Tracce di Dolce Vita between chronicle and myth

06 September 2019 - 12 October 2019

Exhibitions

Tracce di Dolce Vita between chronicle and myth

Bologna

Curated by Matteo Giacomelli The exhibition presents a selection of 35 original vintage photos from and around the film directed by Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita (1960), centered on the birth and the emergence, of a new photographic aesthetic born and raised among the columns of the Newspapers chronicle between the 50’s and 60’s and then made myth by Fellini's cinema. There is a parallel reading between the still photographs and the shots that directly or indirectly inspired the episodes of the film or that have connoted an entire era passed to history as Dolce Vita. Chases, flirts, flashes and stalking give shape to a very modern aesthetic vision. From the streets of Rome, the photographers or rather the paparazzi, themselves become actors that sometimes provoke news, whose exclusive is sought after by magazines and newspapers around the world. The mostly foreign stars, who are Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, Anita Ekberg, Jackie Kennedy, Humphrey Bogart and many others, are immortalized in the Roman nights with the dazzling light of the flash so as to be returned unkempt and of real meat. Thus the Hollywood patina that had made them unreachable and divine is lost and they show themselves, once again human, sensitive to the passions, anger and more generally to life lived in one breath during the Roman days spent between sets and nightlife. Not even the politicians escape the seductions of the sweetness of life in Rome even by drinking a coffee or hiding a laugh, immediately captured by a shot, like that of a very young Giulio Andreotti with Amintore Fanfani. The central core of the exhibition is a series of unpublished shots taken during the Roman presentation of the Public Debate on the La Dolce Vita Film promoted by the Film Culture Circle Charlie Chaplin on February 12th 1960 with Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This is a heated confrontation that has become legendary in the history of Fellini's film due to the controversy that spreads from Newspapers to the whole civil society, generating a conflict between detractors and supporters of the film. Here the succession of events is coherently represented according to the aesthetics of the paparazzi ending with nocturnal scuffles on the street and equally resounding arrest.