Fellini - Satyricon [1969]

Customer Reviews:

Feeble........2006-07-04

Fellini is a highly overrated filmaker, and this is one of his worst. Based on a work of literature of which half is missing, the film has no plot, no substance, and quite frankly is not even that beautiful or erotic. I enjoyed Pasolini's 'Arabian Nights' far more than this.

My advice is, when people say '8 1/2' this and 'La Dolce Vita' that. Just say no!

Two half naked roman dudes fight over a half naked male brat.......2006-03-16

Fellini brings light on space instead of space on light.
He brings mysticism to the movie not the movie to mysticism.

He brings boredom and rattling to a new height.
Lots of nice emotionalism and sweat.
Waging tongues and blood. Candles and tits.
Bondage and perversion.

We learn Italian words that we can not use.

Here is a good tidbit “Child of Aphrodite and Hermes…Hermaphrodite.”

The subtitles conveniently disappear at crucial moments. Even in Italian the voices do not match the sound.

One of the roman dudes Encolpio (Martin Potter) finally got a real part as "Doctor Who" in1983.

great on DVD.......2005-03-23

It's really great to have Fellini's Satyricon on DVD. I've had it on video for years, and have watched it many times (well, in bits -- it is very episodic), but only when watching the DVD, which was going cheap, did I realise that I've been missing half the movie all these years. The widescreen is wonderful -- you can see all the bizarre visual stuff Fellini crams into his shots, and, after all, that's the strong point of Fellini in this period, the visual. Don't get it for plot (fragmented); but it's one of the great bizarre movies of all time.

A film version of a Roman literary masterpiece.......2005-02-02

Possibly Fellini's most complex work, "Satyricon" is two hours of densely packed cinematographic action, with scarcely a plot in sight. Fellini likes his audience to work at understanding his art - "Satyricon" can be obtuse, can be baffling, can be downright disorienting, and it can take two or three viewings before you feel you have grasped what is happening. Two or three viewings? Is any film worth that level of study unless it's to get you marks in an end of term exam?

Fellini's film is a re-telling of a masterpiece of Roman literature. "The Satyricon" ('satire', which may originally have been a dish containing many different choices of meat and fruits) was written around AD 61. Only fragments remain. It ridicules the bad taste and pretensions of Roman society, using foul language and lurid fascination with bodily function to attack high culture and art.

Born in Marseilles, Gaius Petronius, author of "The Satyricon", was Emperor Nero's style guru, a man who partied to excess. The historian, Tacitus, described him as passing his days in sleep and nights in revelry, a man famous for indolence. He fell from favour and was forced to commit suicide. Nero, himself, was fascinated by theatre, music, and literature ... and by his own pretensions as an artist. Traditionally, his reign is seen as one of violence, and of rule by a highly unstable and fractious individual whose court was a living theatre of excess.

Set near Naples, "Satyricon" has that small town, seaside setting beloved of Fellini. The story follows the romantic adventures of Encolpius ("in the groin") as he vies with his friend and rival, Ascyltos, for the affections of a beautiful young man called Giton. We are presented with a roller-coaster ride through a seemingly endless series of disjointed scenes of Roman life - a feast, a brothel, a country villa, a town house, a theatre, a picture gallery, the public baths, a ship, a shipwreck - the various characters making acerbic asides and observations on the state of the world and the foibles of its peoples.

Petronius mixed language - the cultured classes speak in the proper Latin beloved of schoolmasters, but the poorer classes curse and swear, vulgarise their grammar, and generally mangle their declensions and conjugations. Fellini faithfully follows this style, deliberately recreating the gross and the vulgar.

Petronius savagely pilloried his targets. Fellini maintains the pattern. The characters are grotesque. While Petronius's characters are real - his writing breathes with the vitality and reality of his world - Fellini's images are wholly surreal, the more so as he is holding up a 1900 year old mirror to the Italian and cultural world of his own day. Many of his images explore the pretensions and self-satisfaction of both the film maker and the film viewer (or reviewer).

Fellini is regularly self-reflexive, using his own cinematography to comment on the state of contemporary cinema and analyse the process by which we view and understand the moving image. He can take the thinnest of plots and weave around it a surreal imagery which keeps you engrossed. Fellini was also fascinated by the nature of individualism, and in particular how individualism in the 20th century was so frequently expressed through materialism and possessions. So many of the possessions in "Satyricon" are actually slaves - is this Fellini commenting on how slavishly we follow fashion and aspire after each must-have possession, until we ourselves just become the playthings of the marketing industry?

The film abounds in homoerotic images, though homosexuality for Fellini often appears synonymous with effeminacy. The sexual tensions of the film, however, satirise the depersonalising of sex - it is an act involving the body, but too often emotionally and cerebrally vacuous. Life is lived as a series of disjointed scenes - there is no flow, no purpose, it's simply remembered as highlights and underlined passages.

There is something fundamentally empty about "Satyricon". It exposes too many human foibles as facades, too much of human life as insubstantial. Watching it two or three times - or more - you can become subject to crippling self-reflexivity, questioning your own pretensions and assumptions. Is it worth the effort? Well, it makes me laugh in places, it makes me gasp in others, and sometimes I just scratch my head. It's too obtuse to warrant five stars ... to give it three would be churlish.

Fellini Obsessions.......2004-05-03

Fellini Satyricon, despite its threadbare plot and poor post-dubbing, is marvellously entertaining for viewers who like watching weird outlandishness in movies. Fans of David Lynch, intelligent sex comedies and, of course, Federico Fellini will be in seventh heaven!

One complaint about the DVD. The film, naturally, is in Italian. Now, I hate dubbing foreign films, but because the post-dubbing is so (deliberately) poor on this film an English language track wouldn't have mattered so much. Especially since the only English subtitles available on the disc are for the hard of hearing. This means that those of us who are fine of hearing and who don't speak Italian have to be constantly reminded as we watch the film about which character just laughed, about the rumbling noise that accompanies an earthquake, about crowds of people yelling etc. Really off-putting, and really lazy of MGM DVD. Maybe I'll complain...

Average customer rating:

MASTERPIECE OF THE GROTESQUE

Fellini Satyricon [1969] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
Starring: Martin Potter , Hiram Keller , Max Born , Salvo Randone , and Mario Romagnoli
Director: Federico Fellini
Manufacturer: MGM
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

All Drama | Drama | Categories | DVD | Video
All Gay & Lesbian | Gay & Lesbian | Categories | DVD | Video
Region 1 | Special Features | DVD | Video
DVD | Format (binding_browse-bin) | Refinements | DVD | Video
ASIN: B000059H9C
Release Date: 2001-04-10

Customer Reviews:

MASTERPIECE OF THE GROTESQUE.......2002-08-29

Phew! Fellini's wild imagination runs rampant here, with a nightmare journey through a series of brothels with fat prostitutes, midgets, transexuals, a truly sickening Roman feast/orgy with stuffed pigs, a priestess who belches fire from an uncomfortable part of the anatomy, a sinister visit to the lair of the minotaur (the chanting is enough to raise the dead)and a deeply disturbing encounter with a delicate hermaphrodite. It's really too much to digest in one sitting, so I recommend viewing the movie over two days. Not for sensitive souls, but it's certainly a masterpiece of the grotesque. The only other movie that comes close is Burrough's The Naked Lunch.

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