Like a mass image: Fellini’s Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio, advertising and mimicry

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Nardelli, Matilde ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4582-1024 (2022) Like a mass image: Fellini’s Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio, advertising and mimicry. Italian Studies. ISSN 0075-1634

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2022.2095111

Abstract

This article considers Federico Fellini’s Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio (1962), a fifty-minute episode in the omnibus Boccaccio ’70. While sometimes praised for its aesthetic and stylistic significance, the film remains largely overlooked and is considered a ‘bagatelle’ or ‘break’ in Fellini’s career. This article explores its valence as a promotional break between La dolce vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963) and its overt thematization of the mass image of advertising. Unpacking the film’s ostensible superficiality, the discussion is not so much focused on praising its originality, but on highlighting its conceptual, thematic, and aesthetic entanglement with mimicry and imitation. For the film not only addresses the mass image of advertising and the mimetic behaviour it relies on and encourages, but also itself enacts such mimetic behaviour in different ways. In so doing, it both taps into, and contributes to, contemporaneous concerns and debates about mass media and image culture.

Item Type:	Article
Identifier:	10.1080/00751634.2022.2095111
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Italian Studies on 1 Aug 2022, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2022.2095111.
Keywords:	Mass Image, Media, Advertising, Television, Federico Fellini, Frank Tashlin, Milk, Mimicry
Subjects:	Arts > Cultural history Media > Media history and theory Film and television > Screen studies
Related URLs:	Publisher Publisher
Depositing User:	Matilde Nardelli
Date Deposited:	01 Aug 2022 09:06
Last Modified:	06 Feb 2024 16:10
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/9155