ANGLIA POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY

CONTEMPORARY ITALY:
STYLE AND LIFESTYLE

DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES

MODULE: ITH1025

ANASTASIA YANNAKOULI

ESSAY TOPIC: Why is Fellini’s la dolce vita such an important film?

Make references to specific sequences and give others your personal
opinions on the film’s significance.

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 La dolce vita has been and remains a very contemporary film. Federico Fellini
created it forty years before (1960) and it illustrates many aspects of Italian life and
society after the World War II. After a long period of starvation and poverty, Italy has
passed to a period of economic boom and the life of the people has changed. La dolce
vita means sweet life and it is the lifestyle of post war Italy. This lifestyle consists of
the glamorous celebrities who gather around the famous Via Veneto and the huge
crowd of photo reporters and journalists who encircle the celebrities. The photo
reporters move always around the celebrities in search of a new gossip that will make
them also rich and famous. However, from the first minutes of the film we realize that
this sweet life is a little ironic because none in the film seems totally happy. What is
clearly represented is the corruption and decadence of the celebrities.

Moreover, in many sequences of the film the photo reporters move around like
mosquitoes that annoy the calm people. They use their cameras all the time and they
talk a lot in order to gain information and news about the lives of the celebrities.
Fellini invented the idea of the mosquito-photo reporter and he illustrated it with a
drawing. He named the photo reporters paparazzi from the anagram of the word
papataceo that means a large and annoying mosquito (Bondanella 1992:136). In the
first sequences, paparazzi are all over the place, always in a hurry and always
available for gossip. They appear in the nightclubs, in interviews with celebrities and
many times they try to destroy the privacy of the people.

In this category of people belongs the protagonist, Marcello, who lives two
lives and has two faces. He is a writer who does not believe in himself, he is a skeptic
and is interested in philosophical questions. Furthermore, he lives with his girlfriend
who wants to marry him and have the traditional family. On the other hand, he is a
paparazzo and he loves the nightclubs, free love, gossip and everything that make life
easier. He loves only himself, he is corrupted by the endless pleasures he is offered
and he is not interested about anything that includes a simple everyday life. However,
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 girl who waits at
tables in a seafront café (Gundle quoted in Pinna 2002:29).

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 La dolce vita includes many elements of temptation and eroticism. Eroticism
is expressed mainly by the female representation. Anita Ekberg, who plays an
American actress in the beginning of the film is dressed as a sexy goddess but is
appeared as innocent as a child. Her childish innocence is showed by the way she
talks, moves and plays. She plays with a kitten and then she goes into the Fontana di
Trevi to please herself with the beauty of the monument and the silence of the night.
Her goddess attitude in connection with her childish innocence makes even the water
of the fountain stop moving. Marcello follows her ecstatic into the fountain but he
does not touch her. He probably afraid that he could corrupt the beauty and the
innocence of Anita so he remained immobile to look at her.

The second erotic sequence is close to the end of the film. A company of rich
aristocrats has gathered in a house in search for new pleasures. They are appeared
bored of everything common. In the company there are men, women and
homosexuals who end up enjoying a striptease by Nadia Gray. The deprivations of the
war led people and especially aristocrats enjoying free love and other pleasures. It was
the first time that a scene with a striptease took place in a movie. Fellini took the idea
by a Roman restaurant, where the Turkish dancer Aiche Nana did a striptease and he
used it in his film (Bondanella 992:138). He wanted to show the size of the corruption
especially between the rich and powerful but he was criticized as an immoralist.
Nevertheless, his purpose was not to criticize the current situation, he only wanted to
illustrate the Italian society after the World War II. Additionally, smaller roles of
desire and eroticism were played by Nadia, one of Marcello’s lovers who like to try
new things and places in love and Emma, Marcello’s fiancée who struggles for the
traditional love and family.

Another interesting view has Fellini for the religion. The film shows
antireligious feelings and many people thought that it jeers the Catholic religion of
Italy. First of all in the opening scene some journalists carry the statue of Jesus with a
helicopter to Rome. The paradox is the balcony with the girls dressed in their

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swimming costumes and sunbathing. Usually when you face the symbols of God you
have to be respectably dressed and have modest behavior but in the film the girls had
not any kind of modesty. The second time Fellini has dressed Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) as
a priest (this was not proper for a woman) when she takes a visit to Saint Peter’s
Cathedral. The paparazzi run behind her and take photos inside the dome of Saint
Peter’s as if they were in a common place. They don’t respect the place and the only
thing that matters to them is to make a good report for their journals.

