La Dolce Vita opens with one of the most telling widescreen images ever captured, pure in its symbolism yet entirely mechanical in fact: a helicopter is seen flying over Rome carrying a gigantic statue of Christ to St. Peter's Cathedral. (“Oh, look,” remarks a girl sunbathing below, “there's Jesus.”) Fellini creates a rich, intricate tapestry of “Rome, the Babylon of my dreams” in La Dolce Vita. Juxtaposition and composition are finely tuned to exude an air of randomness as an episodic narrative follows Marcello, a jaded journalist (played by Marcello Mastroianni) on an odyssey in search of himself amid the decadent, dehumanized beauties of Rome's upper classes.
Cinematographer Otello Martelli gives this account of Fellini's widescreen technique: “(Fellini) wanted to use perspective according to his fantasy, often completely in contradiction to the principles governing the use of certain lenses...Federico wanted to use only long-range lenses: 75mm, 100, even 150. These lenses are supposed to be used for close-ups, for portraits; however, he wanted to use them while the camera was in motion. What mattered to him was really to focus upon the character, and he was hardly concerned at all about the effect this might have on the depth-of-field. He almost never uses the 50mm lens normal for CinemaScope. With the 75, the panoramic shots and the broad movements risk becoming dull; you risk a kind of flickering. I immediately mentioned this to Fellini, but he replied: ‘What can that possibly matter?' And as is often the case, he was absolutely right. It gave a certain style to the film. A certain severity to the image. A concentration within the frame, a distortion of the characters and the setting.” (in Fellini the Artist by Edward Murray)