Article3:La Dolce Vita (part 1)

Such is the stylistic appeal of the film that images and scenes from it continue to be copied and re-cycled in magazine articles, fashion spreads and advertisements. The films louche image, symbolized by the sharply-dressed and sun-glasses-wearing decadents Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimee, is widely used in connection with reportage's on nightlife, depictions of clubland, and pop-music promotion. The film brought to light the phenomenon of the unlicensed celebrity photographer (who from then on became known the world over by the name of one of the film's characters, Paparazzo), it gave a commercial boost to Italy's hitherto rather underdeveloped fashion industry and fueled a wave of tourism to the Italian capital which continues to this day.
Regularly, at ten-year intervals after its 1960 release, it is evoked, discussed and its influences assessed. Possibly more than any other single film made in Italy since 1945, it has given rise to memoirs, novels, documentary accounts, television specials and photographic exhibitions.
Part of La Dolce Vita's appeal derives from the films complex relationship with the new image of life and society that was being communicated to a mass readership through illustrated magazines like Oggi, L'Europeo, Lo Specchio and the news weekly L' Espresso. A phenomenon of the 1950s in Italy, these publications did not merely report facts and events; they offered what Daniel Boorstin, in his 1962 book The Image, called a pseudo-reality, that is to say a parallel world made up of movie stars, images of high society, media events and publicity stunts that bore little obvious relation to everyday life. The film provides a sequence of tenuously-linked set-piece scenes which include the arrival at Ciampino airport of an American movie star, several scenes in night clubs, parties in the palaces of the Roman aristocracy, celebrity-chasing photo-reporters going about their business, night-time rides in open-topped sports cars, encounters with prostitutes and an orgy. These moments are interspersed with others of a somewhat different nature: the journey over Rome of a helicopter from which hangs a large wooden statue of Christ, the media circus surrounding the appearance of the Madonna to two children, meaningful discussion in an intellectual salon, a trip to the seaside. Through all this, the aspirant writer-turned-gossip-columnist Marcello Rubini (Mastroianni) weaves his course, alternating frivolity and debauchery with moments of melancholy and reflection. He escorts the stars, hangs out at night clubs, liaisons with the photographers and chases women, but he also argues with a highly-strung lover who waits for him at home and discusses philosophical questions with Stiener (the wealthy intellectual whose pessimism will lead him to commit suicide after killing his two small children). In two moving scenes, Marcello is briefly offered alternatives to his empty life in a meeting with his father, and in a chance encounter with an innocent young girl who waits at tables in a seafront cafe.

Initially Fellini had planned to make a rather different sort of film. He intended to follow up his darkly humorous analysis of the limitations of provincial life, I Vitelloni (1953), by looking at the career in the capitol of Moraldo, the one member of the quartet of lower middle-class young men featured in the film who actually manages to up sticks and leave his home town. The director wanted to situate Moraldo in the bohemian milieu of Rome's Via Veneto, which in the early 1950's was the regular evening gathering point of journalist and literati. But Fellini and his collaborators, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi, soon realized that the Rome they had intended to depict had been replaced by another city., more brash and cosmopolitan. By the later 1950s the night spots of the Via Veneto were no longer solely the after-hours haunts of writers who had migrated from the provinces; they were the pleasure grounds of Italy's booming film industry and of the many American actors and actresses who came to work and play in Hollywood on the Tiber. Instead of the bicycles that, following Vittorio De Sica's classic neo-realist film Bicycle Thieves (1948), symbolised the aspirations of the city's working class, outsize American automobiles signaled the wealth of the fortunate few. As Rome became the leading European center for American location films, so a sizeable movie colony sprang up that included both former stars at the end of their careers like Laurel and Hardy and established names such as Kirk Douglas, Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner. Thanks to the stars, Rome became once again an outpost of international café society, a gathering point of exiled foreign royalty, speculators, playboys, socialites and artists.

