Part of Essential Fellini.
The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, LA DOLCE VITA rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success — ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight. This mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip and fame-obsessed our society would become. (Winner of the 1960 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival)
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna, in association with The Film Foundation, Pathé, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Mediaset-Medusa, Paramount Pictures, Istituto Luce – Cinecittà, and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale, with funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
“His best films live and breathe and morph, none more so than the picaresque LA DOLCE VITA, which may be his most nearly perfect, astutely rueful, least sentimental work…. One of the most prescient of all films...” —Gary Giddins, Criterion Channel’s The Current “A biting condemnation of throwaway ‘pop’ culture and the cult of celebrityhood, which also coined the term paparazzi for tabloid photographers…. With LA DOLCE VITA, Fellini ended his first great decade as a filmmaker.” —Wheeler Winston Dixon, Senses of Cinema “For a dizzying moment in the disorientated postwar era, cinema and Federico Fellini put Rome at the centre of the world.” —Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
