La Dolce Vita (1960) tells the story of the character Marcello's balance between the glamorous but vacuous party life of Rome and a life of serious writing. What follows is a critique of Europe's superficiality, which is ironic knowing that Federico Fellini gained international fame from La Dolce Vita.
At this point in time, Neo-realism had permanently died off as a type of filmmaking. Teresa Cutler-Broyles explains that “Italian economic circumstances started to improve, the country was being rebuilt, and many Italians began to look toward happy themes and different film styles as American film became popular and a new Italian style emerged (Cutler-Broyles). Risen from the rubble, so to speak, due to economical improvement in Italy a couple of years after WWII, was a world of affluence, glamor, intellectual circles, and, as shown by Fellini, soul-sucking debauchery.
La Dolce Vita was a running leap away from classic Italian Neorealism, although the story criticizes “The Sweet Life” in Italy, La Dolce Vita does not fall under the category of Neo-realism. The biggest reason is that La Dolce Vita was filmed on expensive film sets in CineCitta, as opposed to all the Italian Neorealism films, which were filmed on the streets in a semi-documentary style (French). The actors in La Dolce Vita were all professional, which is in contradiction to the non-actors that were used in Neo-realism films (French).
During the production of La Dolce Vita, an evolution within Fellini would begin, which in turn would influence the rest of his film career. The early 1960s saw Fellini tapping into his unconscious. Introduced to the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung through Jungian analyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard, “Bernhard turned Fellini onto Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections” (Duoba). This would be “a turning point in the director’s work from neorealism filmmaking to distinctly oneiric” (Duoba).
(Carl Gustav Jung)
With both Federico Fellini's departure from Neorealism, and his knowledge of Jungian theory, Fellini’s work would fall into a style considered surreal, or Fellini-esque.
