Federico Fellini’s epochal image “La dolce vita” is coming back to the cinema.
It’s hard to find a recent text on Fellini’s “La dolce vita” without the word “pop culture” prominently featured. Even if you could perhaps catch a glimpse of it in 1959, when the last take was made in Cinecittà – it was hardly ever used. First of all, the film title “La dolce vita” became a dictum for that mixture of hedonistic attitude to life and celebrity cult that Fellini had located around Rome’s Via Veneto.
Stardom had long been an expensive commodity, produced tightly behind studio doors. And when scandals did get out to the public or half-celebrities basked in the splendor of the true, expensively built stars, the powerful film corporations usually retained the sovereignty of interpretation of what the magazines made of it. All of that suddenly dissolved in the 1950s – captured in a flurry of flashbulbs in tens of thousands of press photos. The name that Fellini gave to the photographer, who becomes the shadow of the reporter and womanizer Marcello in the film, now describes an entire guild: paparazzo.
This week “La dolce vita” is coming back to the cinema, restored in crystal-clear black and white from the masterfully exposed negative (camera: Otello Martelli). 174 minutes of film could hardly be denser: the splendor and darkness of the nocturnal odysseys, the choreographed frenzy of the street scenes shot – mostly on studio sets – and the filmmaker’s unrestrained love for his chronically stumbling hero still add up to one of the greatest films of all time. How could Fellini analyze so wisely and prophetically a phenomenon of which he was also a part?
The appropriation of the iconic urban space, the reinterpretation of the postcard view of the Trevi Fountain into a celebration of “Bigger than Life” could only really work with a star of the second category like Anita Ekberg. In addition, Lex Barker, who was known at the time primarily as second-rate Tarzan, played the role of the cuckolded husband by the photographers.
And like a messenger from the near future of the burgeoning pop art and alternative culture in between: the later Velvet Underground singer Nico.
At the end of the 1950s, old Hollywood had decided to celebrate its grandiose Götterdämmerung on the Tiber of all places. “Ben Hur” – shot in Cinecittà the same year as “La dolce vita” – was the blueprint for countless cheap Italian sandal films. True monumental flops should seal the downfall: “Cleopatra” almost ended the existence of the glorious 20th Century Fox and “The Fall of the Roman Empire” was also that of a brilliant chapter in film history.
For Federico Fellini, who came to film in the 1940s as a cartoonist and court reporter in the tow of star Aldo Fabrizi, stardom was nothing more than a circus – and he loved it more than anything. His early films carried the flimsy promises of happiness of showmanship into the social reality of neorealism – without robbing them of the innocence of the dreamers.
Nevertheless, the tragedy of “La dolce vita” was praised above all by contemporary critics. But is Marcello, played by Anouk Aimée, the rich lover Maddelena, really serious when she – halfway to a casual nighttime acquaintance – calls herself a whore? Does the suicide of his writer friend Steiner (Alain Cuny), who seems to have established himself in the literary world, really bring about a purification?
And are the miracles exploited by the paparazzi really just naive wishful thinking? Or is it rather – as with the nocturnal visit to an abandoned palace by a champagne-blessed high society group – a gateway for the truly magical, which is elevated above the decadence of the moment.
Similar to a second nocturnal odyssey of the 1959/60 cinema season – the Brazilian world hit “Orfeu Negro” by Marcel Camus – Fellini’s film is also an invitation to the orgiastic cinema.
Fellini is above all critical of the class conceit behind decadence, a truly Roman phenomenon that the hippie generation would soon level out to a large extent. Nico is not her only harbinger in “La dolce vita”. In one of his first film appearances, young Adriano Celentano swings his hips and electric guitar. With his underestimated directorial work “Yuppi Du” he shot his own comedy about a hedonistic concept of life in 1975.
What Fellini already sounds like a swan song to a new beginning – his no less influential film about creative stagnation “8 ½” followed in 1963 – today seems like an admonition to (absent) rebellion. For the excesses of the current celebrity cult, the glory of the creative seems far less valued than true decadence – the wealth of an Elon Musk. After all, the excesses of partying in Rome in 1959 still took place in the public eye with flashbulbs – not on the oligarchs’ yachts, as is the case today.
Few films allow us to magnify the beginnings of cultural change. We are just waiting for the pictures that the giant James Webb telescope wants to take of the beginning of the universe. We can just revisit the big bang of modern pop culture.
The sweet life. Italien 1960. Director: Federico Fellini. 174 Min.
