Fellini: Satyricon - KarazwLaimoon

Date: 13 February 2014

Title: Satyricon
Director: Federico Fellini (Italy)
Date: 1969
Language: Italy (English Subtitles)
Duration: 128 minutes
Key Actors: Martin Potter (Encolpio) and Hiram Keller (Ascilto)

Time: 8:00 pm
Location: Mouawad Museum (Beirut, Lebanon)

Link to IMDB: Click Here
YouTube Trailer: Click Here
Roger Ebert: Click Here
366 Weird Movies: Click Here
New York Times: Click Here
GLBT Literature: Click Here
Senses of Cinema: Click Here
Read Article on Structuralism in Fellini Satyricon: Click Here
Download Article on Petronius’ Satyrica: Analysis and Analogy: Click Here

Download Article on Fellini's Satyricon by David Grossvogel: Click Here (From JSTOR)
Download Article on Arbitrary Satyricon - Fellini and Petronius by Erich Segal: Click Here (From JSTOR).

(Note that articles from JSTOR are for our personal use and as a background of the films we are screening).

Synopsis: (from Wikipedia
Satyricon (official name: Fellini Satyricon) is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome. Petronius's original text survives only in fragments. While recuperating from a debilitating illness in 1967, Fellini reread Petronius and was fascinated by the missing parts, the large gaps between one episode and the next. The text's fragmentary nature encouraged him to go beyond the traditional approach of recreating the past in film: the key to a visionary cinematic adaptation lay in narrative techniques of the dream state that exploited the dream's imminent qualities of mystery, enigma, immorality, outlandishness, and contradiction.
In Comments on Film, Fellini explained that his goal in adapting Petronius's classic was "to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination: to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it in order to explore it as something all of a piece and unknowable."[20]
The most important of the narrative changes Fellini makes to Petronius's text is the addition of a battle between Encolpio and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth thereby linking Encolpio to Theseus and the journey into the unconscious. Other original sequences include a nymphomaniac in a desert caravan whose despondent husband pays Ascilto and Encolpio to couple with her, and an hermaphrodite worshipped as a demigod at the Temple of Ceres. Abducted by the two protagonists and a mercenary, the hermaphrodite later dies a miserable death in a desert landscape that, in Fellini's adaptation, is posed as an ill-omened event, none of which is to be found in the Petronian version.
Though the two protagonists, Encolpius and Ascilto, appear throughout, the characters and locations surrounding them change unexpectedly. This intentional technique of fragmentation conveys Fellini's view of both the original text and the nature of history itself, and is echoed visually in the film's final shot of a ruined villa whose walls, painted with frescoes of the scenes we have just seen, are crumbling, fading and incomplete. Fellini's interest in Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious is also on display with an abundance of archetypes in highly dreamlike settings.

Federico Fellini: (From Angel Fire: Click Here)
Fellini was born in Rimini, a resort city on the Adriatic in 1920, to a strongly Catholic family. Fellini was fascinated at an early age by the circuses and vaudeville performers that his town attracted. Fellini, while educated in Catholic schools, soon became critical of the Church, but maintained a strong spiritual connection. His first exposure to the working world found him in such diverse positions as a crime reporter, a caricature artist, and a gag writer for actor Aldo Fabrizi. Fabrizi's thesbian world opened up new possibilities for Fellini's own self-expression.
In 1943, Fellini met and married actress Giulietta Masina, who would later appear in several of his films. Fellini called Masina the greatest influence on his work. A chance encounter with Roberto Rossellini jump-started Fellini's career as a visionary director and screen writer. Fellini drew on his childhood experiences and his prolific imagination to create some of the most memorable films of all time.
Fellini's screenwriting and directing career spanned several decades and he continued to pursue other projects in semi-retirement. At the Academy Awards ceremony in March of 1993, Fellini received a special Oscar for lifetime achievement in filmmaking, which he dedicated to Masina in his acceptance speech. In August of that year, Fellini suffered a stroke, and went into a coma following a heart attack in October. After his death at age 73 on October 31st—one day after he and Masina (who was to die of cancer less than five months later) observed their 50th wedding anniversary—tens of thousands of people packed the narrow streets of Fellini's hometown of Rimini, applauding as the director's casket was carried from the main piazza to the cinema where Fellini had watched his first films as a child (and which he featured in Amacord). It was a fitting tribute to one of the cinema's greatest artists, who had become a national treasure for Italy and a respected master the world over.