Becoming Anita Ekberg

The Swedish Anita Ekberg began her career as a model, participating e.g. in the Miss Universe competition – which prompted Hollywood to take an interest in her. Ekberg acted in several American films, the best known of which are Frank Tashlin's Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedies Artists and Models (1955) and Hollywood or Bust (1956). Ekberg is perhaps the most unique of the 50s actresses called "sex bombs". That is what Mart Rappaport studies in his essay film, which develops into a universal study about stardom. It could as well be named "The Making of Anita Ekberg". The theme and the thematics are already familiar from Rappaport's earlier works Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1952) and From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995). In a sense, Ekberg acted as if playing herself already in the side roles of Tashlin's comedies, but it took Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) to propel the sensational Ekberg, nicknamed "the Iceberg", in the role of a sensational movie star to world stardom. Her stardom was thus in a way born in advance, but it also waned quickly. But still, Ekberg's splashing in the fountain in Rome is one of the most famous scenes in the history of cinema, a similar electrifying moment as Marilyn Monroe dancing amidst subway steam. And that is not all because Ekberg later also performed a meta-level role in Fellini's sequence in the anthology film Boccaccio '70, (1962) where her character was blown up into a gigantic size. Ekberg's part in La Dolce Vita lasted a mere twenty minutes, and perhaps Rappaport therefore consciously condensed his own film into a mere seventeen. It may well be that the minimal measure fits the maximal subject best. (MK) (Midnight Sun Film Festival)