Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's La Notte

La Dolce Vita and La Notte: The Age of Despair and Desperation

The words of the character Steiner in La Dolce Vita (1960), before he kills his two young children and commits suicide, crystallise the pervasive sense of fear in post-World War II Europe in the age of the atom bomb and Modernism.[1]

STEINER. Sometimes the night, this darkness, this calm, weighs on me. It is peace that makes me afraid … Perhaps because I distrust it above everything. I feel that it’s it only an appearance, that it hides a danger.  Sometimes, too, I think of the world that my children will know. They say that the world of the future will be wonderful. But what does that mean? It needs only the gesture of a madman to destroy everything …

His face, reflected in the window, bears an expression of deep sadness and pain.

No, we should live more in the spirit of those phrases I read to you just now. Don’t you agree. Or rather, we should come to love one another outside of time, beyond time. Detached … To live detached ….  (Fellini 136) 

Tullio Pinelli (1908-2009), scriptwriter on La dolce vita, may have found inspiration for the character of Steiner in Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), who had committed suicide ten years earlier.[2]

A more fitting biographical source for Steiner would instead be the suicidal Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), a childhood friend of Tullio Pinelli and his brother Carlo, to whom they had written letters in an attempt to help him find respite in the Christian faith. … During an interview Pinelli provides an enlightening description of Steiner:

[Steiner] is an anticipation of what happens every day. This episode is entirely mine. I suggested and wrote it. Unfortunately, the evening at Steiner’s house has been rewritten and is completely different from what I had done, resulting in one of the worst episodes of the film. However, I said this to Federico, “Be careful because here you did something that communicates that the person kills himself because of the type of friends he has, and naturally so.” At the beginning, though, it was different.  Steiner had to kill himself because of desperation, out of happiness. Someone who arrives at the apex of happiness, of life’s sweetness, with a beautiful, faithful and loving wife, with his beautiful children, knows that he has reached a dead end and therefore kills himself and his children. It is not an isolated event. It is truly what is happening on an immeasurably larger scale. This an exceptional episode in the film; it is not in the same tone as the other parts; it stands out. In my opinion it is one of the most farsighted moments on what is happening now. (Pacchioni 34)

Suicide was for Pavese a constant companion: “I know that I am forever condemned to think of suicide when faced with no matter what difficulty or grief. It terrifies me. My basic principle is suicide, never committed, never to be committed, but the thought of it caresses my sensibility” (Pavese 32, 10 April 1936).  

Despair at the threatened dislocation of Italian culture pervades three jewels of Italian literature: The Skin (La pelle), originally published in Italian in 1949,  by Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957), a visceral dissection of the Neapolitan character in the face of the catastrophes of war and deprivation; The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), originally published in Italian in 1958 by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), a story of the humanity and nobility of the Sicilian  character and way of life under threat from the crumbling of aristocratic authority; and Tra Donne Sole (Among Women Only), originally published in Italian in 1949, by Cesare Pavese, a story of disintegration among the haute bourgeoisie set in his home-town of Turin. Among Women Only was adapted in 1955 by Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007), The Leopard by Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) in 1963, and The Skin by Liliana Cavani in 1981. This radical interaction between Italian literature and film marked post-war Italian cinema.

If post-war Italian cinema is generally regarded as stylistically innovative, thematically subversive or defiant and driven by a strong political agenda, my claim is that the specific qualities should be read in close relation to Italian cinema’s penchant for radical self-reflexivity, i.e. for its wilful desire to test and exceed the intrinsic limits of filmic representation. (Vighi 11)

Two key films of Italian auteur cinema of the early 1960s: La Dolce Vita (1960) and La Notte (1961) reflect the nihilism and pessimism that pervaded Italian society after the trauma of Mussolini’s dictatorship and the catastrophic consequences of his alliance with Hitler.[3]

La Dolce Vita (1960), featuring Marcello Mastroianni as Marcello as a disillusioned journalist, with music composed by Nino Rota (1911-1979), was shot in 1959 in Rome and the nearby seaside town of Passo Oscuro. Its loosely interconnected scenes reflect the dissolution of traditional morals in Italian society, most notably in the striptease scene featuring the actress Nadine Gray (1923-1994).

