Satyricon (film)
Encyclopedia
Satyricon is a 1969 Italian fantasy
Fantasy film
Fantasy films are films with fantastic themes, usually involving magic, supernatural events, make-believe creatures, or exotic fantasy worlds. The genre is considered to be distinct from science fiction film and horror film, although the genres do overlap...

 drama film
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 written and directed by Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...

. It is loosely based on Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...

's work, Satyricon
Satyricon
Satyricon is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as a certain Titus Petronius...

, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero
Nero
Nero , was Roman Emperor from 54 to 68, and the last in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was adopted by his great-uncle Claudius to become his heir and successor, and succeeded to the throne in 54 following Claudius' death....

 and set in imperial Rome.

Plot

The film opens on a graffiti-covered wall with Encolpio (Martin Potter
Martin Potter (actor)
Martin Potter is a British actor.After the National Youth Theatre and repertory theatre in Guildford and Hampstead, Potter received his first role in British television at the age of 24 in the television drama The Bonegrinder written by Dennis Potter...

) lamenting the loss of his lover Gitone (Max Born) to Ascilto (Hiram Keller
Hiram Keller
Hiram Keller , born Hiram Keller Undercofler Jnr., was an American stage and film actor who appeared starred in European films. He is best known for his role as Ascyltus in Federico Fellini's 1969 film Satyricon....

). Vowing to win him back, he learns at the Thermae
Thermae
In ancient Rome, thermae and balnea were facilities for bathing...

 that Ascilto sold Gitone to the actor Vernacchio (Fanfulla). At the theatre, he discovers Vernacchio and Gitone performing in a lewd play based on the "emperor's miracle": a slave's hand is axed off and replaced with a gold one. Encolpio storms the stage and reclaims Gitone. On their return to Encolpio's home in the Insula Felicles, a Roman tenement building, they walk through the vast Roman brothel known as the Lupanare, observing numerous sensual scenes. They fall asleep after making love at Encolpio's place. Ascilto sneaks into the room, waking Encolpio with a whiplash. Since both share the tenement room, Encolpio proposes they divide up their property and separate. Ascilto mockingly suggests they split Gitone in half. Encolpio is driven to suicidal despair, however, when Gitone decides to leave with Ascilto. At that moment, an earthquake destroys the tenement.

Encolpio meets the poet Eumolpus at the art museum. The elderly poet blames current corruption on the mania for money and invites his young friend to a banquet held at the villa of Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), a wealthy freeman, and his wife Fortunata (Magali Noël
Magali Noël
Magali Noël is a Turkish-French actress and singer. Originally from Izmir, she emigrated from Turkey to France in 1951, and her acting career began soon thereafter. She acted in multilingual cinema chiefly from 1951 to 1980, doing several films in Italian with renowned director Federico Fellini,...

). Eumolpus's declamation of poetry is met with catcalls and thrown food. While Fortunata performs a frantic dance, the bored Trimalchio turns his attention to two very young boys. Scandalized, Fortunata berates her husband who attacks her then has her covered in gizzards and gravy. Fancying himself a poet, Trimalchio recites one of his finer poems whereupon Eumolpo accuses him of stealing verses from Lucretius. Enraged, Trimalchio orders the poet tortured by his slaves near the villa's huge fireplace. The guests are then invited to visit Trimalchio's tomb where he enacts his own death in an ostentatious ceremony. The story of the Matron of Ephesus is recounted, the first of the stories within a story in the film. Encolpio finally leaves the villa, helping the limping, beaten Eumolpo to drink water from a pool in a tilled field. In return for his kindness, Eumolpo bequeaths the spirit of poetry to his young friend.

Encolpio, Gitone, and Ascilto are imprisoned on the pirate ship of Lichas, a middle-aged merchant in the emperor's service. Lichas selects Encolpio for a Greco-Roman wrestling match and quickly subdues him. Smitten by his beauty, Lichas takes Encolpio as his spouse in a wedding ceremony blessed by his wife, Trifena. The seasons pass. Rebel soldiers under the new Caesar overthrow Caesar, the boy emperor, who is forced to kill himself. Later, the soldiers board the ship and behead Lichas under Trifena's satisfied gaze. Violent political discord is evoked in a montage sequence of Roman armies on the march. To escape the new emperor, the owner of a patrician villa sets his slaves free and commits suicide with his wife. That night, Encolpio and Ascilto discover the abandoned villa and make love with an African slave girl who has stayed behind. Fleeing the villa when soldiers on horseback arrived in the courtyard to burn the patrician corpses, the two friends reach a desert. Ascilto placates a nymphomaniac's demands in a covered wagon while Encolpio waits outside, listening to the woman's servant discuss a hermaphrodite
Hermaphrodite
In biology, a hermaphrodite is an organism that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes.Many taxonomic groups of animals do not have separate sexes. In these groups, hermaphroditism is a normal condition, enabling a form of sexual reproduction in which both...

