La Dolce Vita

01/08/2026

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With most filmmakers, the question of their authorship is an opinion rather than a fact. Many would agree that Hitchcock is more of an auteur than Irving Rapper, who, if known at all, is known for Now Voyager. Though Victor Fleming was behind two of the enduring classics of 1939 (Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz), few give him strong authorship status. But what about Federico Fellini, a filmmaker who, by the late sixties, incorporated his very name into the films he was making? While in 1962 Fellini directed 8 ½, reflecting the number of films he had made up to that point, when he released Satyricon in 1969, the poster incorporated his very name into the film’s title: Fellini Satyricon. Three years later, he released Fellini’s Roma.
La Dolce Vita could have been called Fellini’s Roma as well, but while Roma was set in the distant past, La Dolce Vita is so up-to-date that it can seem like a compendium of cliches it helped manufacture. It might not have been the first film to make the Vespa famous (Roman Holiday comes to mind), but it gave it an added nonchalance. The character who rides on it with his camera is called Paparazzo, giving the term paparazzi to the world. The Trevi Fountain wasn’t exactly unknown before Anita Ekberg took a dip in it, but she contributed to its world renown. Marcello Mastroianni was a well-known Italian actor before the film came out, but, after its release, he epitomised European chic at a time when Hollywood looked as if it was falling behind the old continent. European film at the beginning of the sixties was fashionable, managing to capture in cinematic style and onscreen detail a world of far greater elegance or vibrancy than Hollywood was capable of producing at the same moment. While Billy Wilder was making The Apartment, Hitchcock Psycho, and Stanley Kubrick Spartacus, Fellini was making La Dolce Vita, Godard Breathless and Antonioni L’avventura. All six are now classics, but the European films were capturing their time, Hollywood trying to catch up with the developments. Before 1960, Mastroianni might have been expected to go stateside and maximise his stardom; however, in the sixties, Europe was capable of producing its own cinematic celebrities: Alain Delon, Bridget Bardot, Sean Connery and Mastroianni amongst them. In the film, Mastroianni drives both a Triumph TR3A and a Lancia Flaminia Convertible, wears what commentators believe are Brioni suits, and gets to go to the best of parties. These range from the intellectually mordant to the casually exuberant, the cynically decadent to the exorbitantly aristocratic. And so he presents to the audience the sweet life of the title, no matter if his girlfriend attempts to take her life, a friend succeeds in doing so, and Marcello knows that he should be getting round to writing serious work, instead of for what he calls semi-fascist newspapers.
Fellini’s film perhaps better caught this period than any other movie of the early 1960s, and yet does this potentially undermine his auteur status? When we talk about the cars, the clothes and the houses where the parties take place, we aren’t only talking about Fellini’s vision, as we might Cezanne’s or Van Gogh’s, Joyce’s or Proust’s. In art and literature, the artists would seem much more responsible for the work they produce. No matter the reality they draw upon, the work remains the abstract consequence of their talent. In film, that talent passes through a recording device, employs numerous other people to make it happen, and puts in front of the screen what is already in some form or another there. Fellini didn’t create Anita Ekberg’s character as Joyce created Molly Bloom, and those cars and suits we see aren’t conjured up out of Fellini’s creative imagination, but from designs created by others. Film is an omnivorously larcenous medium, stealing from anything put in front of its lens. To claim for a film’s director authorial status may seem unreasonable, but if thieves end up in prison for the crimes they commit, then why shouldn’t filmmakers gain credit for their purloined images?
