Fellini Satyricon
Fellini Satyricon had its director’s name added to the title to avoid confusion with another film.
Satyricon is a long fictional work from the Roman writer Petronius, who served in the court of Nero. Fellini’s name reduced any confusion—the rival film more or less disappeared anyway.
From the first frame there’s no mistaking that Fellini Satyricon, a travelogue through a surreal galaxy, is a Fellini work, and no one else’s movie.
Fellini piles excess on top of excess while re-creating ancient Rome, mostly on gigantic sets constructed at Cinecittà.
Every scene offers confounding images of grotesquerie, eroticism, and often uncomfortable mix of the two.
Images of bared flesh mix with scenes of spilt blood, cruelty with intimacy.
It’s carnality on a grander scale than Fellini had ever dared before, and decadent behavior not even seen in La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, and Juliet Of The Spirits
It’s a film only Fellini could have directed, one that his career had been building toward for some time.
For all the elements that define the term “Felliniesque,” it’s also something of a departure for the director.
The film opens with the fair-haired protagonist Encolpio (British actor Martin Potter) lamenting that his friend and lover Asclito (Hiram Keller, an American stage veteran of Hair) has taken his young, androgynous love Gitone (Max Born) and sold him to a vulgar actor.
Encolpio fights with Asclito and retrieves Gitone, then leads him through the nighttime streets that double as an erotic carnival, with each door promising either delight or danger, or both.
After a night in each other’s arms, Gitone leaves Encolpio for Asclito again.
In this world, pleasure is fleeting and beauty always slips away.
Fellini had visited such themes before, but in Satyricon he uses them to construct a unique, closed world.
Petronius’ work survives only in fragments, and Fellini in turn made a fragmentary film, one that seems to begin mid-story and cuts off mid-sentence.
Yet it’s also, in Fellini’s description, the story of “two breakneck kids with completely unhinged lives and pan-erotic dreams,” which pretty much assures it’s never boring. As Encolpio mopes, he takes up with Eumolpo (Salvo Randone), an impoverished poet who explains that the gift of creating true art has been lost in pursuit of money.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t show up to the orgiastic feast that provides one of the film’s most memorable set pieces, one in which a roasted pig, when gutted, produces a flood of cooked chickens, sausages, and other delights.
The images look more sickening than appetizing.
Encolpio sets off on a peripatetic journey that finds his fortunes rise and fall, but he keeps encountering the same outsized appetites wherever he goes. Chaos always seems on the verge of erupting wherever he travels.
In an idyllic moment later in the film, Encolpio and Asclito, with whom he’s then reconciled, enjoy shared night of pleasure with a beautiful woman. But the peace is a result of the death of the inhabitants of the villa in which they’re staying have killed themselves, knowing that a regime change would mean their death anyway.
Fellini had one eye toward the past when he made Satyricon, but also one eye on the chaos of the 1960s, working at when revolutions both cultural and political seemed like they could be on the verge of toppling the established order, in Italy and elsewhere.
By design, it’s an overwhelming film, and sometimes an exhausting one, but the melancholy and wariness keep it grounded.
DVD: SPECIAL FEATURES
In addition to Hughes-derived commentary track, there’s Ciao, Federico!, an hour-long documentary made at the time that contains some fascinating footage of Fellini at work.
Also included: vintage interviews with Fellini, a short documentary about Petronius, conversations with photographer Mary Ellen Mark and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, and a collection of promotional materials for the film, which received a heavy marketing push throughout the world.
For Archer Winston, the film’s classical background in Petronius was fused into “a powerful contemporary parallel. It is so beautifully composed and imagined that you would do yourself a disservice if, for any reason, you allowed yourself to miss it”.
Fellini biographer Parker Tyler declared it “the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history.
Moravia, NY Review of Book
The Satyricon of Petronius is an “open” novel, a series of events and adventures without a beginning, middle, or end; without a story, an internal structure.
One could add chapters to the Satyricon and not damage it at all.
In the Satyricon’s case, whole chapters have disappeared, to its serious impairment, so we have only the conclusion of a long, saga-like novel of antiquity.
But even with these amputations the meaning of the work is not lost.
A novel told in episodes or segments barely tied together?
Petronius reflects in his work a world that is also “open”—the world of the Roman decadence, bereft of rigorous social structures, respected moral conventions, reigning intellectual patterns;
But rich in the unexpected, in novelties, absurdities, incongruences, and surprises.
Petronius, the open milieu par excellence—the street.
In the salons, houses, and palaces we encounter the castes, classes, professional groups; in the street, the crowd.
Petronius was only partly aware
He was in his novel simply using a genre that had by then most likely attained a definitive maturity: the satire or picaresque novel of ancient times, which demanded that the narration pass with ease and agility, without order or logic, from episode to episode, from subject to subject, with the sole aim of amusing the reader.
Such a novel can only be comic. The scale of values shattered on the ground; not only does the writer not believe in anything but he also does not feel any yearning or desire to believe.
Standing above his contemptible characters, he establishes a distance of derision between himself and them,
Petronius is superior to his characters in one respect: that of culture or good literature.
Petronius, even in his cynicism, always preserves his detached and scintillating gentility;
The dazzling stylistic virtuosity which ranges with incomparable adroitness and freedom from low tones to high, from the courtly to the dialectal, from dialogue to description, from magniloquence to realism.
We have psychological nuances set down with unerring aplomb.
Petronius is amusing because he is amused; the quality of a great storyteller.
