Screening of Federico Fellini's masterpiece, with Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Alain Cuny.
Tribute to Anita Ekberg
Tribute to Anita Ekberg LA DOLCE VITA (1960)Screening of Federico Fellini's masterpiece, with Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Alain Cuny. The movie centres on Marcello Rubini, a writer from a provincial middle-class family, who has set aside his literary ambitions to become a fashionable gossip columnist and reporter on the sensational activities of the smart sybarites around the Via Veneto. They're an assortment of international aristocracy, showbiz folk, dubious nouveaux-riches, and their assorted hangers-on. He's a handsome, ambitious, morally weak character, played by Marcello Mastroianni, an established matinee idol in Italy who was to become an international star through this movie.Setting aside the small gestures, the delicate observation of daily life and the sympathetic characterisation associated with neo-realism, La Dolce Vita is a large-scale satire with grand set pieces and forceful visual metaphors. Its target is a godless society that has become a kind of hell (there are pointed references to Dante) and it has rightly been compared with TS Eliot's depiction of a moribund post-First World War Europe in The Waste Land. Cafe society figures are the new gods of this celebrity culture, and to expand the metaphor beyond Rome the film features actors from France, America, Sweden and England as well as Italy. Marcello is torn between the sweet life (mostly a world of night-time frolics and daytime hangovers) of which he is participant and observer, and the detached milieu of his mentor, the desiccated intellectual Steiner, who rails against modern corruption, but has little to offer in the way of constructive hope.Marcello is unfaithful to his self-pitying lover, Emma (British actor Yvonne Furneaux), and drawn both to the rich, nymphomaniac Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) and to the chimerical figure of the visiting Hollywood star, Sylvia (Anita Ekberg). Ekberg is virtually playing herself, inventing her own business and writing most of her own lines, while Lex Barker (a former screen Tarzan) as her drunken, abusive husband, is impersonating Ekberg's real-life husband, the actor Anthony Steel. In one of the picture's iconic scenes Ekberg wades into the Trevi Fountain, inviting Marcello to follow her. (The Guardian) In Italian, with English subtitles. Thursday, February 12th, 2015, at 19:00 Italian Cultural Institute rehov Meir Rutberg 12 – HaifaFREE ADMISSION