More importantly, many of the best filmmakers make images their own, recording the objects they film with a subjectivity that transforms the things they show. Fellini would be one such director, and numerous images in the film are memorable in their conception and execution. Let us take the opening and the conclusion. Against an ancient, ruined viaduct, the film shows us two helicopters passing through the air, the former showing an enormous statue of Jesus hanging from it, held by a rope. The helicopters move from the ancient to the modern as they hover over Rome, and we see from the second helicopter’s point of view the statue in the air and the modern housing below in the process of being built. The scene captures Rome vividly, as perhaps the most famous ancient city in the world, and its status as part of postwar European regeneration after the Mussolini years. It might also make us think of this city as the epicentre of Catholicism, home to the Vatican, even if the man finally held responsible for Christ’s execution was, of course, Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor in Judea. Fellini isn’t afraid of paradox, and the scene brilliantly captures a city in flux, one in the process of becoming modern. Yet the film is also one beholden to superstition — as we discover later when numerous locals go searching for a miracle and end up trampling to death a person hoping to be healed. A couple of kids claim they have seen the Madonna and the gathering hordes turn hysterical.
At the end of the film, after yet another late-night party, Marcello finds himself on the beach and sees a dead sea creature that, as he says, “is still staring.” Marcello sounds indifferent, yet we may wonder if he is speaking of himself and all the other dead creatures who can do little but stare, a paparazzi gaze that Marcello is implicated in but on occasion despises himself over possessing and multiplying. It is a symbol of sorts, just as Christ at the beginning is an unavoidable one. However, Fellini, like numerous filmmakers of the early sixties in Europe, wasn’t interested chiefly in generating symbolism. He wanted to reinvigorate the image by connotation - by suggesting that what we see needn’t be taken functionally, but neither should it be taken metaphorically either. When a film cuts to a gun or a knife, we usually view it functionally - will it be grabbed in time? When the film cuts to rain in the window pane, or to a fireplace, we know the film is metaphorically invoking tears or passion. But what if the image neither quite suggests the certitude of function, nor the assertiveness of metaphor? In such a question, the filmmaker can discover their own image structure and make the objects they show us serve an adjectival form. Those images of Christ in the sky against the incipient buildings, the presence of the sea creature on the beach as late-night revellers gather in the morning light, seem chiefly Felliniesque. They offer a vision just as Cezanne and Van Gogh do in their way.
With the images neither always pushing the story along, nor asking to be read metaphorically, filmmakers found they could perceive with greater freedom, and this extended to form. Shots needn’t be based on establishing shots, close-ups, shot/counter shots and numerous variations that would nevertheless leave the viewer clearly aware of what was significant. Instead, the filmmaker might wish to give such shots an autonomous function. When the theorist Andre Bazin proposed that “ellipsis is a narrative process…it presupposes analysis and choice”, and that “it organises the facts in accord with the general dramatic direction to which it forces them to submit.” (What is Cinema, Vol 2?) he was thinking of film as a medium of greater realism, not chiefly of authorship. Yet by removing film from its narrative demands, and refusing the image its abstract purpose as an implicit but clear designation (the rain; the fireplace), the directors Bazin admired, like Robert Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, could allow other Italian filmmakers after them, like Micherlangelo Antonioni and Fellini, authorial freedom; not only a higher degree of respect for the real than classic cinema would propose.
