Hacker Cinema
Satyricon
Fellini – satyricon
1969 · Film · 129 min
Directed by Federico Fellini
After his young lover, Gitone, leaves him for another man, Encolpio decides to kill himself, but a sudden earthquake destroys his home before he has a chance to do so. Now wandering around Rome in the time of Nero, Encolpio encounters one bizarre and surreal scene after another.
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5 comments on Hacker News
I really enjoyed the film Fellini Satyricon because it shows a couple of regular guys on a crazy adventure after their apartment building in Rome collapses in an earthquake. Most other stuff about Rome/Romans follows leaders, generals, aristocrats, etc. so it was refreshing to see regular people.
And completely not based on reality, I also liked the British comedy series Plebs that also follows regular people living Rome. But it's just a way to show modern issues satirically, not really historical.
Hollywood pffft.
I get my Italian stereotypes from Fellini's Satyricon, Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo and Greenaway's Belly of an Architect.
( likely a few other books and films to boot )
( ok, Greenaway isn't Italian, shrug )
Visually, Satyricon was one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen in my life, but also one of the most boring.
If you're looking for films full of sex and violence in ancient Rome watch Caligula[1] (starring, appropriately, Malcom McDowell in a role not too different from the one he played in A Clockwork Orange). Unfortunately, apart from the sex and violence this film doesn't have much going for it. But I'd still rate it far higher than Satyricon, except on the visual level, where the latter film has few equals.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(film)
For me, "Fellini Satyricon" is his most remarkable film, even if not his greatest and certainly not his most popular. No film about the Roman world has conveyed so graphically what must have been the actual, enormous strangeness of classical times. It's a disturbing film, both a picaresque sex comedy and a nightmare of everyday superstition and casual violence.
In comparison, the most famous works of cinema about ancient Rome -- Ben-Hur, Spartacus, I Claudius, and so forth -- are laughably sanitized and similar to our own world, which is the common failing of most historical drama of course. Fellini ditched the convention by, among other things, staying extremely faithful to the original source. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter is a jolting and bizarre read. A lot of the humor and wordplay, I'm told, is lost in translation.
I'm going to swim upstream with an unpopular opinion. I heard a lot about how great his films were, and suffered through watching three or so. Suffered is the right word. I hated them. I really don't know what people thought was good about them. Satyricon was probably the most awful movie I've ever seen.