Narrating the 'Eternal City' in LA DOLCE VITA (1960) and LA GRANDE BELLEZZA (2013)

Abstract

Early city films undermined the association of the city with social and technological progress by showing what Siegfried Kracauer termed ‘a hidden modernity’ – a spatial mapping of social/ideological structures and values that provided a critique of modernity precisely though focusing on its ‘surface’ aspects. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘pedestrian speech acts’ this essay explores the ways in which Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960) and Sorrentino’s homage LA GRANDE BELLEZZA (2013) – both of which paint a picture of a decadent society, the consumer society emerging in Italy during the postwar economic boom, and a morally decadent neoliberal Italy – ‘narrate’ the Eternal City through their flâneur protagonists, in order to illuminate the two filmmakers’ different critical engagement with history and with Rome’s ‘decadence’.emporary interdisciplinary methodologies in the humanities, from.