What, after all, do we make of the scene where Marcello rushes his partner Emma to hospital after the overdose and drives into what looks like a car park — but that happens to be a hospital. And who is the nun coming down the stairs, and what about the doctor who, when Marcello enters the room to find out how Emma is doing, has his foot up against the sink and is tying his shoelaces? Hospital hygiene may be lax, but we have already foregone realism, and everything will be suffused with the Felliniesque approach to narrative and locale. While we might be saddened by Emma’s despair, Marcello isn’t — as it doesn’t stop him trying to phone Maddalena, the woman he slept with the previous night. And maybe we shouldn’t feel too sad either, not because the film resists empathy, but because it accentuates energy and creativity. Whether it is Marcello feeling he can have it all, or Fellini filming locales without entertaining verisimilitude, the film asks us to suspend our judgements and immerse ourselves in a world. The film is set in Rome and uses numerous locations in the city: The Trevi Fountain, Bassano di Sutri, Parco degli Acquedotti, Passo Oscuro, Fregene. But it was also filmed in Cinecitta studios, as though the city itself could only meet a modicum of the director’s creative demands. Though Fellini was usually less formally insistent than Antonioni, more given to using establishing shots, close-ups and so on to keep us grounded in screen space, he was no less imaginatively demanding. He claimed: “I’m just a storyteller”, yet he also says “and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it re-creates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life itself than, say, painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies.” (Playboy)
Perhaps the final brilliance of the film rests in this approach to rhythm; that Fellini uses the form to change the cadence, so that rather than telling a story that develops, he insists on a tempo that constantly ebbs and flows between enthusiasm and despair, exuberance and devastation. Taking place over little more than a week, it shows Marcello, but also others, struggling to make decisions when so many options are available. Maddalena says she was never able to choose, and Marcello answers her with a paradox: “your desperation gives me strength.” The exchange takes place with a wall between them, and another man comes into the room Maddalena occupies and starts kissing her as Marcello continues speaking. Would he be able to devote himself to Maddalena; didn’t he, a couple of days earlier, show adoration towards the movie star, as though he would leave all if she would succumb to his advances? And Maddalena clearly can’t give herself exclusively to him. The film asks numerous questions about choosing when the wish is to have it all, and it might be a good way of comprehending the film and Fellini’s aesthetic. If La Dolce Vita were beholden to a conventional story’s demands, and the shot choices that would reflect its telling, autonomy would be limited and the Felliniesque contained. By instead allowing it to be about its characters' constantly fluctuating moods, and reflecting this vacillation, the film is one of many around this time that found new forms and created more distinct authorial visions.  Fellow Italian director and uncredited co-writer on La Dolce Vita, Pier Paolo Pasolini, said, in the ‘Cinema of Poetry’, that he could see in such cinema, “a new anthropological” type, especially evident in Godard, but there too in different ways in Antonioni, Bertolucci and clearly Fellini. Out of this type, he saw a new style was evident. “The great principle of wise filmmakers, in force up until the first years of the sixties” was to make the camera invisible. It “has been replaced by the opposite principle”, and Fellini was central to that visibility, and to an authorship that made the story and the form subordinate to a directorial vision.    

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

La Dolce Vita

With most filmmakers, the question of their authorship is an opinion rather than a fact. Many would agree that Hitchcock is more of an auteur than Irving Rapper, who, if known at all, is known for Now Voyager. Though Victor Fleming was behind two of the enduring classics of 1939 (Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz), few give him strong authorship status. But what about Federico Fellini, a filmmaker who, by the late sixties, incorporated his very name into the films he was making? While in 1962 Fellini directed 8 ½, reflecting the number of films he had made up to that point, when he released Satyricon in 1969, the poster incorporated his very name into the film’s title: Fellini Satyricon. Three years later, he released Fellini’s Roma.
La Dolce Vita could have been called Fellini’s Roma as well, but while Roma was set in the distant past, La Dolce Vita is so up-to-date that it can seem like a compendium of cliches it helped manufacture. It might not have been the first film to make the Vespa famous (Roman Holiday comes to mind), but it gave it an added nonchalance. The character who rides on it with his camera is called Paparazzo, giving the term paparazzi to the world. The Trevi Fountain wasn’t exactly unknown before Anita Ekberg took a dip in it, but she contributed to its world renown. Marcello Mastroianni was a well-known Italian actor before the film came out, but, after its release, he epitomised European chic at a time when Hollywood looked as if it was falling behind the old continent. European film at the beginning of the sixties was fashionable, managing to capture in cinematic style and onscreen detail a world of far greater elegance or vibrancy than Hollywood was capable of producing at the same moment. While Billy Wilder was making The Apartment, Hitchcock Psycho, and Stanley Kubrick Spartacus, Fellini was making La Dolce Vita, Godard Breathless and Antonioni L’avventura. All six are now classics, but the European films were capturing their time, Hollywood trying to catch up with the developments. Before 1960, Mastroianni might have been expected to go stateside and maximise his stardom; however, in the sixties, Europe was capable of producing its own cinematic celebrities: Alain Delon, Bridget Bardot, Sean Connery and Mastroianni amongst them. In the film, Mastroianni drives both a Triumph TR3A and a Lancia Flaminia Convertible, wears what commentators believe are Brioni suits, and gets to go to the best of parties. These range from the intellectually mordant to the casually exuberant, the cynically decadent to the exorbitantly aristocratic. And so he presents to the audience the sweet life of the title, no matter if his girlfriend attempts to take her life, a friend succeeds in doing so, and Marcello knows that he should be getting round to writing serious work, instead of for what he calls semi-fascist newspapers.
