Showing posts with label Fellini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fellini. Show all posts
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Saturday, July 22, 2023
‘La Dolce Vita’ Score Re-Release Inspired Trevi Fountain Flash Mob Performance
‘La Dolce Vita’ Score Re-Release Inspired Trevi Fountain Flash Mob Performance
An impromptu performance of Nino Rota's score for the Federico Fellini film took place at the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
Samantha Bergeson
Oct 20, 2022 8:00 pm
“La Dolce Vita” inspired a sweet flash mob performance of the iconic film score in Rome.
Composer Nino Rota crafted the soundtrack to Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning 1960 classic about a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) who searches for the beauty of Rome over the course of a week. The soundtrack is getting a re-release via record label CAM Sugar, and led to an impromptu performance of select “Dolce Vita” songs in front of the iconic Trevi Fountain in Rome.
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Remembering Screen Siren and Fellini Muse Anita Ekberg
| Photographed by Peter Basch, Vogue, August 1956 |
Remembering Screen
Siren and Fellini Muse
Anita Ekberg
Anita Ekberg, who passed away Sunday, was best-known for the scene
in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, where she wades into the Trevi Fountain.
Lynn Yaeger
January 12, 2015
“When you’re born beautiful, it helps you start in the business. But then it becomes a handicap,” Anita Ekberg, the incredibly stunning, famously pneumatic Swedish-born actress once observed.
Saturday, June 26, 2021
Il Maestro By Martin Scorsese / Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema
Il Maestro
Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema
EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959).
CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare.
Under one arm, he’s carrying books. In his other hand, a copy of The Village Voice.
He walks quickly, past men in coats and hats, women with scarves over their heads pushing collapsible shopping carts, couples holding hands, and poets and hustlers and musicians and winos, past drugstores, liquor stores, delis, apartment buildings.
Monday, December 9, 2019
Monday, October 21, 2019
Federico Fellini / Playboy interview
FEDERICO FELLINI: PLAYBOY INTERVIEW
(1966)
A few months ago, during the closed-set filming of Juliet of the Spirits, Federico Fellini’s long-awaited latest film, Roman TV officials congratulated themselves on what promised to be a major video coup when il grande maestro unexpectedly rescinded his own ban on press coverage of the production in progress and acquiesced to their repeated requests for a sample snippet from the film. They were understandably baffled and bedazzled by the footage he supplied—an extraordinary comic-opera scene starring the elephantine, wild-haired whore from 8½ outrageously decked out as D’Artagnan in feathers, velvets, boots and blond mustaches, surrounded by a motley chorus of nuns, clowns and gypsies, all cavorting about to the tune of a blaring Neapolitan aria. The viewing public was equally perplexed when the scene was subsequently sneak-previewed on television, but the critics greeted it with learned interpretations of its allegorical significance—or lack of it. Not until the finished film premiered did they discover that they’d been had: Never intended as part of the picture, it was conspicuous by its absence; Fellini had dreamed up the whole thing as a put-on for symbol searchers.
Anita Ekberg / La dolce vita
Anita Ekberg
LA DOLCE VITA
| Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg y Federico Fellini |
| Marcello Mastroianni y Anita Ekberg |
Monday, June 8, 2015
Fellini / Women
WOMEN
by Federico Fellini
Drawings
Why I draw the characters of my films? Why do I take graphic notes of their faces, of the noses, of the moustaches, of the ties, of the bags, of the way to cross the legs, of those people that come to visit me in the office?Perhaps I have already told that it is a way to start watching the film in face, to see the type it is, the attempt to fix something, even though minuscule, to the limit of the nothingness, but that seems to have something to do with the film, and covertly it speaks to me.Federico Fellini
| Sophia Loren |
| Anita Ekberg |
| Giulietta degli spiritu |
Thursday, January 15, 2015
La dolce vita / The Sweet Life
| Marcello Mastroianni and Anika Ekberg La Dolce Vita |
La Dolce Vita / The Sweet Life
Federico Fellini, 1960
Wednesday 20 October 2010 11.32 BST
Previously associated with neo realist tales of poverty and hardship, Federico Fellini's career, and Italy's public image, took a sudden shift here. It was time to replace those associations of bombed-out, postwar landscapes with hip, thriving modern culture in all its glory and squalor.
Always a master of the grand tableau, Fellini captures Rome in staggering breadth, from the opening aerial shots of the city, the narrow streets, prostitutes' bedrooms through to aristocratic homes and around the historic landmarks on the back of a Vespa. He's like a tireless, voluble tour guide; you're never quite sure where he's going but you're compelled to follow.
| Marcello Mastroinanni and Anita Ekberg La Dolce Vita |
His protagonist, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), is also led along for much of the picture, a journalist on the trail of the next story or in thrall to the new idols of the age, such as the Hollywood starlet Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), after whom he wades into the Trevi fountain in the film's most famous scene.
