Like a Mass Image: Fellini’s Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio, Advertising and Mimicry

Abstract

This article considers Federico Fellini's Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio/The Temptations of Dr 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 considered a 'bagatelle' or 'break' in Fellini's career.It is its valence as a breaka promotional or advertising break, even, between La dolce vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963)and its overt thematization of the mass image of advertising, that this article explores. Unpacking the film's ostensible silliness and superficiality, the discussion is not so much focused on praising its originality, but in bringing into view its conceptual, thematic and aesthetic entanglement with mimicry and imitation. For the film does not only address 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.