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Blcak and white: Italy fetes half century of Fellini's Dolce Vita
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-19 10:49

Blcak and white: Italy fetes half century of Fellini's Dolce Vita

Anita Ekberg (2nd L) is prepared for 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]

 

The notoriety only helped raise its profile outside Italy. "La Dolce Vita" went on to influence scores of directors and still leaves its mark on new generations.

"Even my students today say it has a moral message," said teacher Luisa Rizzo, taking her high school class to the convention. "They identify the false values, superficiality and anxieties of the film's characters with the society they live in today."

The Academy's 2009 exhibition, on "Fellini Oniricon-The Book of my Dreams", will open at its headquarters in Beverly Hills two days after the Oscar nominations. Fellini won five Oscars.

"There have been very few filmmakers who were able to transcend their moment in time and transfer their work across borders the way he did," said the Academy's Harrington.

"I think Fellini was a very moral filmmaker. He was very prophetic but at the same time he examined the range of human behaviour. 'La Dolce Vita' inspires a range of emotions -- lust, envy, desire, horror, repulsion," she said.

The huge two-volume work that will go to Hollywood consists of the nocturnal notes and sketches, many of them sexual, which Fellini quickly put to paper on waking in the night.

It is full of drawings of the type of big-busted and curvy women who populated his fantasies and films.

One entry is about a 1963 dream in which he has oral sex with Anita Ekberg while riding on a train in Italy.

"It would have been unthinkable to publish some of these 50 years ago when 'La Dolce Vita' came out," said Gianluigi Rossi, an Italian lawyer who was instrumental in the Academy show.

"Today, I don't think anybody is going to bat a eyelid."

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