Fellini Satyricon (1969)

The Satyricon was one of the most moving films I have ever seen. There was so much symbolism and so many undercurrents. I present a composite critique.

Fellini's omissions and additions neither contradict nor violate, but further define the surviving fragments of the original Satyricon. He had the task of making a continuous work of art of a scarred, fragmented torso with its head and limbs chopped off. Some of Fellini's sources of what is not in Petronius are from Suetonius, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal and Propertius. One might liken his reconstructing to that of a paleontologist giving form to a few dozen fossil bones. He stated that his intention was not to show vice or corruption, but to give an unbiased look at a morally decaying world. The film prefigures both the world of Rome prior to Christianity and the post-Christian world presently lurching toward birth. The moral violence that punctuates the film prefigures the irrational savagery of our own age.

Fillini rejects what has been written about the ancient world and sticks to what has been painted. The scenario synthesizes art, moving like music and spreading out like a suite of paintings, a catalog of images without character development, story, or drama. Dream-like images of anguish and obsessions demand great intellectual effort on the part of the viewer. His images are mesmerizing, like the waters of the Styx, and hallucinating like the canvases of Hieronymous Bosch. Painted flesh is brought to life and retains the sense of life on fragments amid the ruins.

We are presented a vast living fresco of Roman decadence as a metaphor for present society and as an allegorical satire of where we may be trending. The film is a window and a mirror where we may see both past and present at the same time, a world without moral anchoring, a nightmare world, a decomposing body infested with vermin. It is a fable for our times, equating moral decadence with apocalypse. Fellini constructs it with fresco-like mastery.

We are both fascinated and repelled. The young and the beautiful are as monstrous and impure as the old and the ugly. Fellini uses the grotesque to try to reclaim the viewers' lost sense of the mysterious, the transcendent and the holy. This grotesqueness zaps us into an encounter with another reality. Surrealistic elements dominate, pushing aside the human elements. Dissociations, or an alienated and incoherent simultaneity, are used to create the atmosphere of a dream. Fellini said that his film was "the documentary of a dream." The dream is frightening, because it is endurable only through intense and irresponsible indulgence followed by interminable escape. The characters are exiles in a world that is both of their own creation and beyond their control.

The film is heavy with Freudian symbolism. The over-painted fresco-like faces represent both the external masks of surface relationships and the masks that hide the darker impulses and compulsions that threaten to overwhelm and assume the identity of the ego. Fellini's film is a surrealistic vision of a hedonistic world where there is only the mask of the ego; there is no real ego to impose logic or reason, and no superego to impose ethics or morality. It is an id world that must inevitably consume its pawns, because it moves only on primitive drives, a world without innocence, purity, mutual commitments, restraints, or real love.

As a theme, one might say that the story is about the sexual education of Encolpio set in the context of a morally declin

Fmovies: Permeated with hedonism and sexuality, highly theatrical, very bizarre and surrealist while still keeping it on the ground and making it more potent and little coherence storywise; its fragments of Petronius classic (which I haven't read) wrapped in Fellinis incredible imagination.

Scenography, casting and settings are here of the absolutely highest order. Each frame is composed with the utmost care it seems, perhaps inspired by the same artworks found in the movie. Like the old Greeks this movie is made as true art in a non decadent manner contrasted with the decadent Rome we meet in the movie.

There are so much depth to this movie its no use trying to cover them here, but one key theme is, I think, what was described as the flower of youth and the withering of it, that is Encolpio's youth.

Highly recommended if you like a movie out of the ordinary, the images you see here will never be forgotten.

It seems like everyone on this message board missed a very important point about Satyricon: It is based on a Book! So much of the "weirdness" is not Fellini's doing, but the author's! The book was written by Petronius, one of the Emperor Nero's courtiers in the 1st Century. The book is widely recognized by historians as a peek into the lives of lower class Romans, and the general social mores of the time. In addition, parts of the book were lost during the Middle Ages, so the sketchy, non linear storyline comes from the book, not Fellini! Besides being visually gorgeous, the film does a very good job of portraying how very different ancient Graeco-Roman society was from our own, and how sex in particular was not seen as shameful or in any way limited to a narrow idea of what's "normal" as it is in America today. Unlike recent Roman Period movies or shows - such as HBO's "Rome" - which are constantly trying to make the ancient world seem familiar and "just like us." Fellini goes the other direction, and gives the other side of the coin - YES, the Romans were "like us" in many ways, but in other ways, they were also quite Alien, and UN-like modern Americans - VERY unlike.

Fellini Satyricon fmovies. "Satyricon" is among the weirdest and most colorful, larger-than-life movies I've ever seen, along with Erasurehead, Erendira, Santa sangre, Naked lunch... If you don't like these, don't even try "Satyricon".

On one hand, its many flaws are rather upsetting. The out-of-sync lipping (bad post-sync), the fact that the movie neither really tells a story nor evocates sensible moral or philosophical concepts... so one may say it's actually a dull movie. The violence in this movie doesn't seem to make real sense, neither does the homosexuality, neither does the "romanian decadence" portrait.

