La Dolce Vita

50th ANNIVERSARY! │ It was fifty years ago this spring that maestro Federico Fellini began production on La Dolce Vita, one of his keystone works, and one of world cinema’s most fêted films. Shooting began on March 16, 1959; the famous Trevi Fountain scene, with Anita Ekberg, was filmed at the beginning of April; production wrapped in late August. The finished film would premiere, to great acclaim and a storm of controversy, in Rome in February 1960, and win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May of the same year.

Pacific Cinémathèque and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura join in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the making of Fellini's masterpiece. Five screenings, including two matinee presentations, will be presented April 9-13.

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Featuring Marcello Mastroianni is one of his signature roles, this panoramic portrait of contemporary Roman decadence — parties, paparazzi, and promiscuous sex — is one of the key films in the Fellini canon. With La Dolce Vita, Fellini inaugurated the cycle of ambitious, visually extravagant, episodic, self-conscious, autobiographical works that cemented his reputation as an artist of international stature and gave rise to the term “Felliniesque.” Marcello is a world-weary gossip columnist and would-be serious writer who is utterly compromised by the amorality and debauchery of the New Babylon in which he lives. Anita Ekberg co-stars as the latest Hollywood sex goddess, come to Italy to star in a Biblical epic. The film opens with one of the most celebrated sequences in the modern cinema: a huge statue of Christ being transported by helicopter over the rooftops of Rome. “Oh look, there’s Jesus!” exclaims a bikinied woman sunbathing on a terrace. La Dolce Vita’s Rome is a phantasmagoria of such contrasts: the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material, the Christian and the pagan, the miraculous and the orgiastic. The film was a great succès de scandale in its day; the Vatican denounced it as disgusting and immoral, and even Fellini’s mother was given to ask her son, “Why did you make such a picture?”  B&W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 174 mins.