With La Dolce Vita, Fellini created a new, fantastical, personal, expressive style of film-making to succeed the fading neorealism that had dominated the Italian cinema since the second world war. With Otto e Mezzo, he went even further. He made the most avant-garde movie ever to become a major international success, a film where dream, nightmare, memory and reality intermingle in the story of Guido Anselmi (Fellini's handsome cinematic alter ego), a successful director suffering a serious crisis. Guido has embarked on an expensive production, a science-fiction film with an enormous set already built of a spaceship launch pad. Unfortunately, he's suffering from the equivalent of a writer's block. Surrounded by a variety of people dependent on him – a beautiful, resentful wife (Anouk Aimée), a demanding mistress (Sandra Milo), numerous actors, increasingly anxious producers – he has no idea how to complete his ambitious, determinedly honest picture. So he has sought refuge in a grand, old-fashioned spa.

Funny, moving, semi-autobiographical, it's a movie to be experienced, not understood, Fellini says. Alberto Moravia detected the influence of Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's A la recherche, neither of which Fellini had read, though he did acknowledge the influence of Jung. The film is superbly shot by Gianni di Venanzo (though the high-contrast black and white makes the subtitles difficult to read) and it brought Fellini the third of his four Oscars for best foreign language film. It convinced moviemakers the world over that the best subject for films is the director's own struggles.

The affirmative ending of 200 actors gathering to appear in a circus parade was shot with the intention that it would be the film's trailer. In the event, it replaced the original ending set in a luxurious dining car, which was thought overly pessimistic. This alternative end only exists now in the form of stills and is the chief feature of the documentary accompanying this 50th-anniversary Blu-ray disc.