Word: petronius
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Spirits), Director Federico Fellini has always been half in love with his main target: decadence. His favorite gallery is Rome, where the extravagances of the Via Veneto add daily calories to the Sweet Life. The Appian Way leads into the past, into the harsh, lurid revels of Petronius, who mocked Nero's ancient Sybarites with the first Satyricon. Although only fragments of that manuscript survive, they are enough to reveal a Homeric spoof. The hilariously ignoble hero, Encolpius (sometimes translated as "the Crotch"), is a randy homosexual. His wanderings lead him not to godlike beings...
...catalogue of images is not as unrelated as it seems. At its best, the scenario synthesizes art, moving like music, and spreading out like a suite of paintings. In this, Fellini Satyricon exceeds the original. Petronius could only describe the obscenity of the banquet staged by Trimalchio, the nouveau riche. Fellini could portray it as a vignette of Rome at the end of its parabola of grandeur, complete with elaborate jokes and hoaxes. It is an occasion as bizarre and funny as the film's conclusion-in which a lady leaves a fortune to friends, with the proviso that...
...Spirits of the Dead, Fellini used the original source only as inspirational material. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter was a pornographic satire written by Nero's whoremonger, a raucous tale of two worldly youths moving through the decaying strata of Roman society. Fellini lifted all of the characters but just a single episode from the book. The result, announces the director with a characteristically immodest shrug, "is about 20% Petronius and 80% Fellini...
...incense and cement dust to reproduce a sense of murky antiquity. Yet there is little doubt that, in scenes like the death of a patrician couple who prefer suicide to inevitable political assassination, Fellini is attempting to render this vast fresco as a giant metaphor for the 1960s. "If Petronius' work is a full-blooded description of the atmosphere of those times," Fellini admits, "the film that I adapted from it is a panorama, an allegorical satire of our present-day world. It is a science-fiction film projected into the past, not the future, a journey into...
...Measure for Measure metes out the laughter. Moliere's Tartuffe and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist alternate with them. On the Avon Theater's proscenium stage at Downie Street, the offering for July is Satyricon, an original burlesque by Tom Hendry, based on the writings of Petronius, with music by Stanley Silverman; and for August, Peter Luke's Hadrian...