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Film/Soundtrack Title: La Dolce Vita (1960)
 Main composer/artist: Nino Rota
Film and Soundtrack Avail on Amazon Prime

by Kate Schwartz, Youth Education Coordinator

What are you doing for your 60th birthday? How about your 100th? Do either involve salacious dinner parties, public drunkenness, or driving a Triumph TR3? Well this is your year, because Federico Fellini would have turned 100 in January, and 2020 also marks the 60th anniversary of the film that made “the sweet life” both a ubiquitous goal and a questionable motivation.

We often talk about the power of film to bring us together, but the power that film has to whisk us away is just as important. Much of that power/magic comes from film’s score. Choosing just one Fellini movie to highlight is as impossible as separating his films from the timeless compositions of Nino Rota (née Giovanni Rota Rinaldi). Arturo Toscanini declared Rota “the Italian Mozart”; many know his signature sound from The Godfather (1972) but I think La Dolce Vita stands out as the crème de la crème of Rota’s 150+ film scores.

The best film soundtracks tell the story that is unfolding onscreen without the images. In fact, Rota was famously disinterested in the happenings onscreen. This is remarkable ability on its own, but in La Dolce Vita, Rota evokes specificity throughout the frenetic energy of the film’s episodes.When listening to the soundtrack, we unmistakably find ourselves in early 1960’s Rome without ever seeing Jesus airlifted from the city.

However, in the same ways it grounds us in time and place, the cadence of the soundtrack creates a sense of chaotic surrealism. The soundtrack enhances the film by conjuring dissonance. We’re still in Rome but now it’s Fellini’s “peaceful jungle.”

The scene that best illustrates this juxtaposition is the sixth night sequence when Maddalena (a café society socialite) proposes to Marcello. This scene includes a uniconic fountain that doubles as an echo chamber.

It begins with a sultry, aimless Blues while Marcello and Maddalena are exploring the castle in which they’re partying. The music then quietly moves into the Dei Nobili iteration of the title track at the same pace that Maddalena quietly moves through rooms after leaving Marcello alone. Despite their different locations, they engage in a “serious conversation” through the ether. Of the variations on the theme song La Dolce Vita, this one is the most subdued, and lends continuity despite Marcello and Maddalena’s disorienting distance and intimate dialogue. Maddalena tells Marcello, “one can’t have everything,” but the music suggests otherwise.

If there’s one track that delivers as much as the theme song variations—that can carry you away while keeping your feet on the ground—it’s Valzer. A waltz sandwiched between the much more vivacious Lola and Stormy Weather on Track 5 (or A5 on vinyl), it begins with solo piano emanating as if from a tin jazz club in a recurring dream. We then find ourselves down the street from a lonely trumpet tripping over itself beneath a drizzling xylophone. The piano weaves back in while incorporating cameos from guitar, clarinet, and snare drum, before the trumpet returns to usher Stormy Weather into the culmination of the track. The waltz ebbs and flows like a sparkling body of water, then dips and trips like a streetcar, only to linger like snowfall.

There’s an infinity of choices between grounded stability and surreal chaos. I suggest closing your eyes while listening to the music and see where it takes you. I promise that when the final note fades away, your mind and spirit will both be well-traveled. Safe journey, everyone.
 

 

1. La Dolce Vita is often analyzed as a series of seven episodes (each with a depiction or sequence of day and night) flanked by a prologue and epilogue.


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Posted by: Tom Fuchs