Palimpsest, Mediation, Déjà entendu-Effect

Abstract

Many scholars, who research Federico Fellini's cinematic Rome, refer to the famous images, with which Freud used to describe the Eternal City. He interpreted Rome as a palimpsest, as a place in which the fragments of the past continue to live in the present. Another aspect of Fellini's Rome, which scholars have insisted on, are the erroneous conclusions made in terms of fiction and reality. In the city of cinema and power, it is no longer possible to distinguish between the role model and its reproduction, between the original and its remediation. As known, in La dolce vita (1960, The sweet life), Fellini reconstructed Via Veneto on Stage No. 5 at Cinecittà. The “fake” Via Veneto, the one reconstructed in the studio, becomes “more real than the real” one, in fact hyper-real. If indeed Fellini's oneiric hyper-realism assumes a strong psychoanalytical connotation, how do we understand all this within the realm of music? Could Nino Rota's music be a key to comprehend better a film such as La dolce vita? What is the musical equivalent to the dreamlike and meta-filmic state present in this film? My chapter seeks to answer these questions by examining various characteristics of mimicry and of the déjà entendu-effect of Rota's music.