#0000C/#733: FELLINI, Federico: La Dolce Vita (1960)

FELLINI, Federico (Italy)

La Dolce Vita [1960]

Spine #0000C/Spine #733

Blu-ray

The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success -- ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome's rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight. This mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become.

174 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

in Italian

2:35:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2014/2020

Director/Writers

Story by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli.

Screenplay by Fellini, Flaiano, Pinelli and Brunello Rondi.

Fellini was 40 when he directed La Dolce Vita.

Other Fellini films in the Collection:

#0000C/#189: The White Sheik (1952)
#0000C/#246: I Viteloni (1953)
#0000C/#219: La Strada (1954)
#0000C: Il Bidone (1955)
#0000C/#49: Nights Of Cabiria (1957)
#0000C/#140: 8½ (1963)
#0000C/#149: Juliet Of The Spirits (1965)
#0000C/#747: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
#0000C/#848: Roma (1972)
#0000C/#4: Amarcord (1973)
#0000C/#50: And The Ship Sails On (1983)
#0000C: Intervista (1987)

The Film

Fellini is now a brand! The word felliniesque enters the vocabulary. A character named Paparazzo (Walter Santesso) becomes the eponym for another dictionary entry. And Fellini finally leaves behind any trace of the post-war neorealism that so many Italian filmmakers danced to for over a decade.

The film — considered notorious around the world — caused such a sensation that very few bothered to peek beneath the nightlife on the Via Veneto and the orgy with the chicken feathers, or the spooky ghost-hunting in an old castle — to see … what? Irony? A detached (distaccato) dramatic documentary?

Fellini is just pointing his camera at all this, and capturing a visual eye feast, cleverly stitched it all together for general consumption.

Marcello (Marcello Mastrioianni — in his first of two consecutive roles as Fellini’s doppelgänger) — is the spectator; a disenchanted tabloid reporter who is too distracted to seek a better office.

Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) is the first major distraction from his fiancée, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) — a lovely, warm gal who seems unbearably boring to Marcello.

Then there’s Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) who whispers her love through magical conduits in the castle. Notice how Fellini uses the widescreen in this scene, with Marcello sitting on a chair in the middle of the frame!

There are also men around to confound the poor lost soul. Consider Steiner (a brilliant Alain Cuny), a disturbing intellectual who seems to be the only one around to speak hard truths to Marcello. Ironically, Steiner himself can’t live with such a bleak, harsh reality.

Marcello’s father (Annibale Ninchi) even shows up to confuse Marcello even more. (He will reappear as Guido’s father in 8½.)

One character worth keeping your eye on (although she only has three minutes of screen time) is young Paola (Valeria Ciangottini).

**

This magnificent film might seem to be eye-candy at first — but a discerning viewer should see the wider essence of satire and ironic detachment, which is so easy to miss amongst the chicken feathers. It may not exactly be a condemnation of La Dolce Vita, but Fellini is not exactly showing all these scenes of revelry and debauchery to elicit your approval.

Film Rating (0-60):

58

The Extras

The Booklets

#733 only:

Eight-panel foldout featuring an essay by critic Gary Giddins.

It is a shame that Giddins’s essay is not reprinted in the new box. It is worth reading in its entirety …

“Time has sustained La Dolce Vita, setting loose themes that underscore twenty-first century dilemmas that were of little or no consequence in 1960. Just as we are more likely now to register how funny it is and how tidily structured, we can hardly fail to see how it augurs our obsessions with the loss of privacy and the rise of virtuality, the deadening of the senses and the addiction to technology, the corruption of the media, the lust for fame, and the waning of lust when acculturation trumps individual agency. It is now a more humanistic film too, because, having been there and done much of that, we know its people more intimately than did the first generation of viewers, who were gawkers at and not survivors of the spectacle.”

#0000C only:

Eighty-page book featuring an essay by David Forgacs.

“Fellini’s move toward studio reconstructions, which was in part a practical way of getting more control of the filmmaking process, would become a clear aesthetic preference, a way of transforming the outer world into a simulacrum, where reality becomes confused with a fabricated version of itself.”

154-page booklet featuring an introduction by Bilge Ebiri and essays by Michael Almereyda (Primary Sources); Colm Tóibin (Imagined Homes); Carol Morley (Life on Earth); Stephanie Zacharek (Tough Love); and Kogonada (There is No End).

Zacharek:

“Marcello is sex, and yet at the same time beyond sex. That’s apparent when he’s dazzled by visiting movie star Sylvia … the most direct interpretation is to see this pale-gold lunar goddess as a symbol of all womankind. But she’s more than that: she is desire itself, unmanageable, earthy, inescapable. When she hears dogs howling, she howls back: these are her brothers, speaking in her own feral language. She pretends to be your friend, but she has her own agenda. She’ll sell you out even after you’ve searched high and low to procure a saucerful of milk for her new kitten. She barely looks Marcello in the eye, while he gazes upon her in a lovestruck reverie — though again, is he really interested in sleeping with her? She is, and he is, beyond that. Her goal is to render him helpless, and she succeeds. In this instance, woman is not helping man discover his obscure side — she’s playing on the side of himself he knows all too well, as if she were strumming a harp. He’s drawn to the music, because it, too — the desire he can’t tame — is part of him.”

#0000C/#733:

Commentary

None.

Interview 1

From 2014 with filmmaker Lina Wermüller, an assistant director on the film.

Discussing his womanizing …

Interview 2

From 2014 with scholar Forgacs about the period in Italian history when the film was made.

A look at all the sensational hullabaloo …

Interview 3

From 2014 with journalist Antonello Sarno.

Interview 4

From 1965 with Fellini.

By Irving R. Levine. This one has one of my favorite moments. Asked by Levine to name his favorite films, Fellini at first demurs, saying that he doesn’t watch much film. When pressed however, he names Bergman (he’d seen only Wild Strawberries and The Magician) and Kurosawa!

Presentation

Of La dolce vita ephemera from the “Felliniana” archive of collector Don Young.

Video essay

From 2014 by filmmaker Kogonada.

This nine-minute beaut is worth all the other extras combined!

Kogonada analyzes that potent POV shot when Steiner’s wife greets Marcello at the door and how the shot cleverly changes to an objective POV.

He also takes us through a gallery of films where the final shot is a fourth-wall break, like Paola’s unsettling glance at the camera … 400 Blows, Breathless, etc.

Fourth episode

Of Second Look, André Delvaux’s 1960 series of interviews with Fellini for Belgian television.

Again, Fellini being unable to speak about his creations. They are his “seasons.”

.

Documentary

From 2009 by Antoine de Gaudemaron on the making of La dolce vita, featuring archival footage and interviews with actor Aimée and assistant director Dominique Delouche, among others.

Excellent doc.

#733 only:

Audio interview

With actor Mastroianni from the early 1960s.

Extras Rating (0-40):

37

58 + 37 =

95

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