What is the meaning of the title of Fellini's movie 8 1/2? Eight and a half !
Question: Or is it deliberately ambiguous?
Answers: Or is it deliberately ambiguous?
The title refers to the total number of films Fellini had previously directed: six films plus three collaborations (one of them, Boccaccio '70, counted as half a film as it was a short segment), making this production number 8?.
Its working title was La bella confusione (The Beautiful Confusion).
8? is highly autobiographical: Fellini made the film because he himself was suffering from a director's block; the character of Guido (played by Mastroianni, whom Fellini often used to mirror himself in his films) is a representation of himself and many of Guido's memories are based on Fellini's own.
It's the number of movies he had done up to that point, 6 features, 2 short films (1/2) each, and a movie he codirected so a 1/2 there. That's 7 1/2 so the new one was 8 1/2.