Rubini is the epitome of continental suaveness, but he's a conflicted soul, prey to the city's tensions – between tradition and modernity, morality and hedonism, fantasy and reality. It's easy to forget how fresh and bold this all was at the time, and how the film was condemned by the Catholic church and Italian patriots, among many others.
Fellini / Bitter taste of La Dolce Vita
Originally published in the Guardian on 25 February 1960
Scene from Frederico Fellini's controversial film, La Dolce Vita, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
ROME, 24 FEBRUARY
With his latest film, Federico Fellini has started off probably the most violent, widespread, and far-reaching controversy in the Italian cinema's history, a controversy which is now being joined by almost every faction in the country. First reaction to "La Dolce Vita" was passionate. After its noisy Milan premiere a man spat on Fellini "in the name of the fatherland." After the Rome premiere, watched in glacial silence by the cream of Roman society, Fellini was challenged to a duel. Later, a packed debate on the film, presided over by the novelist, Moravia, turned into a fight settled only by the arrival of jeep-loads of armed police.
The cause of the uproar is the film's "exposure" of corruption, debauchery, perversion, and the aimlessness among the high society, the intelligentsia, and the film and press worlds of Rome, a state of affairs long since apparent to the informed but never before brought out into the open so frankly or treated so seriously.
"La Dolce Vita" unfolds itself in a series of loosely-knit episodes seen through the eyes of a gossip columnist cum press photographer, and ranges from a striking scene of the capital's elite invading the countryside to watch a miracle that fails to occur, to scenes of sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, escapism, boredom, and orgy. Throughout, the technique shifts constantly between satirical caricature and dead-pan neo-realism.
Moravia has called the film "one of the most important and significant films of recent years" and the novelist Giuseppe Marotta praised it in superlatives, declaring Fellini second only to de Sica. The Church thought otherwise. The Vatican newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano" launched a full-scale attack on the film, labelling it an "incitement to evil crime and vice," deploring its effect on "unsafe minds," and roundly rebuking Fellini for trying to "moralise through immorality." Catholic Action, the Church's lay organisation, subsequently demanded its withdrawal from circulation.
Typical public reaction to the film was later voiced by three Christian Democrats who tabled a question asking the Government if it was aware of people's anxieties that the film "could throw a slanderous shadow over the population of Rome, over the dignity of Italy's capital and Catholicism." Throughout the controversy the Catholics have found themselves receiving embarrassing support from the extreme Right Wing who, faithful as always to the cause of la patria, either deny that Fellini's Rome exists or accuse him of pornography. Fellini's warmest supporters are the Communists, who insist on seeing him as a sort of champion of the people against the corrupt and corrupting ruling classes. Amid all the uproar, the intentions of Fellini in the film are rarely consulted. The director of "La Strada," "I Vitelioni," and "Cabiria" confesses himself nonplussed by the fuss his film has caused and amazed that so many have interpreted it as a national indictment.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Broke and alone, Anita Ekberg cries for help
Far from La Dolce Vita: broke and alone, Ekberg cries for help
MICHAEL DAY
Rome, Friday 23 December 2011
Things are so bad, that three months after her 80th birthday, the actress has asked her accountant, Massimo Morais, to request financial help from the Fellini Foundation, which was set up to honour the achievements of the renowned Italian director.
Ekberg, who has no family, says she desperately needs assistance with the bills as she recuperates in a care home after suffering a broken leg. She is unable to walk or look after herself and her plight has been exacerbated by the theft of jewellery and some furniture from her home, which to compound her misery, was recently damaged by a serious fire.
Mr Morais, who is acting on Ekberg's behalf on the orders of the court of Velletri, outside Rome, says his client wants to return to her home but will not be able to without help to repair the building.
In the letter to the Fellini Foundation in Rimini, Mr Morais writes that the actress "wants to share with other benefactors the possibility, however modest, of aiding a very good actress, deserving of help. A small present is always a great gift".
But Ekberg's call for help comes at a tough time for the Fellini Foundation, set up in 1995 by Maddalena Fellini, the late director's sister, and the City of Rimini to promote the filmmaker's legacy; the organisation has seen its accounts slip in to the red, and has had to ask for charitable donations.
Fellini's film, with its critical look at the high society of late-1950s Rome, marked the peak of Ekberg's career, but it was also the start of her decline as she became typecast as the ultimate blonde sex symbol.
During the height of her fame, Ekberg was courted by some of the world's most eligible and wealthy men, including Frank Sinatra, who asked her to marry him.
Leading lady: Her rise to fame
Anita Ekberg, who was born in Malmo in 1931 and went on to become Miss Sweden, came to the world's attention in the 1956 comedy Hollywood or Bust, in which she starred alongside Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and won a Golden Globe.
But it was the scene in La Dolce Vita in which she cavorts with the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi Fountain, that ensured the voluptuous actress's place in Hollywood legend. She was married to the British actor Anthony Steel between 1956 and 1959 and later the minor Hollywood actor Rik Van Nutter.
The list of other men to whom she has been romantically linked reads like the cast-list of a 1960s Hollywood blockbuster – Mastroianni, Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn and Yul Brynner.
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