Fellini Satyricon

Screening on Film
Recently Restored

Directed by Federico Fellini.
With Martin Potter, Capucine, Max Born.
Italy, 1969, 35mm, color, 131 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

One of Fellini’s most ambitious productions, Satyricon mixes the maestro’s fascination with the mythic realm depicted in ancient Roman frescoes together with Petronius’s fragmentary narratives of Rome during the decadent reign of Nero. The result is a tale of Imperial Rome—filled with an array of wonderfully grotesque imagery—whose course is continually shifted by the whims and demands of the lascivious emperors, exotic demigods, and deranged oracles who populate it. The maestro conducts his episodic journey through the waning days of this golden era guided by two Roman students, who become wide-eyed witnesses to Fellini’s opulent cinematic conjurings of both the natural and the supernatural: earthquakes, imprisonment on a slave ship, and encounters with sea monsters, magical hermaphrodites, and a seven-foot Minotaur.