It’s been 30 years since the legendary filmmaker Federico Fellini left us. Thirty years and his films still astonish audiences and inspire filmmakers all over the world. His was a unique and completely original vision – uncompromising and distinctive, coining the phrase “Felliniesque” to describe his sense of the absurd, the surreal and the abstract as only he could accomplish.
Satyricon, or Fellini Satyricon as it’s sometimes known was Fellini’s 3oth film project. He addressed the myths of Rome, employing an insight into the unconscious gained through study of his preferred psychoanalytical theorist, Carl Jung. Distributors incorporated Fellini’s name in the films’ titles, signifying the unique nature of his vision. Although technically inspired by Roman writers Gaius Petronius Arbiter and Lucius Apuleius, Fellini Satyricon (1969), promoted with the slogan “Before Christ. After Fellini,” actually celebrated the hippie movement, which he first encountered in the United States. Two aimless young bisexual men wander a morally and physically decaying world of casual decadence, rendered in the gaudy colours that until then had never been associated with antiquity. White marble gave way to crumbling stucco, bawdy graffiti, and urban filth. Sexually ambivalent in his private life, Fellini revealed in Satyricon a preoccupation with obesity, mutilation, and hermaphroditism that many found disturbing. Disappointingly, he never realized his hope of casting both Groucho Marx and Mae West in the film.
As co-producers keen to recoup their investment, executives at United Artists made certain that Fellini received “a maximum of exposure” during his American promotional tour of the film by organizing press and television interviews in New York and Los Angeles. For Vincent Canby of The New York Times, Satyricon was “the quintessential Fellini film … a travelogue through an unknown galaxy.” Roger Ebert, while recanting his original statement that the film was a masterpiece (he ranked the film 10th in his 10 Best Films of 1969 list), nonetheless gave it a high retrospective rating and wrote, “It is so much more ambitious and audacious than most of what we see today that simply as a reckless gesture, it shames these timid times.”For Archer Winston of the New York Post, the film’s classical background in Petronius was fused into “a powerful contemporary parallel. It is so beautifully composed and imagined that you would do yourself a disservice if, for any reason, you allowed yourself to miss it”. Fellini biographer Parker Tyler declared it “the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history”.
As part of it’s promotion, Fellini took part in a press conference, held at The Lincoln Center Library which also included film students and professors from colleges around the New York area on March 13, 1970.
