Cinema Paradiso and 3 Other Must-Watch Movies About Making Movies You Shouldn't Miss

Cinema is not afraid to look at itself. In the mirror we call the screen, movies reflect on their own history – technically and even philosophically. We recalled the most striking films in which the most important of the arts played a central role.

1. Cinema Paradiso, 1988

Cinema is selfish in a good way, it spends most of its time talking about self-love. After all, the magic of cinema, discovered especially in youth, is an indescribable feeling that many try to preserve for life.

Giuseppe Tornatore's film tells the story of a Sicilian boy, Salvatore, in postwar Italy, where the movie screen has become the epicenter of social life. The boy befriends a projectionist, asks to be his apprentice, and learns all the intricacies of using a projection machine.

Cinema Paradiso, brilliantly acted and accompanied by the music of Ennio Morricone, declares love for the cinema – a place of attraction for human emotions.

2. Babylon, 2022

Damien Chazelle took a risk and composed a huge colossus – an ode to early cinema, jazz, the world of Hollywood's ups and downs.

In Babylon, the director does not hesitate to fantasize about the Hollywood of the 20s – a place drunk with parties that drive you crazy and leave you with a dizzying hangover.

Chazelle turns his movie about cinema into a tribute to the seventh art: the final inserts with shots from Bergman and Godard to Avatar are the progressive path of cinema's development.

3. 8½, 1963

Marcello Mastroianni plays a director who has no idea what he's going to make his next movie about. The producers have already prepared mock-ups of the spaceship, but there is still no movie – the idea that gives a creative impulse hasn't come to Guido.

8½ is the personal ordeal of Federico Fellini, lost in the darkness of his thoughts. The movie is about the crisis of cinematic vision and the agony of a procrastinating artist.

For Fellini, this is not only a triumph, but also his own medicine: life and its difficulties do not give way to the creator, but it is the crisis that becomes a phenomenon worthy of the optics of a genius.

4. Ed Wood, 1994

Tim Burton has made a career out of his love for low-grade science fiction and horror, and in 1994 he showed us who we should be thankful for.

Ed Wood is a biographical film about the work of director Edward Wood Jr., a man who is now called the worst director in the history of cinema. Burton shows how Wood blew money on his projects, enthusiastically shot scenes with a fake octopus, failed to become the new Orson Welles, but still went down in history.