momento
mori
by Douglas Messerli
Bernardino Zapponi and Brunello Rondi (loosely
based on the work by Petronius), Federico Fellini (director) Fellini
Satyricon (Satyricon) / 1969, USA 1970
Loosely-based
on the Menippean satire by the Roman writer Petronius, Fellini Satyricon
seems to be the movie the great Italian director always wanted to make, or let
us just say that all his films previous to this one seem to be summed up in
what Fellini himself described as a “science fiction of the past.” When one
recalls the open sexuality of nearly all of Fellini’s works, the vague science
fiction theme in 8 ½ (whose final scene takes place near a huge
space-rocket launching pad), and the extreme and bizarre beings of many of his
films, particularly Juliet of the Spirits (which like Satyricon
features a hermaphrodite), one might see this beautiful fantasia as a summation
of the director’s career.
Fellini’s films seldom present a
straight-forward story, relying as they do on travelogue (Nights of Cabiria,
La Dolce Vita, and 8 ½) and picaresque (Nights of Cabiria and
Juliet of the Spirits), but in his 1969 film—given the fragmentary and
pedantic qualities of the original (at the heart of Petronius’ form are a
series of pedants)—Fellini jettisoned plot entirely, taking the viewer through
a series of unconnected encounters with two central characters, Encolpio and
Ascilto, and various other figures, including both mens’ beloved Gitone.
Throughout Fellini’s film-making, woman
have always been portrayed as innocent waifs, glamorous temptresses, or as misshapen
hags, and if one reads these images as psychological we can suppose that, at
heart, the director was quite misogynistic. But in Satyricon, in which Fellini
seems to have moved to the borderline between dream and imagination, allowing
nearly all of personal archetypes to come into being, the director, strangely,
has created a male-centered world, where nearly all women are ugly monsters and
heterosexual love is represented as perverse or debilitating. The figures at
the center of the story, on the other hand, are beautiful homosexuals (Martin
Potter and Hiram Keller) or bisexual boys (such as Max Born). The major
storytellers
of this work (the satire’s pedants), Eumolpo (Salvo Randone), Trimalcione
(Mario Romagnoli), and Lichas (Alain Cuny) divide their sexual time between
their wives and young men or boys: Trimalcione turning to two boys the moment
his wife begins to dance, Lichas actually going so far as marry Encolpio, and
Eumolpo rewarding the spirit of poetry to Encolpio. Women such as Scintilla and
Enotea are terrifying monsters. Even the beautiful femalae African slave left
behind in the emperor’s villa is allowed sex with Encolpio only by joining in a
threesome that includes Ascilto. As Parker Tyler summarized the film when it
first appeared: “It is the most profoundly homosexual movie in all of history.”
Saytricon
is also a film about art, not only in its own overstated artistry—few
movies have been so brilliantly framed, the costumes so shimmeringly beautiful,
and actors’ faces so lovely or grotesque—but in its presentation of and
references to theater, mime, poetry, and spectacle. The scene with Eumolpo
begins in an ancient art museum, and the film ends abruptly with a presentation
of frescoes of the characters we have just observed in action.
At the heart of Fellini’s Satyricon,
however, is neither love nor art, but death. For all its bawdy couplings, stolen
kisses, and hidden embraces, the film is as Giovanni Grazzanti described it:
It is evident that
Fellini, finding in these ancient personages the
projection of his own human
and artistic doubts, is led to wonder
if the universal and
eternal condition of man is actually summed
up in the frenzied
realization of the transience of life which
passes like a shadow. These
ancient Romans who spend their
days in revelry, ravaged by
debauchery, are really an
unhappy race searching
desperately to exorcise their fear of death.
And in its
highly fragmented passages, in its purposeful disjunction of speech and image
(Fellini deliberately dubbed the dialogue to make it appear the actor’s voices
and lips were out of sync) and in its Brechtian theatrical distancing, Fellini
has created a grand momento mori. To
emphasize this, the film ends in mid-sentence as the destination of Encolpio’s newest
voyage looms up in the vision of an island. Even if he has found a new
safe-haven, however, he is now alone, without his beloved Gitone or his long-time
companion, forced to live a life, quite obviously, that has turned to stone the
frescoes represent.
Los Angeles, January 18, 2014
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