As the plot goes on Fellini succeed to infuriate the Catholic Church even
more. There is a scene where two children had a vision of Madonna and the
journalists have recreated the place of the miracle into a television show. They have
gathered a crowd of believer and they have given them roles to perform in from of the
television cast. The children are interviewed as television stars and everything is very
comic. Fellini tried to show that after the war most of the people lost their faith.
Especially the idea of God was only an amusement for the celebrities who had not the
time to occupy with anything else but themselves and their publicity. Even a God
intervention appears as a well-made performance and the miracle loses any moral
content. Finally the big fish the aristocrats have discovered in the end of the film is
another religious sign. The fish is the symbol of God and it is dead. The cheerful
company stares at the fish with curiosity but they do not take time to think deeper
about it and they leave to continue their miserable lives.

For the above reasons, church groups, representatives of the Roman nobility,
and right-wing politicians who had praised La Strada demanded that the film be
banned as morally outrageous or even obscene, while critics, intellectuals, and
political parties from the center to the left of the political spectrum applauded La
dolce vita for what they felt was Fellini’s realistic panorama of the corruption and
decadence of Italy’s bourgeoisie (Bondanella 1992:132). Members of the public also
criticized the film as blasphemous, pornographic and provocative. However, Fellini
had no intention to create a scandal or shock the people who went to watch the movie.
In his interview to Charlotte Chandler he said “I would never put anything in a movie
just to shock that wasn’t true to the story I was telling. I would not betray my

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characters, who are as real in my life as any real people I know” (Chandler 1996:130)
in fact Fellini wanted to present the Italian life as it was and as he knew it. Of course
it was a shock for the people because they hadn’t seen anything like this before and
people have the bad habit to criticize negative new things.

Fellini did not forget to include family matters in his film. There are the
sequences of Marcello and his father where they enjoy their time together in a
nightclub and the father who tries to protect his children from the paparazzi and the
crowd but they are not of great interest. The only important thing is that Marcello
seems happy for first time in the film. Although, the family of Marcello’s intellectual
friend, Steiner leave the public aghast. In one scene this family looks very happy and
the relationship between the parents and the children is full of affection and love. The
following stage is so shocking because the father has committed suicide and has taken
his children with him. With this scene we understand that the family value follows the
decay of the Italian lifestyle. Marcello realizes that every moral value has been lost
but this scene functions as an alarm clock that tries to wake him up. Marcello had two
times the opportunity to think about the life he does. One succeeded with Steiner and
one with Paola. Paola was the innocent girl who met at the beach and represents an
image of Marcello’s lost innocence. Neither the glamorous lifestyle, nor religious or
family can bring a meaning to the life of Marcello.

Finally, the film does conclude with a long close-up of Paola, underlining
Fellini’s belief that such innocence is a state of grace well worth seeking, but
Marcello’s decline by the end of the film makes it impossible for him to believe in any
possibility of a spiritual renewal for himself (Bondanella 1992:147). From the end of
the film we can realize that the true meaning of life can be found in the innocence and
inner beauty of ourselves.

La dolce vita helped Italy as a nation in many ways. First of all the bad critics
made the film very famous in Italy and abroad and it was the only film that broke all
Italian records. Places like Roma, Fontana di Trevi and Via Veneto attracted many

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tourists and especially many celebrities of other countries. Although the sequences of
the film were shot in a studio of cinecitta it is hard to realize it. Moreover, the Italian
style and lifestyle became a status in Europe and America and everyone tried to take
something of the glamorous film. The dark glasses, the roll-neck sweaters, the gossip
journals and the cars became symbols of a period with the name La Dolce Vita. Fellini
has created a masterpiece that has something for everyone. But, partly via Fellini, the
country had acquired a sexy new image that refurbished its old glamour in the eyes of
outsiders and definitely replaced both the residual memories of Fascism and the
social and political concerns of the immediate post war years (Gundle quoted in
Pinna 2002:35).

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 REFERENCES

Bondanella, P. (1992) The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton, Princeton

University Press

Chandler, C. (1996) I, Fellini. London, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Pinna, P. (2002) Contemporary Italy: Style and Lifestyle. Cambridge, Anglia

Polytechnic University