On the other hand, the scenography, the sets, the costumes and makup are among the most dazzling ones you'll ever see in cinema, and the cinematography... well... maybe the BEST one you'll ever see. I can't think of any another movie able to compete with "Satyricon"'s mindblowing cinematography. Each scene is a terrific picture, with several visual layers, extraordinary lights and focuses, a lot of invention, of visual flair, and the overall technical mastery is stunning.

The result is something mesmerizing for some, totally disgusting for others. I have to say I'm more on the mesmerized side, because I was mainly focused on the visual/meditative aspects of the movie, not on the narrative ones.

If you're really into cinema, I mean as an artistic media more than as entertainment, you MUST see "Satyricon", as it's to my sense the most *visually* outstanding movie ever made. Be prepared for some disappointment about the movie as a whole, though...

There's not much of a story in SATYRICON: we follow the disjointed "adventures" of two young men during decadent ancient Rome. What follows though is pure visual brilliance. The film reminded me a lot of psychedelic European comic books of the late 1960s and 1970s. I saw this Fellini film on TV, in pan and scan, and even though SATYRICON has to be seen on widescreen format, the cropped version was still mighty impressive to look at. But to experience the complete visual splendor of the film, widescreen is simply a must!

The film did drag here and there (certainly with Fellini letting some vignettes last longer than they should) but overall, the cumulative effect of all the stories creates a unique visceral experience that's seldom seen, back then or since. My only critique with SATYRICON is that in the end, it feels more like some avant-guard experimental theater experience than an actual film. The set-pieces are so stagy that SATYRICON often looks like a filmed stage play. This doesn't make the film bad but its staginess detracts a bit from achieving the perfect surreal effect that only a true cinematic experience can recreate. I could not immerse myself 100% in it because the staginess kept reminding me that I was watching a film. Even Pauline Kael said SATYRICON felt like 2 hours of people walking along walls. That's a bit of an exaggeration but I agree with her point. The staginess (which I'm aware is part of the surreal effect Fellini wanted to create) keeps SATYRICON from being a definitive masterpiece.

Even so, Fellini's SATYRICON is worth seeing for anyone who's into bawdy, surreal visual feasts. It's a one-of-a-kind experience.

Fellini called his "Satyricon" a science fiction film projected into the past. His expressive portrait of ancient Rome is a richly ornamented fresco of contrasts; variations within a select kaleidoscope of opposites related to the sacred, the pure, the just, and the beautiful.

Reportedly a free adaptation of the now fragmentary writings of Petronius, the film also makes fleeting references to various scattered works and myths of antiquity. Even the language is a blend of various dialects and accents, effectively brewed together into a type of "primordial soup."

The film features a young man named Encolpio and his sometime friend Ascilto; both of whom seem to prefer participatory experience as a means to finding meaning in life while primarily disregarding status, power and possessions. Contrasting some of the film's more serene scenes with those of unrest and discord, patterns supportive of a life lived from a similar experiential perspective begin to emerge. Some examples are as follows:

During the "Death to the Classics" scene, the poet Eumolpo says that the arts have declined because the desire for "virtue" has been lost. Dialectical discussion and philosophy have been replaced with drinking, vice and monetary greed, thus preventing further creation of works of art at the same pinnacle of excellence as the classics.

Later when Eumolpo and Encolpio recline in the open field encased in an early morning mist, the elderly poet bequeaths to Encolpio a series of "natural" phenomena; among them mountains, rivers, clouds, love, tears, joy, sound, song and the voices of man...

During the "Matron of Ephesus" scene, a young woman mourning her deceased husband by starving to death in a cave has her chalk white face returned to its natural radiance after accepting the embrace of a handsome soldier. The moral being "...better to hang a 'dead' husband than to lose a 'living' lover..."

A politically doomed and suicidal married couple free their slaves whereupon a reference is made to the "sacred" earth. Their children are sent away to a place free from tyranny which will be "beautiful." Later, Encolpio and Ascilto arrive at the couple's elegant home and enjoy a night of revelry during which Encolpio quotes the "poet" as having said "...as for me I have always lived to enjoy the present moment as if it were the last sunrise..."

The tale of the beautiful Enotea and her subsequent punishment after she tricked the wizard who had professed his love for her seems to be a warning to remain "true" to expressions of affection.

Following what appears to be his final corruption after having abandoned his idealistic philosophy, Eumolpo proposes an interesting last will and testament. Those wishing to inherit a part of his worldly fortune are asked to devour his remains. Reflecting the hippie generation's symbolic scorn of rampant materialism during the shooting of this film, Encolpio and his friends smile and turn away, heading onward toward a new adventure.

The scenes of discord in the film appear to reflect issues related to social and political methods of enforced control over others. For example, during the banquet of Trimalcione, his sycophants eat, laugh, chant, dance, perform and throw objects on cue. While a captive at sea, Encolpio is made an object of entertainment for the pirate Lica. Later he is forced to battle a huge &q