8 1/2
A successful film maker (Mastroianni) is committed to an ambitious new production but is bankrupt of ideas. Exhausted and hounded by his wife and mistress, but stimulated by a famous actress, he escapes into childhood memories and sexual fantasies. He finally realizes his own artistic future lies within his own experiences of life. This unique work, which received the first prize at the 1963 Moscow Festival, focuses on a "film maker who is trying to pull together the pieces of his life till now and make sense of them" (Fellini). However, Fellini ends by "portraying the many facets of a man's character at the age of 45" and creating in some ways a 20th-century version of The Inferno. Its theme does not relate only to the world of cinema, and its extremely elaborate story and style cannot be considered "jumbled" as some critics have claimed. Fellini himself considers that his film "can be described as something between a muddled visit to a psychiatrist and an examination of a disordered conscience with Limbo as the setting. It is a melancholy film, almost funereal, but emphatically comic.(Georges Sadoul) Italy, 1963. B&W, in Italian with English subtitles.188 mins., 35mm. Unrated.

8 1/2 Women
Peter Greenaway's "8½ Women" is a nod to Fellini - and that "half" turns out to be a typically dark Greenaway twist. Greenaway is the detached, pitiless intellectual whose magisterial experimental flourishes can be recondite in the extreme. This film, one of Greenaway's most amusing and accessible, actually arrives at moments of tenderness, even love, fleeting though they may be. "8½ Women" finds Greenaway in a contemplative mood, musing about the interplay of sex and love and mortality, and the bonds between father and son - within the context of mordant absurdist humor, to be sure. In jaunty, elliptical fashion Greenaway introduces Philip Emmenthal (John Standing), a Geneva-based financier and banker, in the midst of driving so hard a bargain in acquiring a Kyoto pachinko parlor for his business associate and architect son, Storey (Matthew Delamere), that he gets his nose bloodied. Storey has to return to Geneva when his mother dies. Philip is bereft, overcome with the loss of his wife, more a companion than a lover, and Storey suggests that to cheer himself up his father turn his immense period palace into a virtual harem. (Excerpt by Kevin Thomas, LA TIMES) Germany, 1999, color, English, 120 min, 35 mm, Rated R

42 Up
Perhaps the most remarkable documentary project ever undertaken, and certainly the longest, is Michael Apted's Up series, which he began shooting for the BBC in 1962. Seven Up was the first of the films, and is an examination of the lives of 14 British schoolchildren of various economic and racial backgrounds. It was followed seven years later by Seven Plus Seven, and has continued, every subsequent seven years, with another look at the same group of kids as they passed through school, marriages, childbirth, and grief. The films are all remarkable chronicles of change, both internal and external, and are, to some extent, about the lack of change as well. Apted has also provided a chronicle of the second half of the 20th century, particularly as applied to England. It's obvious that what he's after, as much as anything, is an analysis and indictment of the British class structure. This he does, with little effort and tremendous subtlety. It's particularly obvious in the sense that the class system, as it existed in the middle part of this century, is most effective in weeding out and preventing Britain's working class from ever allowing itself to rise in stature or achieve much in the way of comfort without working itself to the nub, and sometimes not even then. (Excerpt by Henry Cabot Beck, Film.com) England, 1998, Color, in English, 139 min., 35mm. Not Rated

1900 (Part I)
Bernardo Bertolluci, flush with box office success after the release of Last Tango in Paris, put his new earnings into this panoramic vision of Italian political, social and cultural history from the beginning of the century to the present. Events are filtered through the parallel and intersecting lives of a peasant (Gerard Depardieu) and a land-owner (Robert De Niro). Bertolucci indulges his love of spectacle, while trying, at the same time, to balance it with his ideological concerns. It's a film that turns away from the introspection of Bertolluci's previous films and aims, instead, for a popular movie of the class struggle using the style of both American epics and the lyrical Soviet cinema of the 1930's. It is operatic, didactic, bombastic, mean, moody and magnificent to look at - with the second part (being screened at this same time, next week) veering into hyper-Baroque terrain. Italy, 1976. Color, in English. 175 minutes, 35mm. Rated R.

1900 (Part II)
The second part to Bertolucci's epic continues tonight. According to Bertolucci, 1900 is a "recollection, a collage of my childhood, my friends, and of my father." While he came from a middle-class family, he spent much of his childhood with the peasants in the Parma countryside where he was born in 1941 - and many of these experiences directly informed 1900. The film is structured with the rhythm of the seasons; boyhood scenes are set in the warmth of summer, autumn and winter for the rise of Mussolini to power, and finally springtime for the resurgence of hope and freedom that followed the defeat of the fascists at the end of World War II. The last 30 minutes - symbolic of revolution and post-revolution - goes well beyond the bombastic, and into greatness. Italy, 1976. Color, in English. 165 minutes, 35mm. Rated R