He acts on this by having multiple affairs and pseudo-affairs with beautiful women, including Maddalena, Sylvia, and his fiancée, Emma. While trying to keep an objective viewpoint as he records the life and events of celebrities, he is unable to do so, and gets taken with the luxurious quality of the nightlife in Rome.
La Dolce Vita chronicles the events of a journalist named Marcello, who gets swept up in the spectacular atmosphere and nightlife that Rome has to offer. The fetishization of the female figure is a practice seen quite explicitly in La Dolce Vita and in L’Avventura, yet is depicted in very different cinematic ways. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire”(Mulvey, 17). “Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself.
She represents the culmination of his fantasies his voyeuristic desires to look at her and watch her become seen as the physical representation of her figure. The projection of the male’s fantasy and erotic inner-thoughts are placed upon the woman in an effort to be materialized, and rationalized with throughout the film. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle”(Mulvey, 11). In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. “The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she discusses the juxtaposition of the male protagonist and the female object of his affection, within the framework of a modernist narrative film. There are many theories about the representation of women in these modernist films. And it is through this context that the role of women began to expand over time. Films that followed La Dolce Vita, such as L’Avventura and Matrimonio all’Italiana would also take women into a very fetishized scope. This film is quite telling of the characterization women would continue to have in future modernist films, and the importance of creating a sexual context for women to be seen in. It portrayed the importance of women through the centralization of love affairs, relationships, and the illustration of the female body as an erotic image. This film was representative of the modernist films that would follow it, for it created a sexualized context for women to be perceived in as important figures in film. La Dolce Vita was revolutionary for its time, because it placed the female figure in the center of the spectator’s and the male protagonist’s focus. When Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita emerged in 1960, it was cause for much controversy and critique, on the terms of regressing moralist and religious values, and more specifically, the explicit sexuality that the film offers. As modernist films started to transition into the spotlight of the Italian cinematic world, directors began to further develop the role of the woman. Women were severely underrepresented, or used to solely highlight an aspect of the male protagonist’s character.
On a larger scale, films in Italian cinema innately possessed a patriarchal structure, centering on the emotions and needs of the male protagonist. Often times, the central point-of-view of the child tended to be the focus, as their naïveté and ingénue took center stage in films, such as in the “Naples” episode of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa(1946) and even in Ermanni Olmi’s Il Posto (1961), a film that arguably bridged the gap between neorealism and modernism. The portraits of women in Italian neorealist films, as early as 1943, were notably secondary and inferior to that of the male role in these films.
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