I really have nothing to contribute to the discourse about this film's greatness. Of the 7 and 1/2 leading up to you-know-what, I prefer Il Vitellone and Nights of Cabiria, but the ambition here is stunning. Life is an endless party, punctuated by meaning and beauty and tragedy, but sometimes it's best for Marcello to just keep going from one circle (I buy the Dante connection, and the other one at the end) to another in a garden of earthly delights. Marcello seems to feel everything and nothing, while Paparazzo just shoots with his camera so everything can be seen but not really felt.

Despite its greatness, I've never been able to make it through in one sitting, including the first time I saw when I didn't get it. This has moved to #1 on my list of movies I have to see somehow in a movie theater. It's so episodic that I've always been tempted to watch it in segments, and I always get distracted. David Lynch sorta famously insisted the DVD version of Mulholland Drive be released without chapters that we could skip to, and maybe that's what the experience of this movie needs as well. Because I, like Marcello, live it in bursts, and like Marcello, the connection between these bursts is elusive, while Fellini might allow the viewer to see the visual and thematic connections that elude me . . .

... till human voices wake us and we drown.