But true of all great films, while you know for sure what you've seen after one viewing of a shallow one. Here is Stone on the complexity of '8 1/2': 'Almost no one knew for sure what they had seen after one viewing.' True enough. The printed word is ideal for ideas film is made for images, and images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly defined purposes. A filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art.
The critic Alan Stone, writing in the Boston Review, deplores Fellini's 'stylistic tendency to emphasize images over ideas.' I celebrate it. The earlier films, wonderful as they often are, have their Felliniesque charm weighted down by leftover obligations to neorealism.
What we think of as Felliniesque comes to full flower in 'La Dolce Vita' and '8 1/2.' His later films, except for 'Amarcord,' are not as good, and some are positively bad, but they are stamped with an unmistakable maker's mark. This conventional view is completely wrong.
