From the Vaults: Satryicon

Satyricon. The film: Much anticipated. Maestro Fellini has promised to visit our planet, as if it were an alien one, by going back to the time before Christendom.

I for one cannot remember the world too well in the time before Fellini’s Satyricon. It has been with me since I first heard the music of this film – Fred’s friendly sound genius Nina Rota at hand using BBC-style colonial world field recordings Gamelan and such -- to help conjure the dream.

Exposition - It was a much anticipated film not movie, says I. Movie was an American thing. Our invention. But Fellini was the great film artist, and he had a love for the low culture of movies, and this could be viewed as a movie. And I would be there firstly if I could, in this case, making the 25-mile drive to the big city of Milwaukee in Dad’s Buick Wildcat. Awaited, Satyricon was, as film, the form, was in its flower; as a Hemingway novel was awaited in the 20s, a play by Williams in the 50s, or like a Dylan record still somewhat today. [I asked my high school girl friend E. -- this being after high school, my sometimes girl friend, to the flick -- and she had to accept. She had to! It was Fellini.] Read the rest of the story.