'La Dolce Vita'
PATRONIZE KANSAN ADVERTISERS
Film made to shock viewers
By NORMA C. ROMANO
THE FILM IS a bitter attack upon the degradation of a society of leisure and abundance; of modern paganism with all its sinful catalogue of pleasure seeking. Hypocrisy, cynicism and selfishness are overpoweringly exposed in an unflattering manner.
Fellini's vision is Christian. The film is directed toward a proof of the vulgarization of religion. In "La Dolce Vita" Fellini shows the emptiness of the mis-directed life in the vacant faces on the dance floor, in the motions of the photographers and in the
Ever since Federico Fellini launched his film "La Dolce Vita" in 1961,film reviewers throughout the world have discussed the film.
Undoubtedly, the film presents a picture which shocks the audience especially if the latter has not been, shall we say, trained into Fellini's perceptive vision. To begin with, the immediate impact of the film on our senses needs to be accepted, which is not at all that of a reasoned argument against a way of life and its representatives.
THE FIRST SEQUENCE, for example, probably symbolizes the present religious indifference (Christ passing over sunbathers). With its rich ambiguity this scene could also be translated as the tone of all that is to come.
The next sequence, the supposed vision of the Virgin; when the morning comes there are only a few subdued figures around the body of one who came in hopes of a miracle and only died in the crush: recourse to religion, also seems has failed.
From the first famous sequence of the three-hour film, in which an enormous statue of Christ is carried high over Rome suspended from a helicopter piloted by Marcello Mastroiani, to the last scene in which Mastroiani is left looking sadly across the stream at a "paradise" whose nature Fellini does not want to reveal, the film leads the viewer to a number of interpretations.
Probably the climax of the film is the chain of events which follow Steiner's (Alain Cuny) party.
stupid questions of the press interviews of Sylvia the Hollywood star (Anita Ekberg).
Steiner seems ideally happy with his family, his music, his
books, his civilized friends. Later on in the film, just before the final sequence, we see Marcello and Emma (Yvonne Furneaux, she plays the role of his mistress) are quarreling on the road at night and making up in the morning as news that Steiner, Marcelo's intellectual friend, has killed himself and his two children—probably in a supreme gesture to prevent his children from becoming members of a society rotten by its members.
"The film has been so much misunderstood as a piece of savage social criticism that I can only suppose this is not so obvious after all . . ." comments John Russell Taylor, film critic, in Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear.
The real and valuable of Fellini's legacy in "La Dolce Vita" is that he wants and makes each member of the viewing audience interpret individually his work.
FELLINI'S ROME has imaginative validity as a nightmare image of modern life.
Daily Kansan Monday, December 5, 1966
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