Fellini’s film perhaps better caught this period than any other movie of the early 1960s, and yet does this potentially undermine his auteur status? When we talk about the cars, the clothes and the houses where the parties take place, we aren’t only talking about Fellini’s vision, as we might Cezanne’s or Van Gogh’s, Joyce’s or Proust’s. In art and literature, the artists would seem much more responsible for the work they produce. No matter the reality they draw upon, the work remains the abstract consequence of their talent. In film, that talent passes through a recording device, employs numerous other people to make it happen, and puts in front of the screen what is already in some form or another there. Fellini didn’t create Anita Ekberg’s character as Joyce created Molly Bloom, and those cars and suits we see aren’t conjured up out of Fellini’s creative imagination, but from designs created by others. Film is an omnivorously larcenous medium, stealing from anything put in front of its lens. To claim for a film’s director authorial status may seem unreasonable, but if thieves end up in prison for the crimes they commit, then why shouldn’t filmmakers gain credit for their purloined images?
More importantly, many of the best filmmakers make images their own, recording the objects they film with a subjectivity that transforms the things they show. Fellini would be one such director, and numerous images in the film are memorable in their conception and execution. Let us take the opening and the conclusion. Against an ancient, ruined viaduct, the film shows us two helicopters passing through the air, the former showing an enormous statue of Jesus hanging from it, held by a rope. The helicopters move from the ancient to the modern as they hover over Rome, and we see from the second helicopter’s point of view the statue in the air and the modern housing below in the process of being built. The scene captures Rome vividly, as perhaps the most famous ancient city in the world, and its status as part of postwar European regeneration after the Mussolini years. It might also make us think of this city as the epicentre of Catholicism, home to the Vatican, even if the man finally held responsible for Christ’s execution was, of course, Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor in Judea. Fellini isn’t afraid of paradox, and the scene brilliantly captures a city in flux, one in the process of becoming modern. Yet the film is also one beholden to superstition — as we discover later when numerous locals go searching for a miracle and end up trampling to death a person hoping to be healed. A couple of kids claim they have seen the Madonna and the gathering hordes turn hysterical.
At the end of the film, after yet another late-night party, Marcello finds himself on the beach and sees a dead sea creature that, as he says, “is still staring.” Marcello sounds indifferent, yet we may wonder if he is speaking of himself and all the other dead creatures who can do little but stare, a paparazzi gaze that Marcello is implicated in but on occasion despises himself over possessing and multiplying. It is a symbol of sorts, just as Christ at the beginning is an unavoidable one. However, Fellini, like numerous filmmakers of the early sixties in Europe, wasn’t interested chiefly in generating symbolism. He wanted to reinvigorate the image by connotation - by suggesting that what we see needn’t be taken functionally, but neither should it be taken metaphorically either. When a film cuts to a gun or a knife, we usually view it functionally - will it be grabbed in time? When the film cuts to rain in the window pane, or to a fireplace, we know the film is metaphorically invoking tears or passion. But what if the image neither quite suggests the certitude of function, nor the assertiveness of metaphor? In such a question, the filmmaker can discover their own image structure and make the objects they show us serve an adjectival form. Those images of Christ in the sky against the incipient buildings, the presence of the sea creature on the beach as late-night revellers gather in the morning light, seem chiefly Felliniesque. They offer a vision just as Cezanne and Van Gogh do in their way.
