Word: fellini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...suppose this can all be explained. Fellini is no dodo. He is making a film about decadent Roman society, and where we decadent Americans presume that our symbols have some reference beyond themselves, and thus make for a cleaner reality on another level, the symbols of Fellini's Rome never flee the decadence and malaise that creates them. For example, in one take, two of the main characters are walking past a side street, up which horses are drawing a 20-foot high statue of a head. The two are on their way to a brothel. Trying to understand...
...does, but Fellini has to play a few more tricks and spend some more money on elaborate sets. Out of nowhere (with no transition from the previous scene except a black screen to signal "shift"), we see Encolpius sliding down a dirt pile and into an arena to fight a man in a minotaur costume. At this point. the film begins to resemble Juliet of the Spirits, but only because the situation itself is so implausible that we look for psychological reality, finding no other. An exhausted Encolpius fights his minotaur through a maze, finally falling down pleading...
...crowd and strides over to the woman. He mounts her, but cannot enter; he is impotent. The woman throws him off, calling him "a squashed worm." The crowd boos and throws rocks. Encolpius is again alone, weeping: unable to participate in "the glory that was Rome" as Fellini has defined...
There's only one hope left: the Witch Oenothea, who in a trade-off with a wizard long ago ended up with fire between her legs. And it's real fire too, because Fellini shows us a scene in which a long line of foolish-looking peasants wait with unlit torches at Oenotheas's bed. When their time comes, each devoutly places his torch between her legs to her sex, and "Poof." It is as if Fellini cannot bear to let us imagine anything. Anyway, Encolpius goes to Oenothea, and she "lights his fire," as it were, and he walks...
...there you have the story. On it hang thousands of cameos: of ugly, deformed, voluptuous. debauching Romans. Fellini's camera moves past them almost mechanically, allotting a measured vignette to each freak and then moving on. The story almost rumbles as it moves unaffected through so many lives...