Hacker Cinema
La Dolce Vita
La dolce vita
1960 · Film · 174 min
Directed by Federico Fellini
Episodic journey of journalist Marcello who struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity offered by his girlfriend, all the while searching for a way to become a serious writer.
2 positive3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
Ahh, time for a rambling ode to cinema of the days past and the Italian Cinema course I audited at Purdue from the incomparable Ben Lawton: Although I have admired Antonioni's great shots (l'Avventura is picture perfect, that final shot! And this one: https://kinorotterdam.nl/content/uploads/2022/04/Lavventura-10.png) and the head games of Bergman (I find The Silence to be the least suffocating among his films although I also like Fanny and Alexander, too) I've always been a Fellini person, since the day I watched La Dolce Vita. He can be over the top (e.g. Amarcord and Roma) but to this day I cannot watch the last sequence of Otto e mezzo without tearing up. Lawton also introduced me to Lana Wertmüller, who does not seem to be as well known as she deserves. If you have the chance, watch her controversial Swept Away.
My wife and I both love cinema, so we tried to get our son interested in it, to little effect ... until he started watching Criterion on his own. He started to watch Kurosawa's movies because they were "samurai movies" but got hooked! We're now having discussions about his characterizations in The Hidden Castle and other movies.
If you can spare some time I very strongly suggest to subscribe to Criterion streaming, at least for a few months ($10/mo in the US) to discover the old gems.
Ebert wrote beautifully. I was lucky enough to have met him once or twice at book signing events here in Boulder. He was a regular at the Conference on World Affairs dissecting movies one shot at a time. I attended all of his "Cinema Interruptus" for Mulholland Drive, La Dolce Vita, (no small commitment actually) and a few others. On top of it, Ebert was a kind, good human. I also miss Ebert. Check out his "Great Movies" book series if you can.
nice :)
You know about "false friends" in Italian and Spanish: you can easily think to words means the same, while they do not, example:
* spanish: aceite, sounds like italian:aceto but in italian it's:olio while the italian for aceite is: vinagre
* another: largo largo lungo ancho
* ... https://plida.it/documenti/spagnolo.pdf
for this reason I think Spanish is tricking you a bit while you may think it is helping: it happens to me with Italian/Portuguese/Spanish
My advice is:
* the golden rule: find an Italian girlfriend/boyfriend :) :) best if they cannot speak English (pretty easy in Italy, must say) and spanish.
* forget about translating, practice a lot by spending as much time as possible talking with Italians: I know it is pretty hard now due to Covid, but just ask them to talk about politics... and you'll have hours of conversation
* arrive to the point you talk Italian in your dreams (much easier then you may think, esp. if you respect the above two rules :)
* forget about mobile phone/app, have a paper notebook and write new words/sentences: ask your friend to tell you new works every day. (well, I also record sentence, too, but then I do not listen much I must say)
* many says it does not work, but for me it does: movies! so movies in Italian: choose a masterpiece and watch it many many times: Fellini's Amarcord, La Dolce Vita, even 8 1/2 if you skip the intellectual/Movie-criticts talks... or even some very light ones like Fantozzi.
If, due to codiv, you cannot meet people, pay somebody for skype calls: many great people, esp. in the South, have no jobs but have huge culture and passion for teaching, so just pay per hour for their help and guidance; you may post a request in https://dantealighieri.net/forum (not used that much, but a lot of Italian teachers for foreigner are still reaching notifications from it).
Keep in mind that if you are in an average big town, in the centre north, you can join for free or about 30€ per semester (yes!) Italian school classrooms for foreigners: my experience is that teachers there a lovely: very passionate and curious, really very helful and committed.
http://www.venetoimmigrazione.it/it/imparare-italiano?p_p_id=gs_2019_5_portlet_WAR_gs_2019_5_portlet_INSTANCE_zjiZ7SJul6Zo&p_p_lifecycle=1&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&p_auth=eGW4Cbq2&gs_2019_5_portletcontext=immig&gs_2019_5_portletservice=cercaCorsiItaliano%3Fper_pagina%3D5&gs_2019_5_portlet_SET_PARAMETER_provincia=026
I am sure you are like me, not much interested in football, because if you are then that could help.
all the best: be nice with Italians, but be also strong on your ideas and have no fear to say what you think to let them wake up :) remember, as in many other countries, they are allowed to talk bad about their country, but foreigners cannot ahhaahah
ciao!
Ah, seeing an old friend on HN in the evening! I recently bought the Essential Fellini collection mentioned here (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FPJLQ4T, I great way to spend $170).
Although briefly touched here, he was surrounded by talent that boosted his vision: Giulietta Masina, Nino Rota, and, of course, Mastroianni. 8 1/2 is beyond words; for some reason I still tear up in the "circus ring" finale, but I watch it on YouTube every couple of months (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvrcRSvpI78), it is so sad and yet refreshing in some sense (I had an outfit like that when I was a kid, but it was blue!) Little known fact: Barbara Steele (of Black Sunday fame, this movie plays in the background in a scene in Matrix 2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(1960_film)), who plays a sweet young thing in the movie, was dubbed, because her own voice was not found feminine enough :-)
I also love "La Città Delle Donne", although many find it overdone; unfortunately it was not included in this essential set. The "woman hunter" depicted here is really scared to death of them.
In his The Great Movies Roger Ebert writes:
"Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw La Dolce Vita in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom “the sweet life” represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamor, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello’s world; Chicago’s North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello’s age.
When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal.”
As I also love and pity Marcello when I now watch the film, I must be getting old (Ebert was 49, I'm about that age)! No worries though: now I'm having the joy of introducing them to my son.
> People will be having sex in your house even without the cameras. That's what people do.
Without getting too graphic, there's a HUGE difference between people having sex for fun and a professional porn shoot.
The latter is messy, smelly, and causes a surprising amount of lasting damage. There's a reason that so many porn studios film in hotels (and likewise, a reason that so many hotels refuse to rent rooms to people that they suspect will be filming there).
I won't go into details on HN because it's not really the venue, but let's just say this: if you knew what being "on site" at a porn shoot really looked, sounded, and smelled like, you'd never want to watch porn again[0].
(And we're not talking about an amateur porn shoot where people just film their "normal" sex on a webcam, either - Michael Lucas literally holds the world record for the most expensive gay porn film ever made[1]).
[0] Source: good friend of mine was in the industry for a while (behind the camera, not in front).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lucas'_La_Dolce_Vita