259 - Fellini Satyricon, 1969, Italy. Dir. Federico Fellini.

Saturday, September 16, 2017

259 - Fellini Satyricon, 1969, Italy.  Dir. Federico Fellini.

Sometime between the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in A.D. 33 and the Siege of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Flavian Vespasian and his son Titus, a man named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical work.

Petronius called his satirical work Satyricon.

He was a courtier under the patronage of Nero.

Nero was 16 when he began ruling Rome.  He ruled 14 years and died at age 30.  He ruled from A.D. 54 to A.D. 68.  He was a young man.

Politically, Nero is known for brutality and intrigue.  He killed his own mother to secure power.  He spent widely on public works projects and entitlements, to the detriment of the treasury.  He persecuted and killed Christians, and was said to have crucified Peter upside down.  He watched--though probably did not fiddle--as Rome burned.  He plunged Rome into civil war.  And he finally ordered his secretary to kill him when he did not possess the temerity to commit suicide.

And yet, as with many princes, he was raised in refinement and had a great taste for culture.  He was an Olympic champion (possibly due to suppressed competition), a musician and singer, an actor, a poet, a horseman, and a chariot racer.

It was under his protection that Petronius wrote.  And through his taste for refinement and love of pleasure, Petronius became known as the "Arbiter of Elegance."

Nineteen centuries later, the great Italian master Federico Fellini has inherited the Roman tradition. He takes this story, or series of vignettes, and reshapes it to his own purposes.  Thus, his name in the title.  This is the Fellini Satyricon as opposed to the Petronius Satyricon.

The Fellini Satyricon is a series of vignettes.  In fact, critics have compared it to a wall containing nine frescoes, each one showing a scene, as frescoes do.  Roger Ebert also compares it to John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the urn, like a fresco, capturing a moment in time, featuring characters with no history and no future, but only the captured moment.

There is also the ostensible theme, that it is a film about a time of hedonism.  Ebert further describes the effect the film had on his generation after the Summer of Love, when people believed they could enjoy sex freely without consequence, before the onslaught of "viruses, guilt or psychological collapse."  And in fact, the actors were contemporary hippies, one of them having just performed in the American production of Hair, another one living intentionally on the streets of London in order to pursue his own desires.

When I first saw this movie, about fifteen years ago, I saw it more in those terms.  Not so much in the terms of the 1960s--How could I know about that?  By the time I came along we had the viruses, guilt, and psychological collapse--but in terms of the cultural indulgences we learned about in our Western Civilization and Humanities classes.  It was a contemporary Italian film rooted in Roman history wherein Fellini was making some points about decadence.

Watching it today is different.  I am not so much thinking about any plot or even any theme.  I am having the full-on experience of watching a Fellini film.  A pure Fellini film.

On one level it is like watching a Greek play--yes, Greek, as opposed to Roman, despite even Rome's having repurposed the Greek mythologies.  We see, for example, a Labyrinth and a Minotaur.  They even refer to Homer in the movie rather than Virgil.  The set design and the acting style lead us to imagine other contemporary performances of ancient Greek plays we may have seen.  But then, if you have seen a contemporary performance of an ancient play, you have probably seen Greek and not Roman.  You may have seen a performance of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, or Sophocles.  I myself have performed in an Aristophanes comedy.  But have you ever seen a performance of Plautus, Terrence, or Seneca?  Probably not.  The closest thing to a Roman play we know is William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.  Perhaps Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, or Titus Andronicus.  But those plays are actually British.

But on another level, I am not even thinking about that.  I am thinking about pure Fellini.  Alfred Hitchcock had a concept he called pure cinema, where he aspired to make cinema as an art that only cinema could make, i.e., not a filmed play, but something that only cinema could make, using camera angles and sound and music and cutting in ways that no other art form could do.  This is not that. This is clearly the assembling of the other arts--set design, make-up, wardrobe, highly stylized acting.  But this is pure Fellini.  It is not really the adaptation of an ancient Roman play.  It is also not the contemporary staging of an ancient Greek play.  It is not even a film about a time of hedonism.  It is not erotic.

It is a series of images.

It is a coffee table book.

A great big one.  One that needs a great big coffee table to sit on.  With full color pictures and no text.

From cover to cover.

And it moves.

Moving pictures.

This is what this picture is.  A series of images moving one after the other.

All year I have been talking about the concept of "Every frame a Rembrandt"--where the viewer can pause a film at any moment and find a still picture suitable for hanging on the wall.

All year I have been identifying moments when films approach this goal, if they seem to have it, and citing the apparently associated artist.

This film may come the closest to achieving that ideal.

Why?

What allows each frame to be a still shot suitable for framing?

Because the film does not have to conform to narrative structure.  Since the plot does not matter, the film does not need transitional shots to connect one scene to another in a logical fashion.  Each shot can stand alone.

It is just a series of images to watch, one after the other.

And because we are in the hands of Fellini the master.  He is all about the image.

A picture followed by a picture followed by a picture.

Every frame a Fellini.


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I went back and found the blogs where I referred to this concept--"Every frame a Rembrandt"--and listed them.  It turns out that I used it twice of Fellini already.  Apparently, I felt it before.

Here is a summary--

January 2 - 02, Revanche, 2008, Gotz Speilmann - Every frame a Rembrandt
January 3 - 03, La Belle et la Bete, 1946, Jean Cocteau - Every frame a Vermeer.  Every frame a Dore.
February 8 - 39, Days of Heaven, 1978, Terrence Malick - Every frame a Vermeer.  Every frame an Edward Hopper.
February 9 - 40, Tess, 1979, Roman Polanski - Every frame a Van Eyck.
February 15 - 46, The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant, 1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder - A Poussin in every frame.
February 23 - 54, Andrei Rublev, 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky - Every frame a Rublev.
February 24 - 55, Solaris, 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky - Every frame a Bruegal.  The Elder.
February 25 - 56, La Chienne, 1931, Jean Renoir - Every frame a Renoir!
March 7 - 66, French Cancan, 1955, Jean Renoir - Every frame a Degas, Every frame a Seurat, Every frame a Toulouse-Lautrec, Every frame a Renoir.
June 5 - 156, La Dolce Vita, 1960, Federico Fellini - Every frame a Fellini.
June 7 - 158, Juliet of the Spirits, 1965, Federico Fellini - Every frame a Fellini.
June 22 - 173, The Decameron, 1971, Pier Paolo Pasolini - Every frame a Giotto.
June 27 - 178, The Great Beauty, 2013, Paolo Sorrentino - Every frame a National Geographic picture book.
July 4 - 185, The Ballad of Narayama, 1958, Keisuke Kinoshita - Every frame a Kabuki.
September 16 - 259, Fellini Satyricon, 1969, Federico Fellini - Every frame a Fellini.