Word: satyricon
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FELLINI opens his Satyricon with a shot of a wall covered with ancient Roman graffitti: crudely drawn naked women, some puns, maybe somewhere a reference to Caesar Salad: all in cold damp colors blending to a dull grey-green. This first image persists as the most sensible comment about the rest of the film...
...Fellini Satyricon has been called "the first great Jungian film" (in Time magazine), and this would be true if we were to take graffitti as the quintessential representation of the collective unconscious. Otherwise, Fellini Satyricon is a loosely constructed. opulently produced cartoon, in which no one image seems essential to the thematic sense of the film and some make little sense...
...talk of the decadent disrepair of the art of their time, and look back wistfully to past classics. Having thus conveniently suspended the present in cultural malaise, the two head off to a banquet/orgy given by Trimalchio. a fat old fart whom Petronius, the author of the original Satyricon, patterned after the Emperor Nero. The debauch at the party is complete, happily (for me) beyond the descriptive power of adjectives and adverbs. Merriment is cooled by a breach of good taste when Eumolphus accuses Trimalchio of plagiarizing Lucretius, Obviously he is correct, for Trimalchio immediately orders him thrown into...
...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...
Still, no one else could have brought a tenth of the Satyricon to the screen without the customary lubricity and X-rated smirks. When, in a climactic scene, Encolpius recovers his potency at the thighs of a gigantic black Venus, the viewer feels less a voyeur than an observer of some elemental sexual ritual brought intact from the beginning of the world. To be sure, between such moments, the film proves so personal that it amounts to solipsism. "The pearl," as the director once modestly observed, "is only the oyster's autobiography." Fellini Satyricon, at the end, may even...