I watched Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) last night. It is a welcome break from the diet of movies of the Hollywood publicity machine. Suprisingly, I hadn't seen it, nor the earlier films---La Strada, Il Bidone, Le Notti di Cabiria. I'm not even sure if I have seen 8 1/2 (1963) from the "good old days" of art cinema and reading Sight and Sound. Of the latter fiilms, I've seen Roma, Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon, but not Amarcord or Casanova.

In La Dolce Vita long, episodic film of loosely connected tableaus or scenes. Fellini turns his critical gaze onto the swinging party postwar lifestyle of Rome's rich and famous---Rome in the 1950's amidst the postwar capitalism boom. Fellini explores what is behind the surface of the glamorous facade of society's respectable elite, and depiction is a decadent society that has become nihilistic. Life has become empty and meaningless. As we drift through life we become less and less human, more disconnected from others, and ever more lonely.

This theme is shot in black and white and is shown in a number of different situations about sex, drugs and alcohol of the celebrity lifestyle, connected by a narrative of decline: a journalist writing gossip (and a frustrated writer) decends into narcissism, self-indulgence and meanness. There is none of Nietzsche's transvaluation of values here.

Though currently out of fashion, Fellini is part of the canon of the high culture of American-European film history, with its assumption of the academic aesthetic opposition of art vs. entertainment. He departs from the neorealism of Italian cinema, with its dictum that is character determined by historical circumstance to a view of the personalized character steered, for better or worse, by his or her subjectivity. He highlighted the fabrication in neo-realism cinema by showing the authorship and the fantastic, and transgresses its realist aesthetic which held that films, like literature, are supposed to depict reality, i.e. represent the life of the common people.