film, you become little again. That's what Fellini was like!"

However, Fellini's film doesn't simply portray the director in his moments of being the big man on set. Instead we have access to Guido's dreams, as he is revisited by his dead parents, has visions of memories from his school days, and even imagines a fantastical harem where all of his previous love affairs and sexual conquests reside and eventually rebel against him. He is shown to be a deeply flawed, even troubled person, lacking the confidence his crisp suit suggests. But it's a warm admission, with Fellini being refreshingly vulnerable in his openness.

In the end, the situating of a sincere, tender autobiography in such a cool, empty milieu raises questions as to what is real and what is fantasy. After all, two such differing worlds do not sit naturally together. "What I love about Fellini is that he was a liar," Gilliam said in his original Close-Up interview, discussing in particular the portrayal of filmmaking. "He's a constant liar. He twists and distorts the truth." He elaborates further on this point today. "Fellini was a great liar and yet his lies were very close to the truth," he adds, and in fact "a better truth than the facts!" His point being that filmmaking is such an absurd and surreal venture in the first place that it may as well be a strange dream.

Fellini's world is still an illusion. As with magic, the film is a stylish sleight-of-hand, but the human reaction it inspires is very real and potent. "He took me down these passages," Gilliam concludes "these ways of looking at the world and this is what I thought films were supposed to do, and many films just didn't. He broke every rule there was to break. All the things you're not supposed to do he did, and he made it all work!" Throwing away the cinematic rulebook was a radical but undeniably cool look.

But Fellini's film ultimately shows that what matters is the beating heart beneath the modish exterior – and it is perhaps its air of fallible humanity, alongside its distinctly timeless style, that means Fellini's film still feels cool today. If there was nothing beneath the sunglasses – Guido's being an iconic pair of Prada SPR 07F like any good European jetsetter – then 60 years on, the film would surely ring hollow. 8 1/2 is arguably as much a portrait about simply being alive as it is about creativity. Perhaps Fellini's final trick is portraying life as a kind of film of our own making, one we slip in and out of like a dream. And what illusion could really be cooler than that?

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