1970: Produzioni Europee Associati (PEA) / United Artists
Director: Federico Fellini
Producers: Alberto Grimaldi
Screenplay: Petronius (book "Satyricon"), Federico Fellini (adaptation and screenplay) &
Bernardino Zapponi (adaptation and screenplay), Brunello Rondi (additional screenplay)
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Music: Tod Dockstader, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Nino Rota, Andrew Rudin
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Running Time: 128 minutes
Cast: Martin Potter (Encolpio), Hiram Keller (Ascilto), Max Born (Gitone), Salvo Randone (Eumolpo), Mario Romagnoli (Trimalcione) Magali Noël (Fortunata), Capucine (Trifena), Alain Cuny (Lica)
If you don't know about dvdinfatuation.com, hosted by my good Twitter friend Dave B., you might want to check it out. Besides introducing me to films I may have otherwise missed, Dave offers insights into the film-going experience that compel me to examine my own reaction to certain movies.
In one review, Dave made the following observation about movies that might not appeal to us at certain points in our lives but that we find ourselves warming to as we grow older:
The fact that I passed over [this film] so easily all those years ago was a mistake of youth, and yet I’m not sure I would have appreciated it then the way I do now. Lacking any viable worldly experience in 1991, the underlying message ... might have simply rolled off my shoulders. Seeing it today, it has settled comfortably in my mind.After reading Dave's words, I found myself considering movies that fit that description in my own life, cinematic artifacts that I had to grow into, that perhaps I did not care for on first viewing but came to appreciate when I revisited them later in life.
Case in point, the 1969 film Fellini Satyricon, the most unsettling movie I have ever seen. No really, I'm serious. This movie is an acid trip, a celebration of sweat and soot and bodily fluids so disorienting that when I first viewed it back in college in 1984, I walked out at the reel change.
What’s ironic about my walkout is that around the same time I had no problem sitting through other films considered far more disturbing than Satyricon, films like Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave. Those movies were intense, yes, but none of them smacked me like Fellini’s film. So what was it about Satyricon that rocked my world for all the wrong reasons? To fully understand that, let me give you some back-story.
I grew up in the 1970s, in a small Kansas town. I remember the decade as an ugly time of urban myths and horror stories spread by a queasy religious right resistant to change. For instant, as a kid, I believed marijuana gave you cancer, and that hippies kidnapped children, got them addicted to drugs, and turned them into homosexuals.
As for movies, our local theater didn't get new releases until about four months after their initial run. It never screened foreign films, seldom showed anything controversial, and in all my years, the most distressing thing I saw in that place was the trailer for The Return of Count Yorga.
In 1983, I escaped this small Kansas town and ran off to attend college … at another small Kansas town. Still, as I say in the afterward to my novel Pitch, I though I had died and gone to Paris. I was out from under my parents’ roof, living on my own, and something about the college experience made me feel hip and trendy.
And then I saw Fellini Satyricon.
It all started when my Art History professor rented a 35 mm of Federico Fellini’s cinematic mess and arranged to have it screened in his classroom. Photocopy fliers had been posted all over the fine arts building, and since I had never heard of Satyricon, or of Fellini himself, I fancied this the kind of cool, trendy thing that college guys did. Keep in mind, I was raised on Star Wars and Ray Harryhausen, and at that point, the most intense movie I had ever seen was Jaws.
Suffice to say, Fellini’s eleventh feature film hit me like a prison shower rape.
Set in ancient Rome, Satyricon tells the story of … actually, it doesn’t tell much of a story. The film opens with Enculpio (Martin Potter), a young Roman, whining in front of a grafittied wall about losing his lover Giton (Max Born) to the arrogant Aschyltus (Hiram Keller). When he goes to confront Aschyltus, he learns that Giton has been sold to Vernacchio, a disgusting actor who farts onstage, eats flies, and cuts off the arm of a beggar as part of an afternoon’s entertainment. Enculpio reclaims Giton, and the two make love. When I saw this in 1984, I started freaking out. Sure, I’d heard about gay people on the news and had even seen them depicted in sitcoms, but this was the first time I’d ever seen intimacy between two men in a movie.
But it gets stranger. Aschyltus storms Enculpio’s room, beats him with a whip, and persuades Giton to come away with him. Any semblance to a linear plot ends as the remainder of the film consists of the heart-broken Enculpio’s disjointed and episodic adventures. Along the way, we feast our eyes on a variety of sweaty, grotesque faces, witness a number of disgusting acts, and are pretty much thrown off our game at every turn.
