la dolce vita

“La Dolce Vita” is black-and-white and pretty Italian.

Anouk Aimée, the French film icon known for “A Man and a Woman,” “La Dolce Vita” and “Lola,” has died.

Her big break was Fellini's arthouse film La Dolce Vita, one of the most acclaimed movies in Italian cinematic history, in 1960.

It could have been a scene straight out of “La Dolce Vita,” Federico Fellini’s early 1960s film that introduced the character of an annoying and eccentric photographer who hounded the movie stars that swelled the casts of Cinecittà film studios when Rome was known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.”

But I would note, too, that 1961 falls between Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” — the title of the series’ fourth episode, not incidentally — and “8 1/2,” and at the midpoint of Michelangelo Antonioni’s great “trilogy” of “L’Aventurra,” “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse,” their last films before turning to color, masterpieces of tonal control and composition.