Fellini Satyricon (1969) [Criterion Collection]

Directors: Federico Fellini
Writers: Petronius (book), Federico Fellini (adaptation)
Stars: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born

Federico Fellini’s career achieved new levels of eccentricity and brilliance with this remarkable, controversial, extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, written during the reign of Nero. An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie, Fellini Satyricon follows the exploits of two pansexual young men—the handsome scholar Encolpius and his vulgar, insatiably lusty friend Ascyltus—as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. Creating apparent chaos with exquisite control, Fellini constructs a weird old world that feels like science fiction.


Essential Fellini: One hundred years after his birth, Federico Fellini still stands apart as a giant of the cinema. The Italian maestro is defined by his dualities: the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, the provincial and the urbane. He began his career working in the slice-of-life poetry of neorealism, and though he soon spun off on his own freewheeling creative axis, he never lost that grounding, evoking his dreams, memories, and obsessions in increasingly grand productions teeming with carnivalesque imagery and flights of phantasmagoric surrealism while maintaining an earthy, embodied connection to humanity. Bringing together fourteen of the director’s greatest spectacles, all beautifully restored, this centenary box set is a monument to an artist who conjured a cinematic universe all his own: a vision of the world as a three-ring circus in which his innermost infatuations, fears, and fantasies take center stage.


Special Features:
- Audio commentary from 2014 featuring an adaptation of Eileen Lanouette Hughes's 1971 memoir On the Set of "Fellini Satyricon A Behind-the-Scenes Diary
- Ciao, Federico!, Gideon Bachmann's documentary shot on the set of Fellini Satyricon
- Archival interviews with Fellini
- Interview from 2011 with cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno
- Documentary from 2014 about Fellini's adaptation of Petronius's work, featuring interviews with classicists Luca Canali, a consultant on the film, and Joanna Paul
- Interview from 2014 with photographer Mary Ellen Mark about her experiences on the set and her iconic photographs of Fellini and his film
- Presentation of Fellini Satyricon ephemera from the "Felliniana" archive of collector Don Young
- Trailer