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Satyricon (film)

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This article is about the film. For other uses see Satyricon (disambiguation).

Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon) is a 1969 Italian film by Federico Fellini. It is loosely based on the Petronius novel Satyricon, a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome.

Petronius's original text survives only in fragments. While recuperating from a debilitating illness in 1967, Fellini reread Petronius and was fascinated by the missing parts, the large gaps between one episode and the next. The text's fragmentary nature encouraged him to go beyond the traditional approach of recreating the past in film: the key to a visionary cinematic adaptation lay in narrative techniques of the dream state that exploited the dream's imminent qualities of mystery, enigma, immorality, outlandishness, and contradiction.

Though the two protagonists, Encolpius (Martin Potter) and Ascilto (Hiram Keller), reappear throughout, the characters and locations surrounding them change unexpectedly. This intentional technique of fragmentation conveys Fellini's view of both the original text and the nature of history itself, and is echoed visually in the film's final shot of a ruined villa whose walls, painted with frescoes of the scenes we have just seen, are crumbling, fading and incomplete. Fellini's interest in Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious is also on display with an abundance of archetypes in highly dreamlike settings.

A year prior to the release of the film had already seen another Satyricon film (directed by Gian Luigi Polidoro) – hence the addition of "Fellini" to the title. A "making-of" film shot by Gideon Bachman, entitled Ciao Federico – Fellini directs Satyricon is also available.

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