La Dolce Vita: The Mechanical Fellini

In Italian cinema there is no tradition for live sound. Not only are foreign films dubbed rather than subtitled, but Italian films always have been filmed silently and the dialogue recorded later. So Italian audiences are used to a disparity between lip movements and sound. Federico Fellini takes this to an extreme, often recording dialogue completely different to that spoken during filming. To British and American audiences, the effect is to make the film seem mechanical, even clunky, especially noticeable in La Dolce Vita which includes a fair smattering of English dialogue.

Yet Fellini's intent in this film, as with 8^1/2, is to show the mechanics of film-making, of art, and even life itself.  This is the kind of film in which cameras are everywhere, in which the anti-hero, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), climbs a gantry to watch proceedings from next to a huge spotlight, and in which he later argues with his girlfriend under a set of floodlights. At one point sounds are completely divorced from action as the host of a civilised party plays a tape recording of a storm.

The film opens with a mechanical second-coming, a statue of Christ flown over Rome suspended by wires from a helicopter. So the scene is set for a film in which a capital city's values, not only its traditional values, will be stripped of all pretensions and reduced to machinations.

At first we have cover-ups. Chinese masks and stage make up. We see a woman (Maddelena, played by Anouk Aimée) glamorously wearing sunglasses indoors. Then she lifts them and we see that she is covering a bruise on her face. Maddelena is just one of the partygoers, in a succession of parties, playing a part that ultimately can't keep out more brutal truths such as violent husbands, infidelity, boredom, and loneliness.

Fellini also uses these parties to serve up his usual visual feasts, perhaps the most famous being the buxom Anita Ekberg splashing around in a fountain, and one of the most memorable a sad trumpet-playing clown who pathetically calls a floor full of balloons to follow him offstage - and off they shuffle. The journalist Marcello wanders through all these episodes, enjoying brief moments of sweetness, but slowly losing himself until, drunk and tired, he himself becomes a clown, and then an automaton, repetitively throwing feathers around for no-one's amusement.

Yet Fellini does not condemn his characters. Marcello's ultimate fate is one of resignation, perhaps pragmatism, as he accepts his lot with the debauched revellers, shrugging off the attention, even misplaced admiration, of an innocent girl. She still thinks he is a writer, but he's given all that up.