 demi-god reputed to possess healing powers at the Temple of Ceres. With the aid of a mercenary, they kill two men and kidnap the hermaphrodite in the hope of obtaining a ransom. Once exposed to the desert sun, however, the hermaphrodite sickens and dies of thirst. Enraged, the mercenary tries to murder his two companions but is overpowered and killed.

Captured by soldiers, Encolpio is released in a labyrinth and forced to play Theseus to a gladiator's Minotaur for the amusement of spectators at the festival of Momus
Momus
Momus or Momos was in Greek mythology the god of satire, mockery, censure, writers, poets; a spirit of evil-spirited blame and unfair criticism. His name is related to , meaning 'blame' or 'censure'. He is depicted in classical art as lifting a mask from his face.-In classical literature:Hesiod...

, the God of Laughter. When the gladiator spares Encolpio's life because of his well-spoken words of mercy, the festival rewards the young man with Ariadne, a sensual woman with whom he must copulate as the crowd looks on. Impotent, Encolpio is publicly humiliated by Ariadne. Eumolpo offers to take him to the Garden of Delights where prostitutes are said to effect a cure for his impotence but the treatment - gentle whipping of the buttocks - fails miserably. In the second of the stories within a story in the film, the owner of the Garden of Delights narrates the tale of Enotea to Encolpio. For having rejected his advances, a sorcerer curses a beautiful young woman: she must spend her days kindling fires for the village's hearths from her genitalia. Inspired, Encolpio and Ascilto hire a boatman to take them to Enotea's home. Greeted by an old woman who has him drink a potion, Encolpio falls under a spell where his sexual prowess is restored to him by Enotea in the form of an Earth Mother figure and sorceress. When Ascilto is murdered in a field by the boatman, Encolpio decides to join Eumolpo's ship bound for North Africa. But Eumolpo has died in the meantime, leaving as his heirs all those willing to eat his corpse. Encolpio hasn't the stomach for this last and bitter mockery but is nonetheless invited by the captain to board the ship. In a voice-over, Encolpio explains that he set sail with the captain and his crew. His words end in mid-sentence, however, as the camera films a distant stretch of land then cuts to frescoes of the film's characters on a crumbling wall.

Cast

  • Martin Potter
    Martin Potter (actor)
    Martin Potter is a British actor.After the National Youth Theatre and repertory theatre in Guildford and Hampstead, Potter received his first role in British television at the age of 24 in the television drama The Bonegrinder written by Dennis Potter...

     as Encolpio
  • Hiram Keller
    Hiram Keller
    Hiram Keller , born Hiram Keller Undercofler Jnr., was an American stage and film actor who appeared starred in European films. He is best known for his role as Ascyltus in Federico Fellini's 1969 film Satyricon....

     as Ascilto
  • Max Born as Gitone
  • Salvo Randone
    Salvo Randone
    Salvatore "Salvo" Randone was an Italian theatrical and film actor. He appeared in 45 films between 1943 and 1977.He was married to the actress Neda Naldi-Selected filmography:...

     as Eumolpo
  • Mario Romagnoli as Trimalcione
  • Magali Noël
    Magali Noël
    Magali Noël is a Turkish-French actress and singer. Originally from Izmir, she emigrated from Turkey to France in 1951, and her acting career began soon thereafter. She acted in multilingual cinema chiefly from 1951 to 1980, doing several films in Italian with renowned director Federico Fellini,...

     as Fortunata
  • Capucine
    Capucine
    Capucine was a French actress and fashion model best known for her comedic roles in The Pink Panther and What's New Pussycat? . She appeared in 36 films and 17 television productions between 1948 and 1990...

     as Trifena
  • Alain Cuny
    Alain Cuny
    Alain Cuny was a French actor.He was born René Xavier Marie in Saint-Malo, Brittany, and studied medicine for a while before entering the film industry as a costume and set designer. Cuny started acting in the 1930s...

     as Lica
  • Fanfulla as Vernacchio
  • Donyale Luna
    Donyale Luna
    Donyale Luna was an American model and cover girl. She also appeared in several films, in Camp by Andy Warhol, Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? by William Klein, as Groucho Marx's companion in Otto Preminger's Skidoo, and most notably as Oenothea in Federico Fellini's Satyricon and as the title...

