La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita — It was impossible to hold back tears when I arrived at the Fontana di Trevi. Where Fellini filmed one of the most magical scenes in film history with Anita Eckberg and Marcello Mastroianni.

While walking around Rome and filming for Live! the great problem of filming is constantly reminded: how does architecture, ‘most supreme art of the physical’, maintain its unique vitality without being reduced to mere decor; a background, when featured in a film?  How do buildings become alive in ‘the most supreme art of the psychological’; the cinema?

In case of Fellini and this sequence, Fontana di Trevi reveals an unspoken aspect about us, inserted as a transcendental character at such a precise moment in the topography of the film. The magic is what happens there and how it happens in order to have this particular weight and effect on the audience. And this kind of mastery only deserves the tears of beauty, for this place and the characters fuse into an  experience that is seeped under my skin. Today I revisit a memory.