Juliet of the Spirits

Federico Fellini's first feature in colour, Juliet of the Spirits (1965) is in some ways a female companion piece to 8½, trading that film's blocked director for a repressed housewife and her interior life. It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and remains one of Fellini's most visually extravagant works.

Giulietta Masina — Fellini's wife and the soul of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria — plays Giulietta, whose suspicion of her husband's affair unleashes a flood of hallucinations, childhood memories and grotesque apparitions. Fellini, working with designer Piero Gherardi, fills the screen with riotous colour, fantastical costumes and a carnival of spirits, blurring reality and reverie until the distinction ceases to matter. It is a film conceived as a psychic landscape.

Critical opinion was divided — some found it overstuffed where 8½ had been controlled — but its imagery has proved indelible, and its dreamlike treatment of a woman's inner emancipation has drawn fresh appreciation over time. As a showcase for Masina's expressive gifts and for Fellini's first plunge into colour, it is essential to understanding both. Lavish, strange and generous, Juliet of the Spirits is the maestro turning his fantastical eye inward, on behalf of his greatest muse. Restored to its full chromatic splendour, it has been reassessed as one of Fellini's boldest experiments and a showcase for the incomparable Masina.