“La Dolce Vita,” Federico Fellini’s film that came to define the liberated era that inspired it, began with an impromptu striptease in a Roman trattoria fifty-one years ago. In November 1958, Peter Howard Vanderbilt threw the 24^th birthday party for his friend, Venetian countess Olghina di Robilant at Rugantino. The party was uneventful until an Armenian dancer (and assumedly uninvited) Aïché Nana ran to the dance floor, started dancing by herself, pulling down her suspenders and stripping. The police commissar attending the party ordered his men to throw her out and made the photographers hand over their film. However, one of the photographers, Tazio Secchiaroli, held onto his photos of the striptease, and next morning Rome woke to the headlines about “Roman orgy at Rugantino’s”. Thus was born the famous “orgy” sequence of La dolce vita, where Nadia Gray celebrated her divorce with a striptease scene. (Selwyn-Holmes)

Several of the initial scenes of La dolce vita were shot on the via Veneto but only late at night due to city regulations, which led to the reconstruction of parts of the street in Studio 5 at the Cinecittà film studios. 

June 1959. … Fellini is finally shooting La Dolce Vita at Cinecittá. In a studio, he has put together a piece of Via Veneto, not the corner where the poet lived but the more crowded corner by the Café de Paris. Standing in front of that implacable reconstruction I almost started laughing, but immediately afterwards a rabid melancholy took hold of me. In a projection room, I saw a few passages from the film. Fellini’s elated portrait, his amplification of that world of Via Veneto conjures up the image of the wax museum, of the images of Lenten preachers as they describe the flesh putrefying and corrupting. It reminds me of those big paintings of Valdes Leal that are at the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville, where ornamental scrolls float over the cadavers of bishops and read: Finis gloriae mundi. Fellini a Lenten preacher? It’s a tempting hypothesis. (Flaiano 65)

The choice of the Via Veneto as a key location embodied the cultural and historical resonance of the city.

Via Veneto, originally named in the last decade of the nineteenth century for the destroyed villa of Cardinal Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV, was renamed via Vittorio Veneto after the Italian victory in World War I. The neighbourhood that the street passes through is called Ludovisi, also known as the “neighborhood of the regions” because of its place-names. The street runs up from Bernini’s Triton Fountain in Piazza Barberini to the ancient wall at Porta Pinciana. There are two rows of plane trees and bushes along it, flanked by the neo-baroque, ornate Liberty and Fascist architecture that had come into fashion. The idea of having bars in hotels dates to the late 1800s, but via Veneto took their place at the center of the worldly, intellectual society between the two world wars, with scores of cafés –like Rosati, Strega-Zeppa, Doney, and later, Café de Paris – setting tables outside in the spring and summer and staying open late into the night. (Kezich 194)

Marcello ties together the episodic structure of the film, although he remains an essentially passive character desperately trying to imprint his personality onto the various dramas in which he participates - whether at the Caracalla nightclub, the Fountain of Trevi, or the party at Riccardo’s villa - but he lacks the talent to convince his audience.

The modern antihero is acted upon rather than controlling what surrounds him. In La dolce vita, one may argue that beauty and spectacle act upon Marcello and render him passive: a spectator rather than an agent of action (Pravadelli 242).

Only in his interaction with Paola, the waitress he meets at a small bar in the seaside town of Fregena, does Marcello appear authentic, perhaps because he is free of the expectations of his social circle, a point highlighted in the final scene of the film where he sees her at the beach, but their tentative rapprochement is broken by his friends calling him away.  Apart from this glimmer of hope, Marcello is represented as trapped between transient desire for female beauty represented by Sylvia, played by Anita Eckberg, and the intellectual Maddalena played by Anouk Aimée (Pravadelli 243). His mistress Emma , played by Yvonne Furneaux, offers the prospect of a secure relationship but the vista of cloying domesticity drives him to alternate between self-destructive rage and guilt.

La Notte (1961), shot in black and white, and starring Jeanne Moreau as Lidia and Marcello Mastroianni as Giovanni, was the second in a series of films by Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) in the early 1960s - L’Avventura (1960), L’Eclisse (1963) and Il Deserto Rosso (1964).  