During this period Italy entered a new phase of growth and change. No longer the predominantly agricultural and only primitively industrial country that had emerged from the Second World War, it was rapidly developing into an industrial society with a profile of its own. Although few Italians could yet afford cars, Vespa and Lambretta scooters began to be seen on the streets, radios entered working-class homes and television broadcasts spread elements of what would become a new common culture. In increasing numbers, peasants abandoned rural areas to seek a better life in the cities, young people gave rise to a culture fashioned by foreign-inspired sounds and fashions, and the values of consumerism came to be widely accepted. Although it would only be in the mid-1970s that the vast majority of households would possess a television set, a washing machine and a refrigerator, aspirations for these goods were forged earlier. The economic dynamism of the 1950s was evident in many ways, in the extraordinary boom of the building industry, in the investment in mass production, in the expansion of the mass media, in the transformations in family life.
Unprotected by the studios that in their heyday had been able to control completely the flow of news about their properties, foreign stars found themselves at the mercy of opportunist photographers who snapped them off-duty and sold and sold the results to the scandal sheets. Their antics were a source of endless fascination to Italians who read about them and watched them in magazines and newsreels. Celebrities offered a larger-than-life version of the consumer lifestyle. Their hedonism, conspicuous consumption, leisure mobility and child-like freedom from everyday constraints made them a focus for the dreams and aspirations of ordinary people. The implications of this were never fully grasped by Italy's elite. While religious spokesmen and the political left expressed grave concern about the consequences of the rapid decline of the countryside and the development of an American-style neo-capitalism, the ruling Christian Democrats complacently assumed that new values and cultures would dovetail easily with traditional ones to reinforce the existing social hierarchy. In a series of ways, La Dolce Vita demonstrated that this was a vain hope.

Fellini always claimed that he was not a moralist, that he had no intention of judging the new society that was emerging in Italy or even the particular fauna that he depicted. This is plausible in that the film does portray the seductive fascination of the café society as well as its intrinsic vacuity. Indeed the long-term impact of the film has mainly been in the area of style. But there seems little doubt that he wanted to say something critical about the change of culture that was occurring. If Fellini was not moralistic then he was at least satirical. As in previous films, such as his first work Luci del Varieta (Variety Lights, 1950), which dealt with the decline of traveling theatre companies displaced by cinema, or Lo Sceicco (The White Sheik,1952), which explored the artificial world of the photo-romance magazines, he viewed the big city as an outsider. Like his character Moraldo, Fellini was a provincial who had migrated from the seaside town of Rimmi to Rome. Despite his international successes (he had won an Oscar for La Strada in 1955), Fellini frequently returned for his inspiration to the experiences of his youth and the particular mentality and atmospheres of his hometown. La Dolce Vita presented a stark contrast between figures, behavior models and values that belonged to an old world, and which generally were endowed with a positive connotation, and those which were representative of a new world that had lost its soul. The use of black and white photography, several years after the first Italian color film, underscored this dichotomy.
Within Italy, the film was a watershed; it marked a shift in what could be represented on the screen and it also heralded the replacement of the austere neo-realistic aesthetic by a focus on the ephemeral and the superficial. For perhaps the first time in postwar Italian cinema, style triumphed over substance. For this reason the film was deplored by Roberto Rossellini, the father of Italy's postwar cinema and the director of Rome Open City, the influential 1945 wartime film on which the young Fellini had collaborated.

Although Fellini had successfully lobbied to avoid any censorship of his film, La Dolce Vita was intensely controversial from the moment of its release in February 1960. While some welcomed its exploration of the negative side of economic boom, others, including conservative opinion leaders and the Catholic Church, denounced it as the work of a Communist. The Rome premiere on February 4th passed off peacefully, but the Milan opening the following day was marked by a very different atmosphere. One irate spectator spat in the director's face; others accused him of being a clown and of having dragged Italy's good name through the mud. The depiction of a picturesque whirlwind of decadence and frivolity which implied that society was on the point of irredeemable degeneration led to questions in parliament and to calls for the film's immediate withdrawal. La Dolce Vita was attacked as immoral and subversive, and branded as a mock-trial that aimed to condemn Italian society as a whole and the capital in particular. Aristocrats who had taken part in the film found themselves ostracized by their peers, while those clerics who had initially seen it as useful moral reflection were swiftly brought into line. The establishment was not united but a majority closed ranks against the film.


