
Actors Marcello Mastroianni (L) and Anita Ekberg perform a scene in the epic film "La Dolce Vita" by director Federico Fellini at Cinecitta Studios in Rome in 1959. Fellini's classic film "La Dolce Vita" is approaching the half-century mark and the director's hometown is pulling out the stops to give it a Felliniesque two-year-long international birthday bash.[Agencies]
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"Fellini was an artist whose influence, whose cultural and intellectual power, went far beyond cinema. His creativity, his drawings, his writings, the music he chose, influenced art and society in general," said Boarini.
Last week the foundation opened an exhibition called "The Books of My House," where devotees can see the volumes he kept at home that influenced him -- from comic books and murder mysteries to Freud and Socrates.
MORE FLESH IN A DEODORANT AD
"La Dolce Vita", starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg and Anouk Aimee, was considered scandalous at the time of its release but is quite tame by the standards of today, where more flesh can be seen in a television deodorant advert.
In seven loosely connected episodes, Mastroianni, playing reporter Marcello, covers the escapades of residual nobility, nouveau riche, starlets and hangers-on of the cafe set on Rome's Via Veneto as he struggles to find meaning in his own life.
A bored rich woman (Anouk Aimee) takes Marcello in her Cadillac to the squalid house of a prostitute because making love there would be more exciting than in her palatial estate.
In its emblematic scene, Sylvia, a towering phosphorescent blonde diva played by Ekberg, lures Marcello into a sensual midnight wade in the cold waters of Rome's Trevi Fountain.
In the film, Marcello chronicles events with his inseparable sidekick, a photographer whose last name is Paparazzo: the name now in dictionaries in nearly every language meaning aggressive street photographers.
"The phrase 'Dolce Vita' or 'the sweet life' and the word paparazzo have become part of every day American language," said Ellen Harrington of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in California.
"The film really foretold where we are at with the celebrity culture in America, which is so saturated and so over the top. The paparazzi are everywhere and my small children know the word already because our lives in Los Angeles are kind of impinged by the existence of these creatures," she said.