La Dolce Vita

All right, Steve and Ann will be right back, but first, another stop on the Hollywood tour.

Pretty much everyone has seen director Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

It's the 1960 film with Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni.

Now, is there another more famous and memorable scene from Italian cinema than that Trevi Fountain midnight romp? I mean, who can visit or even think about this iconic Roman fountain without conjuring up that scene, even if you haven't seen the full three-hour movie? While the fountain scene lasts only about two minutes in the film, it took a week of filming in early March of 1959 under chilly Roman skies.

Well, that added color to the water, and it satisfied Fellini.

And since the movie's presented in black and white, that's a detail we can only imagine.

This is in the perfect keeping with one storyline of La Dolce Vita itself, the work that launched the phrase paparazzi for the first time.

That describes the intrusive photographers that surrounded celebrities in the newly post-war, sparkling, and chic city of Rome in the late 1950s and early '60s.

As Kim Newman points out in his book Nightmare Movies, quote, He creates a style-obsessed, emotionally frigid modern world that provides the perfect context for his callous stories and shatteringly staged violence.

Whereas before the war, Italian filmgoers aspired to, or at worst envied, La Dolce Vita, Argento's audience insists the haute bourgeoisie should suffer for their privilege by dying in elaborate agony.

End quote.

And modern and style-obsessed is certainly one way to describe Tenebrae, which, unlike the director's earlier films, avoids the depiction of anything that might be remotely described as classical or historic.

Every character returns in a different form.

La Dolce Vita ends with a girl on a beach calling to Marcelo across the water, and he cannot hear her.

Eight and a Half ends with a circle of hands.

Amarcord ends with a ship passing in the fog, the same fog it began with.

But also, funnily enough, it's it's very prescient of other kind of tabloid journalism films that wouldn't come out for a few more years.

You think of Sweet Smell of Success in the US and La Dolce Vita, you know, and that was 57 in 1960, you know, respectively.

So it's kind of a little bit ahead of its time in a way as well in terms of like really pushing back on showing the dirty side of this kind of journalism.

Yeah.

Then a great episode with the film director, Joe Maggio, whose tales about growing up in working class Buffalo could have come straight out of a screenplay.

What is your next brilliant thing? My next brilliant thing is the film, La Dolce Vita, which- I

know

nothing

And like everything is there, the great themes that they're gonna be wrestling with.

You can divine them right from the beginning.

And in La Dolce Vita, La Dolce Vita opens with a helicopter carrying a giant statue of Jesus over Rome.

And it's this enormous thing and everyone's looking up and it's casting these long shadows on the ground and the children are running and chasing the helicopter.

So i- in many ways, you could take this as a veiled, uh, the, a veiled reference to the threat of America, which is the Jews and their, their ide- their, uh, ideology.

But it's, uh, I, I've always said the, if you want a cultural reference point to understand th- the times, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, I think you should, uh, watch Federico Fellini's film, uh, La Dolce Vita.

Okay.

Uh, because Totaviani and, Pr- Ottaviani's preliminary documents and were written at the same time as Fellini's movie, La Dolce Vita, came out.

It was a big scandalous movie, uh, about...

What's it about? It's basically about the Americanization of Italy.

They love being over here, and so on and so forth, uh, but they're destroying our culture.

Yeah.

So i- in many ways you could take this as a veiled, uh, the, a veiled reference to the threat of America, which is the Jews and their, their ide- their, uh, ideology.

But it's, uh, I, I've always said that if you want a cultural reference point to understand th- the times, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, I think you should, uh, watch Federico Fellini's film, uh, La Dolce Vita.

Okay.

Uh, because Ottaviani and, Ottaviani's preliminary documents and were written at the same time as Fellini's movie, La Dolce Vita, came out.

It was a big scandalous movie, uh, about...

What's it about? It's basically about the Americanization of Italy.

They love being over here, and so on and so forth, uh, but they're destroying our culture.

Yeah.

The term comes from paparazzo, a persistent news photographer character in, um...

I think it was in a film, La Dolce Vita, right? It came from that.

Using long-term range, uh, telephoto lenses, hiding, chasing subjects in vehicles.

You know, it's, it's, it's also very controversial in my opinion.

[upbeat music] What is your next brilliant thing?

Uh, my next brilliant thing is the film La Dolce Vita, which-

Right, I know nothing about this film

...

Right.

You c- you can divine them right from the beginning.

And in La Dolce Vi- uh, La Dolce Vita opens with a helicopter carrying a giant statue of Jesus over Rome, and it's just, it's this enormous thing, and everyone's looking up, and it's casting these long shadows on the ground, and the children are running and chasing the helicopter.

And then there's this follow helicopter of this journalist, uh, played by, um, Marcello Mastroianni.