Satyricon

the protean creator of "la dolce vita," "8-1/2" and "juliet of the spirits" casts some light--darkly--on the message and metaphysics of his latest film

I first read the Satyricon of Petronius a long time ago, in school, with the pleasure and the morbid curiosity of the adolescent. The memory of that first distant reading has never left me during all these years, but little by little it was transformed into a constant and obscure temptation to which, three years ago, I finally yielded: I had to sign a contract for a film, and the title I chose was Satyricon.

When the moment came to honor the contract--when it was a matter of executing the project whose end up to that time I had only dreamed of--I was seized by panic; I felt lost. What kind of mess had I got myself into? Why was I making Satyricon? One never knows why one makes one film rather than another. At least I don't know. Pressed by journalist friends, I can invent all sorts of motives and reasons, chattering on in bad faith about urgencies, coincidences, analogies, anger, nostalgia, memories. But they are all fabrications, an artifice of screens and labels that, in part unwittingly, have the function of protecting and camouflaging the real and unforeseeable growth of what I really want to do.

Anyway, when I said that I wanted to make Satyricon, a number of friends whom I esteem kept repeating to me: "It will be your best film!" "You couldn't have chosen better!" But apart from the fact that this plebiscite made me suspicious and full of icy doubts about the validity of the enterprise, I did not really know what to say to those who encouraged me in that way. How could it be my "best" film? What could I have in common with the pagan world? Of one thing, at least, I was absolutely certain: All those enthusiastic affirmations of my presumed undeniable capacity to make a film like Satyricon contained the sinister shadow of the film that I did not want to make, that I should not make and that I have not made. Nothing--but nothing--did I know about the Romans; they seemed to me unknown and more remote from us than a cat or a crab could be. The busts I saw at the Capitoline Museum said nothing to me; their splendid inertia had only the familiarity of academic knowledge or the casualness of personal associations.

Perhaps for this reason, the choice of faces for this film found me faltering, disoriented. In general, the human tapestry of a film of mine is the most precise element for penetrating the meaning of the film itself; but this time its plot was hard to structure, precarious, even incongruous. There existed no models, no aesthetic canons to copy; each conventionally expressive perspective was confused, upset; and if, perchance, I let myself be tempted by it, the result could be unexpected or catastrophic. The Appian Way? The ruins of the Colosseum? Picture postcards. Nothing was coming to me. Less than nothing, save that vague sense of funereal melancholy that photographers have invented, showing those ruins silhouetted at sunset with a couple of lambs in the foreground.

Then one night, in the Colosseum, I saw that horrendous lunar catastrophe of stone, that immense skull devoured by time, as the testimony of a civilization with a different destiny, and it communicated to me for one instant a shiver of terror and of delight; and for the first time, I felt myself immersed in the convulsive lucidity of dreams, in the feverish temperature of fantasy and forebodings. And this seemed to me the exact tone that the film ought to have. Satyricon should have the enigmatic transparency, the indecipherable clarity of a dream. The greatest effort, therefore, that this film has required of me has been to make two parallel and completely contradictory operations coincide. In the film, everything is invented: the faces, the gestures, the situations, the atmosphere, the objects. To obtain all this, I committed myself to the burning and passionate dimension of fantasy. But then I had to objectify the fruit of this fantastic operation, to detach myself from everything in order to re-explore it from a disquieting point of view--to find it again intact and yet altered beyond recognition, as in a dream. To give a sense of strangeness to the film, therefore, I have adopted a dream language, a figurative code that has the elusiveness, the ineffability of a dream. The detachment, the estrangement, in fact, often seemed to me the only means that could defend me from the danger of a dialectical relationship, whatever that might be, with a remote and unknown reality, the only perspective from which to regard pagan Rome with eyes unclouded by the myths and ideologies that have followed in these 2000 years of Christianity. In the Rome of the decline that I was preparing to conjure up, Christ did not yet exist; to forget, to put aside this idea, this experience that has modified us almost biologically, was psychologically a most difficult and exhausting task, but only its success could allow me to show the Roman world with the same wonder, the same curiosity, the same amazement with which we approach a tribe of the Amazon or observe a human magma sunk in mystery.

On the other hand, it was not possible to ignore the obvious analogy between the Roman society described by Petronius--corrupt, dissolute, cynical--and the society of today, at the height of its magnificence but already revealing the signs of a progressive decay; a society where every religious, philosophic, ideological and social belief has crumbled, leaving in its place a sick, frenetic occultism, an impotent promiscuity. Likewise, the principal characters of the story--Encolpius, Ascyltus, Giton--could be the long-haired students that one sees these days on the Spanish Steps in Rome or in Paris, Amsterdam or London; people who go from one adventure to another, even the most wretched and impudent, without the least hesitation or the slightest repentance, with the innocence and the vitality of young animals. Their revolt has none of the character of traditional revolt--neither the faith nor the desperation nor the will to change things or to destroy them. Rather, it remains a rebellion that expresses itself in terms of total indifference and separation from the society that surrounds it. Their interests in life are natural and elementary: They eat, they make love, they live together, they wander here and there. They find the means to live through casual, often illegitimate expediencies. They are outside of any system, free from obligations, constraints, duties; they are completely insensitive to the often blackmailing rules of conventional emotionality, from family ties; they do not even have the cult of friendship, which in its traditional expression they consider a precarious, contradictory and self-interested sentiment, and they are ready to deny and betray it at any moment. They have no illusions about anything, because they do not believe in anything, but theirs is a new form of cynicism, a sort of peaceful disengagement, a healthy, concrete common sense, a singular realism.

I think that young people will react positively to Satyricon, because it seems to me that they are living in the same free, adventurous way as the boys in the film. During a trip to America last January, I had occasion to meet many university students and I spent time in the company of hippies. It is, above all, the nonviolent revolution of the latter--its significance, the sweet and indifferent passivity with which it is being lived--that has troubled and shocked me, so much so that one feels powerless to formulate even an (continued from page 210)Satyricon(continued from page 111) approximate judgment about them, because one is afraid of mistaking everything, of being too conditioned by a certain code of ethical, conceptual and emotional values to be able to look at such a new and strange phenomenon with sufficient clarity and openness.

These young people, who live in large communities, who move about continuously and always together like schools of fish, seem already to belong to another race, to another species, giving the impression that there already exist in them modifications on a chemical-cellular level. They dress differently than we, they eat differently--they are all vegetarians--they have negated the values that are the motor of our society: money, the spirit of competition, egotism, the sense of ownership and, the most clamorous one, that of sexual possession. They seem to cultivate a relationship with life that is wholly private, introverted, religious and fantastic. Their presence, exploding in the carnivallike and excessive manner of every liberation, is nothing but the other face of man that our culture has up to now repressed: spontaneity, instinct, fantasy.

After filming Satyricon, I visited an underground club in New York--the Electric Circus: immense and dimly lit, the usual band blasting, the dance floor populated with multicolored algae shaking with tremors or lost in a composed and interminable trance, the floor carpeted with seminude bodies, and enormous holes in the walls from which hung four, five, six pairs of legs, masculine and feminine, black, white, yellow.

In that damp darkness of cockroaches, in that dense, placental promiscuity, all those boys and girls suddenly appeared to me like a single giant individual huddling itself for warmth, to nurture that part of itself, that deepest and darkest part, without which the individual himself is nothing, that is to say, not man. It was agonizing to watch, because this process of being transformed into an immense breathing amoeba, this being lost in an enormous crucible where everything burns and is dissolved--the old myths, the worn-out ideologies, the obsolete Utopias, the unreal idealisms--has something sacrificial about it. It is a total and very gentle suicide, a spreading and magnificently anonymous interregnum in which salvation, a new way of being human, is perhaps still possible.