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Directed by Federico Fellini
Starring Martin Potter, Hiram Keller
Duration: 2 hrs 8 min Cert: TBA (Provisionally :18)
In Italian with English subtitles
Tickets €6
In SATYRICON, Italian New Wave director Federico Fellini depicts the hedonistic, amoral, pre-Christian world of ancient Rome.
Using the unfinished classical writings of Petronius as his guide, Fellini invents a dreamlike culture full of strange, distant characters and odd, grotesque events.
Though the film lacks a definitive plot or narrative structure, its constants are Gitone (Max Born) and Encolpius (Martin Potter), whose unsavory encounters with sex, the theater, and religion are the film's focal point. Presenting a loosely structured episodic tale of decadence and depravity in ancient Rome,
SATYRICON follows the adventures of two students as they negotiate their way through a variety of mishaps, dangers, and sexual encounters. What results is a bizarre journey through ancient Rome. This story is a perfect example of Fellini's accomplished skill in bringing fantasy to the screen.
"I am examining ancient Rome as if this were a documentary about the customs and habits of the Martians."
-- Federico Fellini in an Interview, 1969
Federico Fellini describes his "Fellini Satyricon" as a science-fiction film, but one in which we journey to the past rather than to the future. Directors are notoriously unreliable as sources of opinions about their own movies, but in this case I think Fellini is dead right.
His film is a fantastical journey to a pre-Christian Rome that resembles no civilization that ever was, in heaven or on Earth. And it is a masterpiece. Some will say it is a bloody, depraved, disgusting film; indeed, people by the dozens were escaping from the sneak preview I attended. But "Fellini Satyricon" is a masterpiece all the same, and films that dare everything cannot please everybody.
Roger Ebert January 1970
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