				*creative film...* *Article3:La Dolce Vita (part 1)*



	Home The films of Buster Keaton \| Film History for Translucent Boneheads, Article1:RASHOMON \| Article2:Psycho \| Article3:La Dolce Vita (part 1) \| Article3:La Dolce Vita (part2) \| Upcoming and Previous Film Schedule


		La Dolce Vita (part1)



		Although it was made forty years ago, La Dolce Vita remains a very contemporary film. Directed by Federico Fellini at the height of his creative powers, it offers an extraordinary panorama of aspects of Roman life at the very moment when Italy was shedding its rural past and becoming a turbulent industrial society. Such is the stylistic appeal of the film that images and scenes from it continue to be copied and re-cycled in magazine articles, fashion spreads and advertisements. The films louche image, symbolized by the sharply-dressed and sun-glasses-wearing decadents Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimee, is widely used in connection with reportage's on nightlife, depictions of clubland, and pop-music promotion. The film brought to light the phenomenon of the unlicensed celebrity photographer (who from then on became known the world over by the name of one of the film's characters, Paparazzo), it gave a commercial boost to Italy's hitherto rather underdeveloped fashion industry and fueled a wave of tourism to the Italian capital which continues to this day. Regularly, at ten-year intervals after its 1960 release, it is evoked, discussed and its influences assessed. Possibly more than any other single film made in Italy since 1945, it has given rise to memoirs, novels, documentary accounts, television specials and photographic exhibitions. Part of La Dolce Vita's appeal derives from the films complex relationship with the new image of life and society that was being communicated to a mass readership through illustrated magazines like Oggi, L'Europeo, Lo Specchio and the news weekly L' Espresso. A phenomenon of the 1950s in Italy, these publications did not merely report facts and events; they offered what Daniel Boorstin, in his 1962 book The Image, called a pseudo-reality, that is to say a parallel world made up of movie stars, images of high society, media events and publicity stunts that bore little obvious relation to everyday life. The film provides a sequence of tenuously-linked set-piece scenes which include the arrival at Ciampino airport of an American movie star, several scenes in night clubs, parties in the palaces of the Roman aristocracy, celebrity-chasing photo-reporters going about their business, night-time rides in open-topped sports cars, encounters with prostitutes and an orgy. These moments are interspersed with others of a somewhat different nature: the journey over Rome of a helicopter from which hangs a large wooden statue of Christ, the media circus surrounding the appearance of the Madonna to two children, meaningful discussion in an intellectual salon, a trip to the seaside. Through all this, the aspirant writer-turned-gossip-columnist Marcello Rubini (Mastroianni) weaves his course, alternating frivolity and debauchery with moments of melancholy and reflection. He escorts the stars, hangs out at night clubs, liaisons with the photographers and chases women, but he also argues with a highly-strung lover who waits for him at home and discusses philosophical questions with Stiener (the wealthy intellectual whose pessimism will lead him to commit suicide after killing his two small children). In two moving scenes, Marcello is briefly offered alternatives to his empty life in a meeting with his father, and in a chance encounter with an innocent young girl who waits at tables in a seafront cafe. Initially Fellini had planned to make a rather different sort of film. He intended to follow up his darkly humorous analysis of the limitations of provincial life, I Vitelloni (1953), by looking at the career in the capitol of Moraldo, the one member of the quartet of lower middle-class young men featured in the film who actually manages to up sticks and leave his home town. The director wanted to situate Moraldo in the bohemian milieu of Rome's Via Veneto, which in the early 1950's was the regular evening gathering point of journalist and literati. But Fellini and his collaborators, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi, soon realized that the Rome they had intended to depict had been replaced by another city., more brash and cosmopolitan. By the later 1950s the night spots of the Via Veneto were no longer solely the after-hours haunts of writers who had migrated from the provinces; they were the pleasure grounds of Italy's booming film industry and of the many American actors and actresses who came to work and play in Hollywood on the Tiber. Instead of the bicycles that, following Vittorio De Sica's classic neo-realist film Bicycle Thieves (1948), symbolised the aspirations of the city's working class, outsize American automobiles signaled the wealth of the fortunate few. As Rome became the leading European center for American location films, so a sizeable movie colony sprang up that included both former stars at the end of their careers like Laurel and Hardy and established names such as Kirk Douglas, Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner. Thanks to the stars, Rome became once again an outpost of international café society, a gathering point of exiled foreign royalty, speculators, playboys, socialites and artists. During this period Italy entered a new phase of growth and change. No longer the predominantly agricultural and only primitively industrial