Federico Fellini Videos : Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita"

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Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita"

"It was a moment that marked a turning point in postwar Europe: Anita Ekberg wading through the Fontana di Trevi in Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita, as improbably voluptuous as the fountain itself. La Dolce Vita was shot in 1960, and while Ekberg's low-cut, dark evening dress may look back to the formal 50s, her insouciant transgression points unmistakably ahead, into the subversive 60s. What few cinema-goers realised was that the scene in the film was a reconstruction of a real event. Two years earlier, Ekberg had spent the evening with a set photographer, Pierluigi Praturlon, at the Rancho Grande nightclub in Rome. To ease her aching feet on the way home, she climbed into the fountain. Praturlon, who never went anywhere without his Leica, lit up the scene with the headlights of his car and caught the moment in a photograph that Fellini later saw in a magazine, Tempo Illustrato." "When the film was presented in New York, the distributor reproduced the fountain scene on a billboard as high as a skyscraper. My name was in the middle in huge letters, Fellini's was at the bottom, very tiny. Now the name of Fellini has become very great, mine very little." (Anita Ekberg) Shots on and off the set of "La Dolce Vita"

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