I’ll admit it. In 1984, I had no real exposure to the homosexual lifestyle, and the idea of two men together kind of freaked me out. I was able to get past the scene with Enculpio and Giton, which was rather tame, but about the time Enculpio wrestles the aging merchant Lica (Alain Cuny) and is forced to give in to the older man’s advances, I was done. I walked out on Satyricon, and was scorned by both my instructor and my hipster peers for weeks. It would be another decade before I had a chance to see Fellini Satyricon again. While I can’t say it sweetened like fine wine, I am now at least able to sit through it and appreciate it on its own terms.
To grasp what Fellini was going for here, let's go back to the source material. The original Satyricon was a satirical play from the late 1st Century, believed to be written by Gaius Petronius, a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. Only fragments of the original text have survived through the centuries, and when Fellini read it in 1967, he became fascinated by the gaps in the narrative. The disjointed quality of Satyricon was reminiscent to the great director of the dream state, and this dictated his approach to translating the text to the big screen. The result is a film that treats history itself as possessing the qualities of dream, as lacking in the kind of narrative structure we impose on it. Fellini’s tale of ancient Rome is without cause and effect, lacking a set of complications in the first act that are to be resolved in the third. It views the past through a scrim of romance and surrealism, but it denies any real significance to its concatenation of episodes. In the film’s final shot, when Encolpio’s narration is cut off in mid-sentence and his image fades into a fresco on a crumbling wall, we are struck by the transience of life, and we question whether our life experiences have philosophical meaning or if profundity is merely an aesthetic we impose upon them.
I’m sounding like a bearded, balding literary type now, so let me dial it back a bit. The real question is, do I like Fellini Satyricon. Well, yes and no. Like Pasolini’s Saló, the film is disgusting, but it can also be fascinating, what writer Gary Indiana might call an “ugly butterfly.” The imagery overload and the disjointed nature of what passes for story were designed to make a viewer uncomfortable, and guess what? It does.
Still, now that I am older and have seen Fellini’s other work, I appreciate the film’s place in the canon, particularly as a transition between Juliet of the Spirits, which I did not care for, and Fellini’s Roma, which I enjoyed. In many ways, Satyricon derives its episodic nature from La Dolce Vita, my favorite Fellini film and its dreamlike disposition is evocative of 8 1/2, my second favorite Fellini film, so I can’t to be too hard on it.
As with most Fellini films, I have a favorite sequence, and ironically, it occurs right after the point where I walked out in 1984.
A wealthy man, fearing persecution from the new emperor, decides to set his slaves free, after which he and his wife commit suicide. As the life blood flows from their wrists, the man relates a memory of seeing a lion in Africa and then dies. Immediately after, Encolpio and Achyltus arrive and decide to enjoy the luxuries of the house, even frolicking with a beautiful African slave. In this progression of images, great tragedy has given way to the indulgence of life’s pleasures, and Encolpio waxes poetic about living each day as if it were your last. To me, nothing else in Fellini Satyricon better illustrates the film’s central theme of life’s transitory nature, encouraging us to enjoy the moment for we too will pass, and most of us won’t even get a fresco.
If you’ve never seen a Fellini film before, take my advise and save this one for later. It’s a rough way to be introduced to the master. For my money, La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 are his best films, but you might do well to start with his early realist works like Nights in Cabiria or La Strada. If I can say anything positive about my 1984 experience, it’s that the first half of Fellini Satyricon opened my eyes to cinema, making me realize that there were other ways of telling a story through film than the pulpy but no less wonderful narratives I had previously enjoyed. As upsetting as it was to my naïve red state sensibilities, Satyricon stayed with me for years. It encouraged me to explore. Had I not experienced it, even in its truncated state in 1984, I may not have been open to other films and certainly to nothing by Fellini.
If you're grooving on Matt's reviews, check out his other writing. Pitch, Matt's first published novel and first prize winner of the 2012 Balboa Press Fiction Contest, is a chilling yet inspiring tale of baseball, addiction, recovery, and ... time travel. The banner will also take you to an Amazon page, where you can order Matt's newest novel Strays, part of the Glaring Chronicles series. Check it out:
