Filming an autobiographical science fiction film, the director Guido Anselmi, runs dry on his creative juices. He is paralysed by an all-consuming, existential crisis, defining all of his relations—with his producer and collaborators, his mistress and his wife, the cardinal and the elegant clients of the spa in which he takes refuge. Memory and fantasy “set up” a wonderful carnival of oneiric forms of the unconscious, leading him to the dubious—to him—realisation, that the meaning of life is love… And the meaning of creation, simplicity and sociability. By incorporating a fluidity and virtuosity of narrative forms of the cinematic avant-garde and memories of the great novel—Musil, Joyce—Fellini, in his monumental self-referential masterpiece, achieves what his hero was unable to achieve: the most beautiful self-portrait, an artist could conceive on the nature of creative impasses’ and the “absolute” identification of the creator with his protagonist.