La Dolce Vita amazes indeed the very faculty of eyes and ears. Eyes and ears are not just the targets, though, but recurring symbols for what author-director Fellini has on his mind. (p. 425) The music of the film parodies itself, and the point of Fellini's images of sound seems to be that they fail. It was, of all people, Robinson Crusoe (though he was surely not the first) who pointed out that sound and language are the means of which human beings can achieve more than an animal relation with each ...

La Dolce Vita is not so much long as redundant. Scene duplicates scene; and scene after scene is protracted long after its every point has been unmistakably made. The trouble would seem to be that the film is conceived on a grand scale, but imagined only within rather narrow limitations. Fellini almost invariably extends all his scenes beyond every interest save the visual…. [A] negative compensation in all of this is in the proof it offers that the film is definitely more than a visual medium. (pp. ...

Fellini's La Dolce Vita is a great bas-relief of the day-dreams and the ideals of an age—the rootless hedonism, the sensationalised religion, the spiritual nostalgias and an erotism which is blatant and obsessive because it is rootless…. If ever erotism and social context were inseparable, it is in La Dolce Vita. The film itself is massive yet disjointed, its structure recalls the tumbled slabs of a Roman temple. One feels Fellini chose the images that he fancied; because he is a poet, ...