Federico Fellini’s 1960 film “La Dolce Vita”took risks never before seen in Italian cinema, displaying images and covering themes commonly believed to be taboo, or at the least, improper. Upon its release, it scandalized both the political left and the political right and everyone in between. But it was a group of Jesuit priests who, going against the grain, were determined to offer a more nuanced interpretation of the film.
Nearly 65 years later, it feels nearly impossible to find reasoned and balanced takes on contentious cultural and political issues, let alone spaces that aren’t completely overtaken by partisan polemics. At a time when art is increasingly targeted toward “woke” or “anti-woke” audiences, it is instructive to revisit the responses to “La Dolce Vita” and to learn from those Jesuits who eschewed culture-war analysis and offered something of greater substance to the public discourse.
The semi-autobiographical film, which many consider to be Fellini’s magnum opus, features Marcello Mastroianni as Marcello Rubini, a womanizer and aspiring journalist who has left his provincial hometown for Rome. In the late 1950s the city was enjoying a high point of post-war prosperity. The Via Veneto, in particular, had become a hotspot for international celebrities—and for tabloid journalists and their photographers, who would go to extreme lengths to snap shots of the stars. In fact, the term paparazzi was inspired by the photographer Paparazzo in “La Dolce Vita,” who prowled around the city to capture candid photos of the stars. Marcello quickly becomes disillusioned with the glamor and decadence of the so-called “sweet life,” and is challenged to re-evaluate who he is and what gives his life worth.
According to Shawn Levy, author of the book Dolce Vita Confidential, viewers were reported to have run out of the theater shouting “Coward!,” “Vagabond!,” “Scoundrel!,” “Communist!,” “Disgusting!” and “Shame on you!”
A conservative politician condemned the film, saying: “Projects of this kind should be crushed immediately for they are highly corrosive and worm their way into the lives of young people with their images of easy, materialistic life without ideals.” In its official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican declared the film “an incentive to evil, to sin, to vice” and argued that “it’s time that the audience finally shouts ‘enough’ to the authorities who protect the public well-being and the respect for the good name of the populace.” Even Marxists critiqued it for veering too far away from the proletarian commitments of neorealist cinema.
Yet those determined to critique the film’s alleged agenda failed to recognize that Fellini had little interest in sending a message. In fact, he was surprised—or rather, disappointed—to see how misunderstood and divisive the film had become. He insisted that it wasn’t a polemic against any political faction or the church, but rather that it was meant to be an exploration of the complexity of modern life. Levy writes that “Fellini was truly appalled by the ruckus his film had occasioned.” A “stunned observer of it all,” he said the responses to the film were “complete mysteries to him.”
As Fellini wrote: “These polemics fill me with sorrow. I’m a storyteller. I’ve told a fable, a fable of our times. And now I see that this fable has provoked interpretations in Parliament, a painful division among Catholics, the disdain of the guardians of public morals.... They tell me, You should be happy: All this fuss means that you’ve hit the nail on the head. I respond: No. I’m not happy. I didn’t want to condemn anyone, nor did I ever wish to pity anyone.”
In an interview, he told a journalist that what he “intended was to show the state of Rome’s soul, a way of being a people. What it became was a scandalous report, a fresco of a street and a society.... I intended for it to be a document, not a documentary.” To another reporter he remarked “It’s terrifying to realize that I don’t have the secret for La Dolce Vita any more than anyone else.”
For artists like Fellini, who are more interested in using art as a tool to provoke thought and contemplation than making propaganda for one faction or another within a culture war, the freedom and intelligence of the audience is something sacred. Thus I found it only fitting that Jesuit priests—formed in Ignatian spirituality, with its emphasis on the role of conscience and discernment of spirits—defended the film.
Much of the Catholic backlash against “La Dolce Vita”was provoked by the film’s depiction of sex, public drunkenness and open homosexuality. Critics objected to its playful interpretation of the seven vices and seven sacraments and by the opening scene featuring a statue of Jesus hanging from a helicopter en route to St. Peter’s Basilica, making a pit stop over a group of scantily clad sunbathers on a rooftop so that Marcello could flirt with them.
Frustrated by the condemnation of the film in L’Osservatore Romano, Angelo Arpa, S.J., tried to convince Cardinal Siri of Genoa not to forbid Catholics from seeing the film—which he called “disquieting” and “not easy to watch” because of its “decisively new style and presentation of fascinations”—as “the public, for no reason other than their curiosity, will go to see it en masse” anyway. Father Arpa argued that the film should be labeled as “exclusively for adults” or “not recommended.” The cardinal agreed, and even decided to screen it for his seminarians so as to discern its implications for their ministry.