Compared with the relative spaciousness of L’avventura, La notte, all of which takes place in less than twenty-four hours in and about Milan, promotes an Aristotelian intensity of time, place and action that gives each tiny gesture of its characters, each minute alteration in its story, immense incremental value. Unlike the earlier film, it has a minimal plot that is easy to follow, as are the motivations of its characters who are troubled, certainly, but who remain relatively clear-cut and stable. Identities seem less fluid here than in L’avventura, and, although curious camera angles continue to be used, the film is somewhat less formally experimental and contains a great deal less in the way of unconventional ellipses and cuts. Yet Antonioni’s reliance on striking visual images, spatial juxtapositions, emotional suggestion and nuance, ambient noises, and formal qualities of line, shape and texture - rather than on the traditional resources of narrative – continues.  Dialogue is also much more significant in this film. In L’avventura dialogue was so sparse as to be merely one more signifying element, on a par with ambient noise, music and visual imagery, rather than occupying its normally dominant position. In La notte, there is a barrage of it, as if, having been so painfully reticent in L’avventura, the medium itself has to burst forth, using all its resources. This investment in dialogue, in language, is of course exactly appropriate to a story set in Milan, Italy’s intellectual capital, especially a story about a writer. (Brunette 52)

La Notte follows the two main characters over a period of twenty-four hours: starting with a visit to a hospital by Giovanni, a successful writer, and his wife Lidia, to visit their dying mutual friend Tommaso, Lidia’s nostalgic visit to Sesto San Giovanni a district in the suburbs of Milan where she previously lived with Giovanni,[4] a scene in a nightclub, the scenes at a party at the Gherardinis, and ending in a park at dawn with a forlorn attempt by Giovanni to sexually arouse Lidia.

While the encounter with Tommaso leads her [Lidia] to search for alternatives to a culture of indifference and collective assurance, at the nightclub, where Giovanni is content to find distraction from domestic emptiness, she formulates the decisive “pensiero” she later will juxtapose to his boredom and disclose as a nihilistic despair over the awareness that she no longer loves him. Moving in temporal as well as spatial dimensions, she exposes the present as a time between a determined past and an already concluded future. (Haaland 608)

Lidia’s attempt in the nightclub to crystalize her discontent in words, can be seen as an attempt at epiphany.

By an epiphany he [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. (Joyce 211)

The critic Arthur Symons (1865-1945), in his study of the poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), had earlier emphasized the importance of such flashes of inspiration in artistic creation, “Browning's practice, Symons writes, is “to reveal the soul to itself" by a sudden test, which shall "condense the long trial of years into a single moment, and so ‘flash the truth out by one blow’” (cited in Beckson and Munro 689). However, on being pressed by Giovanni, Lidia puts off expressing her decisive thought and instead falls in with the visit to the Gherardini’s party she had previously rejected because, “One has to do something” (235). Only in the final scene does she reveal her thought to Giovanni, “I wish I didn’t exist any more, because I can no longer love you. There it is: That’s the thought that came to me when we were sitting in that night club and you were so bored” (272).

As in other auteur films of the period, Antonioni focuses in La Notte on character rather than plot.

In contrast to classical narration, art cinema privileges character over plot. The plot is riddled with gaps, and cause–effect relationships are disrupted. While the film downplays action, it “exhibits character”: art‐cinema protagonists “tend to lack clear‐cut traits, motives, and goals. [They] may act inconsistently … or they may question themselves about their purposes …. If the Hollywood protagonist speeds toward the target, the art‐film protagonist is presented as sliding passively from one situation to another” (Bordwell 1985, 207). As is the case with modernist novels, the art film’s purpose is to pass judgment on modern life and the human condition. (Pravadelli 230).

For plot, La Notte substitutes incident. Both Lidia and Giovanni engage in a series of haphazard sexualised encounters that magnify their sense of disillusionment both with their own relationship and their lives. Giovanni has a brief but unsettling sexual encounter with a young woman patient he meets by chance in the hospital after leaving Tommaso and at the Gherardini’s he flirts with their daughter Valentina played by Monica Vitti, although the impetus for an affair is weakend when she learns he is married, and she befriends Lidia on her return from her trip with Roberto. On an impulse, Lidia had left the party with Roberto, a wealthy guest, although this ended in disillusionment.