With the images neither always pushing the story along, nor asking to be read metaphorically, filmmakers found they could perceive with greater freedom, and this extended to form. Shots needn’t be based on establishing shots, close-ups, shot/counter shots and numerous variations that would nevertheless leave the viewer clearly aware of what was significant. Instead, the filmmaker might wish to give such shots an autonomous function. When the theorist Andre Bazin proposed that “ellipsis is a narrative process…it presupposes analysis and choice”, and that “it organises the facts in accord with the general dramatic direction to which it forces them to submit.” (What is Cinema, Vol 2?) he was thinking of film as a medium of greater realism, not chiefly of authorship. Yet by removing film from its narrative demands, and refusing the image its abstract purpose as an implicit but clear designation (the rain; the fireplace), the directors Bazin admired, like Robert Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, could allow other Italian filmmakers after them, like Micherlangelo Antonioni and Fellini, authorial freedom; not only a higher degree of respect for the real than classic cinema would propose.
What, after all, do we make of the scene where Marcello rushes his partner Emma to hospital after the overdose and drives into what looks like a car park — but that happens to be a hospital. And who is the nun coming down the stairs, and what about the doctor who, when Marcello enters the room to find out how Emma is doing, has his foot up against the sink and is tying his shoelaces? Hospital hygiene may be lax, but we have already foregone realism, and everything will be suffused with the Felliniesque approach to narrative and locale. While we might be saddened by Emma’s despair, Marcello isn’t — as it doesn’t stop him trying to phone Maddalena, the woman he slept with the previous night. And maybe we shouldn’t feel too sad either, not because the film resists empathy, but because it accentuates energy and creativity. Whether it is Marcello feeling he can have it all, or Fellini filming locales without entertaining verisimilitude, the film asks us to suspend our judgements and immerse ourselves in a world. The film is set in Rome and uses numerous locations in the city: The Trevi Fountain, Bassano di Sutri, Parco degli Acquedotti, Passo Oscuro, Fregene. But it was also filmed in Cinecitta studios, as though the city itself could only meet a modicum of the director’s creative demands. Though Fellini was usually less formally insistent than Antonioni, more given to using establishing shots, close-ups and so on to keep us grounded in screen space, he was no less imaginatively demanding. He claimed: “I’m just a storyteller”, yet he also says “and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it re-creates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life itself than, say, painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies.” (Playboy)
Perhaps the final brilliance of the film rests in this approach to rhythm; that Fellini uses the form to change the cadence, so that rather than telling a story that develops, he insists on a tempo that constantly ebbs and flows between enthusiasm and despair, exuberance and devastation. Taking place over little more than a week, it shows Marcello, but also others, struggling to make decisions when so many options are available. Maddalena says she was never able to choose, and Marcello answers her with a paradox: “your desperation gives me strength.” The exchange takes place with a wall between them, and another man comes into the room Maddalena occupies and starts kissing her as Marcello continues speaking. Would he be able to devote himself to Maddalena; didn’t he, a couple of days earlier, show adoration towards the movie star, as though he would leave all if she would succumb to his advances? And Maddalena clearly can’t give herself exclusively to him. The film asks numerous questions about choosing when the wish is to have it all, and it might be a good way of comprehending the film and Fellini’s aesthetic. If La Dolce Vita were beholden to a conventional story’s demands, and the shot choices that would reflect its telling, autonomy would be limited and the Felliniesque contained. By instead allowing it to be about its characters' constantly fluctuating moods, and reflecting this vacillation, the film is one of many around this time that found new forms and created more distinct authorial visions.  Fellow Italian director and uncredited co-writer on La Dolce Vita, Pier Paolo Pasolini, said, in the ‘Cinema of Poetry’, that he could see in such cinema, “a new anthropological” type, especially evident in Godard, but there too in different ways in Antonioni, Bertolucci and clearly Fellini. Out of this type, he saw a new style was evident. “The great principle of wise filmmakers, in force up until the first years of the sixties” was to make the camera invisible. It “has been replaced by the opposite principle”, and Fellini was central to that visibility, and to an authorship that made the story and the form subordinate to a directorial vision.    

© Tony McKibbin