A celebrity journalist drifts through Rome's high society over 7 days and nights (parties, scandals, spiritual apparitions, beautiful women) and finds nothing that satisfies him. It's Fellini's portrait of postwar Italian society as a magnificent void.
La Dolce Vita is a 1960 drama film directed by Federico Fellini. This breakdown covers 4 techniques (3 narrative and 1 cinematography), each with the scene where you can see it. If you like how it is made, Forrest Gump uses several of the same techniques.
Telling the story as a loose string of separate adventures, often following a low-status hero through different levels of society. With no single plot, the episodes add up to a portrait of a world.
How this film uses it
La Dolce Vita has no plot in the usual sense. It's a string of nights, each with its own world, its own cast and its own version of Roman excess. Marcello moves through them and doesn't change in the usual sense either. A picaresque is a story told as loose episodes like this. The film makes its point by piling them up: 7 days of beautiful emptiness that add up to a portrait of emptiness.
Where to see it
The transition between episodes. Marcello moves from the Steiner party to the Via Veneto to the country estate. Because the film works in episodes, each place is a fresh variation on the same spiritual void.
Changing the color, film texture and camera style for each time period, and using the fashion and architecture of the day. Every era gets its own distinct feel.
How this film uses it
The film is a visual catalog of Rome at the exact moment it was changing after the war: the Vespas, the paparazzi, the nightclubs, the aristocratic villas, the construction cranes. Otello Martelli's photography lets you read 1960 Rome as a specific moment in history. It's a society sitting between its Catholic past and its consumerist future, and it hasn't committed to either yet.
Where to see it
The Via Veneto sequences. The cafés, the fashion and the celebrities are all there. The film records what Rome looked like while its society was changing, the way a documentary would.
Using a party or celebration as the place where normal rules are dropped and characters show who they really are. Afterwards, order often comes back down hard.
How this film uses it
The Steiner party, the aristocratic party and the final beach party are all places where the beautiful life shows how empty it is. Fellini films parties as the moments when the Roman world is most itself: excessive, beautiful and completely hollow. I feel like nobody in this film relaxes at a party. It is where they are most fully exposed.
Where to see it
The aristocratic house party. People waste the late night away in a decaying castle outside Rome. The party shows how this class relates to its own history.
Ending the film where it started, or with a scene that echoes the opening. The repeat shows what has changed, or suggests the cycle will keep going.
How this film uses it
The film opens with a statue of Christ being airlifted over Rome, so religious authority looks down on worldly excess from above. It ends on a beach. A young girl calls to Marcello across the water, and he can't hear or understand her. The ending answers the opening, and that is how the film makes its point. After 7 days of the beautiful life, Marcello can no longer hear innocence, even when it is right in front of him.
Where to see it
The closing beach scene. Paola calls to Marcello with the sea between them. Marcello shrugs and walks away with the others from the party, and that brings the film back around to where it started.
Questions
La Dolce Vita: quick answers
What filmmaking techniques does La Dolce Vita use?
CineCode breaks down 4 techniques in La Dolce Vita (1960): Picaresque Structure, Era-Coded Visual Grammar, The Party as Transgression and Circular Structure.
Who directed La Dolce Vita?
Federico Fellini directed La Dolce Vita, released in 1960. CineCode also covers I Vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969).
What films are similar to La Dolce Vita?
Films that share techniques with La Dolce Vita include Forrest Gump (1994), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Catch Me If You Can (2002), Talk to Me (2023).