Roberto’s sports car drives slowly along a lonely, tree-lined road. Lidia and Roberto are talking and laughing. The car stops at a railroad crossing, where the gates are down. Roberto and Lidia step out of the car, protected from the rain by a large tree. They look at each other. The train goes by and the gates go up. After a long silence, Roberto stretches out his hand and caresses Lidia delicately, smiling at her. He tries to kiss her. At the last moment, she pulls back, saying:

LIDIA.  I can’t. I’m sorry.  (260)

One notable feature of these incidents, signifying their marital instability, is the lack of any attempt at concealment or embarrassment at their disclosure, emphasising that the couple have abandoned hope and that they realise these desperate attempts to rekindle desire are destined to end in failure.  When, in the closing shot of La Notte, “Lidia closes her eyes and allows herself to be embraced. A kind of carnal lust devours her, in remembrance of that which was and which will never be again” (276), serves as a metaphor for the general sense of loss that pervades both La Notte and La Dolce Vita.  

Works Cited

Antonioni, Michelangelo. “La Notte.” Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni, translated by Roger J. Moore, The Orion Press, 1963, pp. 209-76.

Antonioni, Michelangelo, Ennio Flaiano, and Tonino Guerra. La Notte. Italy: Nepi Film & Sofitedip, 1961.

Beckson, Karl, and John M. Munro. “Symons, Browning, and the Development of the Modern Aesthetic.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 10, no. 4, 1970, pp. 687–99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/449709.

Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni.  Cambridge UP, 1998.

Fellini, Federico, director. La Dolce Vita. Italy: Riama/Pathé Consortium Cinema, 1960.

---. La Dolce Vita. Translated by Oscar DeLiso and Bernard Shir-Cliff, Ballantine Books, 1961.

Fiedler, Leslie A. “Introducing Cesare Pavese.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 16, no. 4, 1954, pp. 536–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4333524. 

Flaiano, Ennio and John Satriano. “Via Veneto Papers.” Saimagundi, no. 67, 1985, pp. 36–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40547844. 

Haaland, Torunn. “‘Flânerie’, Spatial Practices and Nomadic Thought in Antonioni's ‘La Notte.’” Italica, vol. 90, no. 4, 2013, pp. 596–619. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24368405.

Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. New Directions, 1944.

Kezich, Tullio. Federico Fellini: His Life and Work. Translated by Minna Proctor and Viviana Mazza, I.B. Tauris, 2007.

Pacchioni, Federico. Inspiring Fellini: Literary Collaborations behind the Scenes. U of Toronto Press, 2014.

Pavese, Cesare.  This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950. Translated by Geoffrey Brock, Routledge, 2017.

Pravadelli, Veronica. “Italian 1960s Auteur Cinema (and beyond): Classic, Modern, Postmodern.” A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 228-48

Vighi, Fabio. Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious. Intellect Books, 2006.

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[1]  “… that illustrates Henri Lefebvre's distinction between modernism and modernity, the former consisting of ‘triumphalist images and projections of self [...] made up of many illusions, plus a modicum of insight,’ whereas the latter involves an antithetical reflective process of ‘critique and auto-critique, a bid for knowledge. If the attitude of modernism is indifference nourished by confidence and arrogance, modernity is recognised by a questioning attitude and it takes form as irony directed towards a truer way” (Haaland 599).

[2]  “From the earliest pages, the diaries record his longing for suicide, the overture to the long flirtation, the approaches and withdrawals, the self-reproaches for cowardice and the desperate excuse that to kill oneself would be to lose the pleasure of looking forward to death” (Fiedler 544).

[3] For an analysis of Mussolini-era cinema and its relationship to the films of the neorealism directors of the 1940s, see Piepergerdes, B. “Re-Envisioning the Nation: Film Neorealism and the Postwar Italian Condition”. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol. 6, no. 2, 1, pp. 231-57, https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/776

[4] See for an analysis of the significance of Lidia’s excursion: Torunn Haaland, “‘Flânerie’, Spatial Practices and Nomadic Thought in Antonioni's ‘La Notte.’”