The relationship between the secular and the sacred in Italian films: temporal and symbolic juxtapositions in La Dolce Vita and La Grande Bellezza Anonymous College

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita[1] (1960) and Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza[2] (2013) both present the hedonistic lifestyles of failed writers turned journalists whose dreams have been derailed by the temptations and debauchery of modern Rome. The trajectories of both Fellini’s Marcello Rubini and Sorrentino’s Jep Gambardella are interwoven with narrative and aesthetic evocations of the sacred which are juxtaposed symbolically and temporally with the secular – and even the profane. The nature of the relationship between the secular and the sacred is complex, and at times even contradictory, the ultimate enterprise of its investigation being to locate a new source of meaning in post-religious life.

Filmic depictions of modern Roman society portray an untethered hedonism, a seemingly unending string of ostentatious displays of wealth and the commodification of life, where Christian moral doctrine is cast aside in favour of amoral depravity. The juxtaposition of the secular and the sacred appears almost immediately upon the commencement of La Dolce Vita, as Peter Bondanella describes:

'After Marcello and Paparazzo (who follow the helicopter with the statue [of Jesus] in another helicopter) dally over one of the high-rise...