Fellini SATYRICON (1969)

Fellini SATYRICON (1969, 128 minutes). Federico Fellini’s career achieved new levels of eccentricity and brilliance with this remarkable and controversial adaptation of the fragmented satirical novel Satyricon by 1st Century AD author Petronius, Emperor Nero’s official “arbiter of elegance.”

An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and surreallist grotesquerie, Fellini sought, in his own words, “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.” The result is a phantasmagoric odyssey through ancient Rome, following the misadventures of the student Encolpio and his on-again, off-again boy lover Gitone as they face imprisonment on a pirate ship, kidnap a hermaphrodite demi-god, fight a minotaur, and search for a cure for Encolpio’s impotence. And that’s not even the half of it! Earning Fellini the third of…