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 (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 is considered a ‘bagatelle’ or ‘break’ in Fellini’s career. This article explores its valence as a promotional break between La dolce vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963) and its overt thematisation of the mass image of advertising. Unpacking the film’s ostensible superficiality, the discussion is not so much focused on praising its originality, but on highlighting its conceptual, thematic, and aesthetic entanglement with mimicry and imitation. For the film not only addresses 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.