After the viewing, Alberto Bassan, S.J., superior of the Jesuits of the region, granted approval for Nazareno Taddei, S.J., to review the film for the Jesuit journal Letture, with the understanding that “the service of truth and of the Church requires not a polemical position, but an even-handed and in-depth analysis, which is entirely independent of the disputes in progress.” In his review, Father Taddei insisted that if one considers the structural organization of the plot, not only is the film not dangerous to watch, it can be spiritually beneficial. The trajectory of Marcello’s character development embodies the infusion of God’s grace into the human soul.
Some Jesuits were not pleased with the review, considering it naïve and overly generous. Father Enrico Baragli wrote in La Civiltà Cattolica that Taddei’s “objectivity has been overshadowed by an in itself praiseworthy and entirely apostolic concern for the director” and that “as much as we respect the opinions of others, especially if supported by arguments that at least have some permanence of validity, we do not feel like passing this film off as Christian; much less as Catholic; indeed, not even as religious.”
Word got to then-Cardinal Montini of Milan (soon to become Pope Paul VI), who, while affirming the “good intentions” of Father Taddei, indicated that “his apologia aggravates its influence and extends its diffusion, and above all disarms moral judgment, contradicts fundamental criteria of our education, breaks the barrier of the pastoral defense of our people against the rampant immorality of the scenes.” Cardinal Martini forbade further distribution of the article, and for a time Father Tadeii was prevented from writing on television or film.
Upon hearing the news, Fellini wrote to Taddei, saying “I have thought of you often and sometimes with a sense of acute remorse, although I do not feel guilty. And I think that a feeling born of profound gratitude and friendship can compensate for any displeasure, even when one only has the hope of having acted according to the conviction of one’s conscience.”
The Jesuits weren’t immune to disagreement among themselves over the divisive film, but even its critics in the Society sought to engage the film on terms that transcended purely reactionary or polemical rhetoric, instead viewing it through a deeply human lens that centered the soul as its point of departure.
Opinions, they say, are like noses: everybody has one. But lately, it seems that so many of us feel anxious to display our opinions on our sleeves, as if they were some sort of badge indicating our tribal belonging. Surely, expressing our opinions openly is one of the privileges of living in a free society and shouldn’t be taken for granted. The problem is that the more we identify ourselves with our opinions, the more and more difficult it becomes to engage in conversation with people whose opinions do not align with ours.
Gone are the days of public spaces and civic institutions where people of different ideological persuasions interacted freely with each other, perhaps engaging in spirited debates and even in arguments, but at the end of the day falling back on the things that they shared in common. Most of us today would be hard pressed to—as the activist Justin Giboney once challenged his audience to do—identify five flaws within your own ideology and five strengths of an ideology you oppose.
When we define ourselves by our preferred ideology, it becomes difficult to recognize that what constitutes the humanity of others—and even of ourselves—is something much deeper than our opinions, which are malleable and shift over time. Put bluntly, we lose sight of the fact that we are all made in the image and likeness of God, a trait which unites us to others across the globe, and even across political lines.
In his most recent book, The Uses of Idolatry, the theologian William T. Cavanaugh attempts to demonstrate how corporate marketers have swooped to fill in the vacuum created by our collective uprooting from community, culture and faith with an aspirational consumerist ideal. To do so, their advertising campaigns focus less on the functionality of the product itself and more so on its capacity to fulfill our sense of identity and purpose. The British documentarian Adam Curtis argues that politicians in the United States and Britain in the 1980s started taking their cues from the theorists behind such a style of marketing, like Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, and applying them in the realm of politics. Thus, political positions were transformed from a matter of convictions into products sold to particular demographics, the same way styles of clothing and appliances were.
Given the expansive commodification of partisanship, it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it has run rampant in spaces where it normally is placed within certain limits, like education and the sphere of the arts. The politicization of art has made it increasingly difficult to allow a work of art to speak for itself and provoke us to reflect on the deeper truths of human existence.
While society continues to be mired in culture war polemics, the Catholic Church seems to have largely moved past its formerly antagonistic orientation toward secular art. The fact that Pope Francis commented that Fellini’s “La Strada” is one of his favorite films, and recommended that everyone watch it during the Jubilee Year of Mercy, goes to show how far the church has come. Catholics ought to take up the mission to recall for people that the true criterion for judging cultural and political realities is not partisan loyalties or “tribal belonging,” but the human conscience and the heart—whose restlessness only finds rest, as St. Augustine once said, in God.
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