country that had emerged from the Second World War, it was rapidly developing into an industrial society with a profile of its own. Although few Italians could yet afford cars, Vespa and Lambretta scooters began to be seen on the streets, radios entered working-class homes and television broadcasts spread elements of what would become a new common culture. In increasing numbers, peasants abandoned rural areas to seek a better life in the cities, young people gave rise to a culture fashioned by foreign-inspired sounds and fashions, and the values of consumerism came to be widely accepted. Although it would only be in the mid-1970s that the vast majority of households would possess a television set, a washing machine and a refrigerator, aspirations for these goods were forged earlier. The economic dynamism of the 1950s was evident in many ways, in the extraordinary boom of the building industry, in the investment in mass production, in the expansion of the mass media, in the transformations in family life. Unprotected by the studios that in their heyday had been able to control completely the flow of news about their properties, foreign stars found themselves at the mercy of opportunist photographers who snapped them off-duty and sold and sold the results to the scandal sheets. Their antics were a source of endless fascination to Italians who read about them and watched them in magazines and newsreels. Celebrities offered a larger-than-life version of the consumer lifestyle. Their hedonism, conspicuous consumption, leisure mobility and child-like freedom from everyday constraints made them a focus for the dreams and aspirations of ordinary people. The implications of this were never fully grasped by Italy's elite. While religious spokesmen and the political left expressed grave concern about the consequences of the rapid decline of the countryside and the development of an American-style neo-capitalism, the ruling Christian Democrats complacently assumed that new values and cultures would dovetail easily with traditional ones to reinforce the existing social hierarchy. In a series of ways, La Dolce Vita demonstrated that this was a vain hope. Fellini always claimed that he was not a moralist, that he had no intention of judging the new society that was emerging in Italy or even the particular fauna that he depicted. This is plausible in that the film does portray the seductive fascination of the café society as well as its intrinsic vacuity. Indeed the long-term impact of the film has mainly been in the area of style. But there seems little doubt that he wanted to say something critical about the change of culture that was occurring. If Fellini was not moralistic then he was at least satirical. As in previous films, such as his first work Luci del Varieta (Variety Lights, 1950), which dealt with the decline of traveling theatre companies displaced by cinema, or Lo Sceicco (The White Sheik,1952), which explored the artificial world of the photo-romance magazines, he viewed the big city as an outsider. Like his character Moraldo, Fellini was a provincial who had migrated from the seaside town of Rimmi to Rome. Despite his international successes (he had won an Oscar for La Strada in 1955), Fellini frequently returned for his inspiration to the experiences of his youth and the particular mentality and atmospheres of his hometown. La Dolce Vita presented a stark contrast between figures, behavior models and values that belonged to an old world, and which generally were endowed with a positive connotation, and those which were representative of a new world that had lost its soul. The use of black and white photography, several years after the first Italian color film, underscored this dichotomy. Within Italy, the film was a watershed; it marked a shift in what could be represented on the screen and it also heralded the replacement of the austere neo-realistic aesthetic by a focus on the ephemeral and the superficial. For perhaps the first time in postwar Italian cinema, style triumphed over substance. For this reason the film was deplored by Roberto Rossellini, the father of Italy's postwar cinema and the director of Rome Open City, the influential 1945 wartime film on which the young Fellini had collaborated. Although Fellini had successfully lobbied to avoid any censorship of his film, La Dolce Vita was intensely controversial from the moment of its release in February 1960. While some welcomed its exploration of the negative side of economic boom, others, including conservative opinion leaders and the Catholic Church, denounced it as the work of a Communist. The Rome premiere on February 4th passed off peacefully, but the Milan opening the following day was marked by a very different atmosphere. One irate spectator spat in the director's face; others accused him of being a clown and of having dragged Italy's good name through the mud. The depiction of a picturesque whirlwind of decadence and frivolity which implied that society was on the point of irredeemable degeneration led to questions in parliament and to calls for the film's immediate withdrawal. La Dolce Vita was attacked as immoral and subversive, and branded as a mock-trial that aimed to condemn Italian society as a whole and the capital in particular. Aristocrats who had taken part in the film found themselves ostracized by their peers, while those clerics who had initially seen it as useful moral reflection were swiftly brought into line. The establishment was not united but a majority closed ranks against the film. creative film... Article3:La Dolce Vita (part2)