La Dolce Vita (1960)

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Dir. Federico Fellini

France-Italy

From http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/la-dolce-vita.jpg

If cinema is left to be mere museum pieces under the titles of ‘classic’ and ‘masterpiece of art’, then we’ll leave it to become fossilised when it should breathing with life continually. A ‘canon’ of filmmaking should be vibrant for the sake of the viewer, naive and obsessed, not the death sentence it feels for me. Citizen Kane (1941) cannot be viewed as an actual film, rather than an academic essay project, thanks to this botching of the code of filmic history. The paparazzi in Fellini’s film could be remade into overeager film writers, stripping off the cinematic magic of certain films by overexposing them without good taste. There is a fine line between showing these films in cinema studies classes and in retrospective writings, and merely making them technical and glossary showcases when they are great films for being cathartic, heart stirring and entertaining too. My viewing of Bicycle Thieves (1948) for the first time this year, the start of a loving relationship with Italy along with all the grubby trollops of joy of their genre filmmaking, made me realise this horrifying paradox fully. All I knew of this film was that it was an important film for Italian neo-realism and that, before Citizen Kane, it was number #1 on the first Sight & Sound poll. That is a crime that should be forced upon all of us film connoisseurs in that no one has - from what I’ve read as a regular film buff to educate myself - talked about its humour, its emotional power, and how even now, especially now, it’s portrait of a man desperate for work only for fate to go against him is still relevant. What place has Bicycle Thieves been put into however? A mere archival piece, a footnote of importance in history for Italian and global cinema which people only see, like myself, when they are on their ‘going through the classics before you die’ binge. It’s pathetic that, just like in literature, music and art, we still neuter the majesty of films like this by making them academic studies only, and while I adored my school academic routings through the library DVD collection, dear God we give these films worse fates than being fully forgotten. The forgotten ones get found again, released by a DVD company like Masters of Cinema and loved as if they are new and still films that grab us by the throats.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AI0XtK1mbaA/TzU9vXp9RSI/AAAAAAAAFF0/Vqkhb2zKkj8/s1600/ladolce3.jpg

La Dolce Vita is another Italian film that has suffered from this. It is known as one of the best films made by director Federico Fellini and is known for its sequence with Anita Ekberg in a water fountain, but what is the film actually about? It’s about a man, played with a considered grace even at his character’s most detestable by Marcello Mastroianni, played with consideration but able to break down when his world does, who is stuck in life. He could become a great writer, even a great one in journalism his existing trade, but is too intoxicated by the celebratory hedonism he and the swarm-like proto paparazzi celebrate to step back from it. He has a devoted fiancée, but cannot stay with her and sleeps around, and cannot leave her either. He cannot become more than a hanger-on at drunken parties even though he has a masculine beauty, charm and intelligence to win in life if he used them. Regardless of class, he is a representative of all of us, working to high class, any ethnicity, even any gender, who can have it all but is either scared to move in any direction or has no idea where to go. He as a character, with this film, is also still relevant in this day and age beyond that obnoxious chime of it being just being ‘one of the best films of all time’ without no connection to why it go this title in the first place. It’s also more than just the image of the busty and fleshy “doll” of American bubbliness, played wonderfully by Anita Ekberg in respect to her part, who graces all the posters and clips of the film, as she is part of a vast array of characters and events which make up the film and are all important within it.

From http://www.amieflanagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/dolcevita4.jpg

Following Mastroiannai’s character through his travels and courses, the film is truly cinematic but shares a tone only seen in literature and this kind of classical cinema, where it presents itself as events and images but needs the viewer to do the footwork to bring their own meanings and emotional context to the film to connect them and get the most from the results. Even the best genre and pulp work, even schlock to fairytales, need the viewer to do this to get the most from them, but La Dolce Vita is a prime example of the sort of cinema far from the infantilism we’ve had shoved down our throats for my generation of twenty something year olds (and the generation after us). The Rome depicted in the film is extravagant and passionate, but is in a stupor and lost. Intellectuals who could help the world are just intellectuals stuck in their middle class homes away from the poverty filled back streets, and people still cling onto spirituality, wonderful at first in a vignette of a miracle taking place Mastroiannai goes to report, but perverted by the media and the desperation of the believers. Far from a cynical view on my part, it is more sadness of how lacking people are that a simple, perfect symbol, a sapling tree, is decimated by a mass of people grabbing for holy charms unable to control their despair. Mastroiannai’s Marcello is the same, having the ability to use his fly-on-the-wall nature to see the world more fully than others, but too liable to shrink in his corner instead anywhere he goes unless he is blind drunk or destructive. His father, before the after celebration drop, is able to juggle a luridness with grace and tenderness when he goes to a club with his son and charms one of the female dancers, but Marcello is only able to show himself fully to a person, a paparazzi friend who tags along, when his father is on the dance floor and he is almost by himself. The ‘Sweet Life’, as the title translates into, is besieged by hesitation and fear of directness.

From http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/d/o/u/douceur-de-vivre-1960-54-g.jpg

The film is a visual feast around this as well; despite being before his full blown delving into the baroque and dreams, it still straddles the line, in evocative black and white, between the odd and realistic for Fellini, opening with the startling image of the Second Coming of Christ by means of helicopter. It perfectly conveys the world Marcello lives in, a place of excess and urban carnival that is beautiful in his highs, like the sad trombonist and his sentient balloons, but ugly and off putting when he is at his lowest. Fellini’s admiration for all – prostitutes of all kinds, the drunk, the heavily made-up and down-and-out – is admirable and humanistic to the greatest extent, able to show a glamour that warms the viewer’s heart while never neglecting the down trodden and showing their pride and charisma. And it adds to the idea I gained from the film, of people stuck in their positions, unless they were already happy, who like Marcello are unable to move in a new decade but do not have the existential crisis he had. Unfortunately for one, as Marcello finds out, there are worse that he could have felt. When he stares into the eyes of a mirror image dragged out of the ocean in the last scene, as a warning to him or a sign that he is too late to be able to change, the sign of where Fellini would go with his obsessions with the surreal would take over is shown but he at least knew how to use it properly.

From http://clothesonfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/La-Dolce-Vita_Marcello-Mastroianni-sunglasses-top-11.jpg

Never view films like this as a ‘classic’; if its fifty or more years old, it does not matter as long as you are taking in by it or not. We as film obsessives and scholars, worse than the person who dismisses viewing these movies because they are black-and-white and in another language, can destroy these films far more brutally by shelving them into ‘Best of Cinema’ lists and auteur dissection without thinking of the primal joys or sadnesses one feels for films like this. It is not merely one of the best films by Federico Fellini, it is a great film because it is from a director who knew how to craft something passionate and thoughtful, that should be shown on any TV station, not just BBC4, because anyone could fall in love with it. Elitist attitudes to cinema will kill the darlings rather than for them to be dismissed as ‘old’ by the apparent mainstream who watches films while texting on their phones; the over nerdy, pedantic intellectualism, rather than vital film education, will drain the life out of cinema that could survive any neglect because of the viewers who would keep them alive and relevant regardless. Being on the greatest films ever list is probably a worst fate for a film like La Dolce Vita now because we can pretend to have seen it, as we view it, and believe it to be great rather than see them as the creations of others we can adore. La Dolce Vita, alongside Bicycle Thieves, are films I adore now on these first viewings, and even if I write lists where they are on them, it’s just a surface sign to how I admire them as wonderful films.

From http://stopglobalairwaveabuse.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/la-dolce-vita-paparazzi.jpg