Judulnya merujuk kepada delapan setengah film Fellini sebagai sutradara. Karya penyutradaraan sebelumnya terdiri dari enam film fitur, dua segmen pendek, dan sebuah kolaborasi dengan sutradara lainnya, Alberto Lattuada, kolaborasi tersebut disebut sebagai "setengah" film.[3]
^"Top Rental Films of 1963", Variety, 8 Januari 1964 p 37
^"8½". BFI Film & Television Database. London: British Film Institute. Diarsipkan dari versi asli tanggal 2011-08-06. Diakses tanggal 27 Desember 2012.
^Alberto Arbasino (1963), review of 8½ in Il Giorno, 6 Maret 1963: "The film is a step forward in the history of novelistic form. The block structure of La Dolce Vita already paved the way in both cinema and littérature. Otto et mezzo, however, not only outdistances by many years almost all films currently made but impacts our narrative at the most sensitive moment of the friction between convention and avant-garde, and may well provide a boost in the direction of the experimental, i.e. the future, as regards, among other things, the problems of being, of writing, and the relationship with reality."
^Film scholar Charles Affron writes that "the status of 8½ as a 'classic' text can be recognized in the homage of its imitations and versions." Cf. Affron, 5. Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella concurs: "As might be expected from the work's important place in the history of the cinema, the criticism on 8½ is voluminous." Cf. Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, 163