     as Enotea
  • Danika La Loggia as Scintilla
  • Gordon Mitchell
    Gordon Mitchell
    Gordon Mitchell was an American actor and bodybuilder.-Biography:Charles Allen Pendleton was born in Denver, Colorado, and began working out in his Denver neighbourhood to deal with his tough companions. During World War II he served in the U.S...

     as Robber
  • Lucia Bosè
    Lucia Bosé
    Lucia Bosè, born Lucia Borloni , is an Italian actress, who was at the height of her fame during the period of Italian Neorealism, the 1940s and 1950s. She is the mother of famous Spanish singer Miguel Bosé.-Life and career:...

     as Suicidal wife
  • Joseph Wheeler
    Joseph Wheeler
    Joseph Wheeler was an American military commander and politician. He has the rare distinction of serving as a general during war time for two opposing forces: first as a noted cavalry general in the Confederate States Army in the 1860s during the American Civil War, and later as a general in the...

     as Suicidal husband

Production

A year prior to the film's release had already seen another Satyricon directed by Gian Luigi Polidoro – hence the addition of "Fellini" to the title. Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich explained that when "Fellini starts work on Satyricon, Alfredo Bini, another producer who'd registered the title in 1962, decides to push up his movie to compete. Grimaldi [Fellini's producer] tries to stop him with a lawsuit and loses. And so the production will be called Fellini Satyricon, distinguishing it from the one produced by [Bini]."

Co-screen-writer Bernardino Zapponi
Bernardino Zapponi
Bernardino Zapponi was an Italian novelist and screenwriter best known for his films written in collaboration with Federico Fellini.- Biography :Zapponi was born in Rome in 1927...

 noted that Fellini used a deliberately jerky form of dubbing that caused the dialogue to appear out of sync with the actors' lips. This was in keeping with his original intention of creating a profound sense of estrangement throughout the film.

Italy

First screened at the 30th Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

 on September 4, 1969, the film received generally positive reviews by critics writing in "stunned bewilderment". Time Magazine reported that the "normally reserved press corps gave the film a five-minute ovation ... the Venice showing was so wildly popular that festival tickets, normally 2,000 lire ($3.20), were being sold on the black market at 60,000 lire (about $100) apiece". Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich
Tullio Kezich
Tullio Kezich was an Italian film critic, screenwriter, playwright and actor.Kezich was born in Trieste...

 noted that there were "no outright negative reactions. The rampant moralizing of ten years ago seems to have passed out of fashion". In his favorable Corriere della Sera
Corriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...

review, Giovanni Grazzini argued that "Fellini's Rome bears absolutely no relationship to the Rome we learned about in school books. It is a place outside historical time, an area of the unconscious in which the episodes related by Petronius are relived among the ghosts of Fellini... His Satyricon is a journey through a fairytale for adults. It is evident that Fellini, finding in these ancient personages the projection of his own human and artistic doubts, is led to wonder if the universal and eternal condition of man is actually summed up in the frenzied realization of the transience of life which passes like a shadow. These ancient Romans who spend their days in revelry, ravaged by debauchery, are really an unhappy race searching desperately to exorcise their fear of death".

Kezich saw the film as a study in self-analysis: "Everything seems to be aimed at making the viewer feel ill at ease, at giving him the impression that he is watching for the first time scenes from a life he never dreamed could have existed. Fellini has described his film as 'science fiction of the past,' as though the Romans of that decadent age were being observed by the astounded inhabitants of a flying saucer. Curiously enough, in this effort of objectivity, the director has created a film that is so subjective as to warrant psychoanalysis. It is pointless to debate whether the film proposes a plausible interpretation of ancient Rome, or whether in some way it illustrates Petronius: the least surprising parts are those that come closest to Petronius's text or that have some vague historical significance."

The film performed well at the box office in both Italy and France.

The film was selected as the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...

 at the 42nd Academy Awards
42nd Academy Awards
The 42nd Academy Awards were presented April 7, 1970 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles. There was no host.This is currently the highest rated of the televised Academy Awards ceremonies, according to Nielsen ratings....

, but was not accepted as a nominee. The following year, Fellini was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.

