|
|
 |
| Federico Fellini | 1969 |
|
Click image to purchase
|
 |
 Italy Surrealism  |
Satyricon is Fellini's very long, very weird and absolutely gorgeous exploration of the ancient world. The image quality is flat out amazing, the film work and cinematography are wonderful and there's some pretty decent acting tossed in. Seeing as I really don't know how to explain this movie and none of the logical or factual explanations come close to covering it... {Supposedly, Satyricon is based on "Satyricon" by Gaius Petronius Arbiter. Gaius was an advisor to Nero. Basically, the film is a fragmented and fantastic tour of the ancient world.} I'm just going to type out a few thoughts...
I own this. I've probably watched it more times than might be considered to be healthy. There's just so much here. Despite the fact that there's so much weirdness happening on screen, the movie's really long and there's just so much to try to take in, this is all infused with a really odd sort of humor that makes it easy to sit through. For me, there's a real contrast between this and La Dolce Vita. In La Dolce Vita, Fellini's moving most of the movie along with dialogue and almost interconnected scenes, there's a lot of symbolism and everything makes a slightly off kilter sort of sense. For some reason, I find La Dolce Vita to be difficult to watch.
In Satyricon, Fellini just bombards you with all manner of images, that run the gamut from gorgeous to base and nasty. He puts you in this insane world that he's built and you have to struggle to make real connections between elements in the movie. There's a discernable structure that you can follow along with once you watch for a few minutes but, other than that... much of this takes some work to connect. Despite that, I find this much easier to watch than La Dolce Vita. The very fact that you have to struggle to get things to make sense puts you in a mindset that's receptive to the the way the ideas are presented here. Add the fact that the imagery onscreen is just so absolutely nifty that you don't actually have to make sense of things to enjoy this and it all just... works.
{You can most likely expect more here in the future. :}}
