Federico Fellini’s epic charts a week in the life of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) as the excesses of modern Roman life go on around him.

Beginning with the startling image of a statue of Christ being transported over the city by helicopter, Fellini’s three-hour panorama of the contemporary Roman ‘good life’ marked a decisive turning point in the director’s career. Leaving behind his small-scale, realism-rooted dramas of the 50s, this episodic story of a tabloid reporter’s comings and goings within the decadent upper reaches of modern Italian society found Fellini moving in a flamboyant new direction.

The film’s atmosphere of moral lassitude, together with its then scandalous sexual frankness, created a popular sensation, introducing the world to the word paparazzi. Together with Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), its modernity of form and subject matter ushered Italian arthouse cinema into the 1960s. The image of Anita Ekberg cavorting in the Trevi fountain is one of the era’s most iconic.

“Socially and historically a landmark film, sensing, influencing and ambivalently critiquing the role of media, gossip, hedonism and celebrity in modern culture – but all done with brio, scale and complexity achieved with an astonishing lightness of touch, utterly confident in itself as cinema.” Richard Dyer

“Sprawling, infuriating, profoundly inventive – a film world populated by beautiful and sinister creatures that never ceases to surprise.” Belén Vidal

“An acrid romp through a demi-monde choking to death on its own ennui-fuelled excess. We’re all still being deadened by the same cultural hollowness depicted here, just without any of the glamour, our present as garish and frightful as that fish on the beach. If you’re gonna overdose on beauty, you might as well have Anita Ekberg around.” Charles Bramesco

Film	Year	Director
La dolce vita	1960	Federico Fellini
Barry Lyndon	1975	Stanley Kubrick
Le Mépris	1963	Jean-Luc Godard
The Battle of Algiers	1966	Gillo Pontecorvo
Love Streams	1984	John Cassavetes
Catch-22	1970	Mike Nichols
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence	1982	Nagisa Oshima
Walkabout	1970	Nicolas Roeg
The Beguiled	2017	Sofia Coppola
TRAVOLTI DA UN INSOLITO DESTINO NELL'AZZURRO MARE D'AGOSTO	1975	Lina Wertmüller

Pia Marais

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