USA

As co-producers keen to recoup their investment, executives at United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....

 made certain that Fellini received "a maximum of exposure" during his American promotional tour of the film by organizing press and television interviews in New York and Los Angeles. For Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...

 of the New York Times, Satyricon was "the quintessential Fellini film, a travelogue through an unknown galaxy, a magnificently realized movie of his and our wildest dreams". Unimpressed, Richard Corliss
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...

 saw the film as a reflection of an artist in decline. John Simon
John Simon (critic)
John Ivan Simon is an American author and literary, theater, and film critic.-Personal life:Simon was born in Subotica, Bačka, County of Bačka, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later, known as Yugoslavia . He is of Hungarian descent...

 unfavorably compared Fellini to Petronius. Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....

's "Mondo Trasho
Mondo Trasho
Mondo Trasho is a 1969 16mm mondo black comedy film by Baltimore, Maryland filmmaker John Waters starring Divine, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary and Mink Stole. It contains very little dialogue, the story being told mostly through musical cues.-Plot:...

" review in the New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

described the film as little more than "a really bad, a terrible movie" while author Parker Tyler declared it "the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history". For Archer Winston of the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...

, 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".

The film currently holds a 77% 'Fresh' rating on Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

.

Adaptation

Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...

's original text survives only in fragments. While recuperating from a debilitating illness in 1967, Fellini reread Petronius and was fascinated by the missing parts, the large gaps between one episode and the next. The text's fragmentary nature encouraged him to go beyond the traditional approach of recreating the past in film: the key to a visionary cinematic adaptation lay in narrative techniques of the dream state that exploited the dream's imminent qualities of mystery, enigma, immorality, outlandishness, and contradiction. In Comments on Film, Fellini explained that his goal in adapting Petronius's classic was "to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination: to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it in order to explore it as something all of a piece and unknowable."

The most important of the narrative changes Fellini makes to Petronius's text is the addition of a battle between Encolpio and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth thereby linking Encolpio to Theseus and the journey into the unconscious. Other original sequences include a nymphomaniac in a desert caravan whose despondent husband pays Ascilto and Encolpio to couple with her, and an hermaphrodite worshipped as a demigod at the Temple of Ceres
Ceres (mythology)
In ancient Roman religion, Ceres was a goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships. She was originally the central deity in Rome's so-called plebeian or Aventine Triad, then was paired with her daughter Proserpina in what Romans described as "the Greek rites of Ceres"...

. Abducted by the two protagonists and a mercenary, the hermaphrodite later dies a miserable death in a desert landscape that, in Fellini's adaptation, is posed as an ill-omened event, none of which is to be found in the Petronian version.

Though the two protagonists, Encolpius (Martin Potter
Martin Potter (actor)
Martin Potter is a British actor.After the National Youth Theatre and repertory theatre in Guildford and Hampstead, Potter received his first role in British television at the age of 24 in the television drama The Bonegrinder written by Dennis Potter...

) and Ascilto (Hiram Keller), appear throughout, the characters and locations surrounding them change unexpectedly. This intentional technique of fragmentation conveys Fellini's view of both the original text and the nature of history itself, and is echoed visually in the film's final shot of a ruined villa whose walls, painted with frescoes of the scenes we have just seen, are crumbling, fading and incomplete. Fellini's interest in Carl Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

's theory of the collective unconscious
Collective unconscious
Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. It is proposed to be a part of the unconscious mind, expressed in humanity and all life forms with nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche autonomously organizes experience...

 is also on display with an abundance of archetypes in highly dreamlike settings.

See also

  • List of submissions to the 42nd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
  • List of Italian submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Further reading

  • Fellini, Federico (1988). Comments on Film. Ed. G. Grazzini (trans. Joseph Henry). California State University at Fresno.
  • — (1970). Fellini Satyricon, ed. Dario Zanelli, New York: Ballantine.
  • Frantz, Gilda (1970). "'Fellini Satyricon'". in: Psychological Perspectives, Volume 1, n° 2, Autumn 1970, p. 157-161.
  • Hughes, Eileen Lanouette (1971). On the Set of 'Fellini Satyricon': A Behind-the-Scenes Diary, New York: Morrow.
  • Prats, Arnando José (1979). "The Individual, the World and the Life of Myth in 'Fellini Satyricon'". in: South Atlantic Bulletin, Band 44, n° 2, May 1979, p. 45-58. Betti, Liliana (1970). Federico A.C.: disegni per il 'Satyricon' di Federico Fellini, Milan: Libri Edizioni.
  • Sütterlin, Axel (1996). Petronius Arbiter und Federico Fellini. Ein strukturanalytischer Vergleich, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag

Documentary

  • Bachmann, Gideon. Ciao Federico: Fellini directs Satyricon. A "making-of" filmed during the 1968 production.

External links

  • Fellini Satyricon review by Roger Ebert
    Roger Ebert
    Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK