Satyricon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

You remember the eyes before you remember the story. An extreme close-up — a mouth, a patch of skin, a pair of eyes lit from below by a source that can't exist — cuts into a wide hall crowded with hundreds of figures, and it explains nothing. No reaction shot follows. The face isn't reading the situation for us; it's just there, strange material the camera happened on. Before you've finished registering it, Ruggero Mastroianni has already dropped you into the middle of another scene with no door, no corridor, no 'meanwhile.' This is how Fellini Satyricon moves. The disorientation isn't a flaw in the telling. It is the telling.

Gilles Deleuze hung his whole history of cinema on a hinge he called the crisis of the action-image. Classical movie-making, he argued, runs on a simple circuit: a character perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it — and the editing serves that chain, situation leading to deed leading to new situation. Encolpio breaks the circuit on the first reel. His lover Gitone leaves him; he resolves to kill himself; an earthquake levels the building before he can. The grand gesture is pre-empted by a world that simply doesn't answer to him. From there he doesn't act so much as wash through events — shipwreck, slavery, the poet's villa, the oracle, Trimalchio's feast. Deleuze has a name for exactly this shape: the voyage-balade-form, the trip or stroll that transforms nothing. The picaresque was always a string of weak links, and Fellini takes that literally. Petronius survives only in fragments, in lacunae, and rather than paper over the gaps Fellini makes the gap his grammar. Scenes begin without orientation and end without conclusion. Deleuze calls this a dispersive situation knit by slackened causality — episodes that refuse to bridge into one another.

Which is where Buñuel enters the lineage. The associative, non-causal cutting of The Exterminating Angel — ritual collapsing with no explanation, scenes that won't connect — is the direct structural model here, and Fellini named the debt. But Buñuel's irrationality is a scalpel; Fellini's is a dream. What Deleuze would call the irrational cut, the join made across a gap rather than by continuity — the pure 'AND' between two images — becomes, in Mastroianni's hands, the logic of something half-remembered. Fellini said he wanted the ancient world to look as strange as a distant planet, and Giuseppe Rotunno's impossible torch-and-amber lighting, faces lit from nowhere, delivers it. The whole film is an onirosign, a dream-image: a circuit untethered from any datable memory, vivid in texture and elusive in logic. Not a flashback to a real Rome. A Rome that never had a present to remember.

So what is Encolpio, if not an agent? Deleuze's word is voyant — the seer. When the sensory-motor link snaps, a character stops being someone who acts and becomes someone who looks and endures. Rotunno helps by refusing him: the camera favours the long lens and the held frame, so figures move across a static composition rather than being followed. You observe the world the way you'd watch a frieze, not the way you'd accompany a hero. These are pure optical situations — opsigns — moments offering nothing to do, only something to behold. And the spaces themselves stop being settings for action. The hermaphrodite's grove, the labyrinthine insula, Trimalchio's tiered cavern — each is a self-contained world with its own chromatic and spatial law, cut off from the others. This is the any-space-whatever, and specifically its disconnected mode: space fractured into affective fragments that no longer add up to a navigable geography.

Here the deepest debt comes due. The frieze-tableau — bodies arranged as a picture to be read rather than a scene to be played — Fellini learned partly from his own Rome-as-spectacle in La Dolce Vita, and partly from Buñuel's Viridiana, whose grotesque feast freezes its diners into a Last Supper held in a wide static frame. He hired Danilo Donati straight off Pasolini's Oedipus Rex and Gospel precisely for that vocabulary: antiquity rebuilt ethnographically, alien, textured, never the warm peplum cliché. Trimalchio's banquet is the payoff — a composition you scan rather than follow. Deleuze would call the result a lectosign, an image that has lost its self-evidence and asks instead to be deciphered, read like an inscription in a dead language.

What did this do to film? It proved that narrative continuity was optional, not natural — that a major production could run almost two hours on association alone and hold. Antonioni had emptied the frame; Resnais had scrambled time. Fellini did something stranger: he kept the density, the crowds, the colour, the sheer carnal abundance of spectacle, and drained the causality out from under it, so that maximalism itself became a form of drift. The body here is never private and never psychological — Fellini sculpted his polyglot, half-amateur cast into postures, coaching physical states, not motives. That ceremonial, material body carrying its own duration is what Deleuze means by a cinema of the body, the gest that exposes a social arrangement without explaining it.

Watch it again and stop hunting for the plot. There isn't one waiting to cohere. What there is — and it's rarer — is the feeling of antiquity as genuine amnesia, a civilization recalled the way you recall a dream: certain it happened, unable to say what it meant. That uncertainty isn't the film failing to speak. It's the film's deepest truth.