‘8 1/2’ Scores High in Fellini Repertoire

If the news reports were true, Federico Fellini was flirting with women almost to his last day. Dispatches from his hospital bed leading up to the great director’s death in October wryly suggested that he loved his nurses and they loved him right back.

Apparently, even a stroke couldn’t prevent him from finding at least a little of la dolce vita . No end is a good end, but it’s comforting, at least for those who grew up with his work and admired his genius, to think not all of the Fellini blaze had been extinguished as he became sicker.

What’s left now are the films, a legacy that couldn’t be more enduring. The best ones (“La Strada,” “I Vitelloni,” “Juliet of the Spirits” and “8 1/2”) are foundations of the international cinema. Even the less-than-stellar ones (“Fellini Satyricon” “Fellini’s Casanova”) are invigorating in their own way, if only because Fellini made them.

It’s nice timing, then, for the UC Irvine Film Society to launch its “Off the Beaten Path” series tonight with “8 1/2,” probably Fellini’s best-known movie and, arguably, his finest.

Many of the directors spotlighted in the weekly program owe something to Fellini, a filmmaker who expanded the medium’s boundaries and helped open the door wide for international movie exports to the United States.

The series title implies the fringe (and there certainly are some outsider auteurs in this diverse group), but Fellini was essentially a mainstream director. Sure, his career, which started to flourish in the ‘50s, was marked by inventiveness at just about every turn, but Fellini was always dedicated to documenting the common elements that connect us. He was proud of the universality of his themes, and often mentioned that in interviews.

In “8 1/2,” Fellini takes on the big ones--religion and love, death and memory, art and self-awareness. It’s probably his most autobiographical film, one that came when he was much lauded around the world but finding it hard to continue creatively.

The 1963 release features Marcello Mastroianni as Fellini’s alter-ego, a director battling brain-drain, the deadline for his latest movie, edgy relationships with women, and a haunting past. Imaginatively shot and gleaming with vitality even when morose, “8 1/2” is boldly revealing. It won the Oscar for best foreign film that year.

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Following “8 1/2,” the “Off the Beaten Path” series offers nine full-length movies and a short, including:

* April 15: “The Funeral” (1984), directed by Juzo Itami.

* April 22: “Red Sorghum” (1987), by Zhang Yimou.

* April 29: “My Twentieth Century” (1989), by Ildiko Enyedi.

* May 6: “Polyester” (1981), by John Waters, with Buster Keaton’s 1920 short, “One Week.”

* May 13: “Labyrinth of Passion” (1982), by Pedro Almodovar.

* May 20: “Mystery Train” (1989), by Jim Jarmusch.

* May 27: “Marriage of Maria Braun” (1978), by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

* June 3: “Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), by Victor Erice.

* June 10: “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), by Stanley Kubrick.

* Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2” will screen tonight at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at UC Irvine’s Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium, Campus Drive and Bridge Road, Irvine. $2 to $4. (714) 856-6379.