Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 253: Tue Sep 10

Satyricon (Fellini, 1969): Curzon Mayfair, 6.15pm



This Federico Fellini movie is part of the Scalarama season which runs throughout September. Scalarama is the follow-up to Scala Forever and Scala Beyond and brings together all types of different cinemas, venues, film clubs, societies, pop-ups and festivals to encourage and champion repertory and community cinema, and be the UK’s widest and most inclusive film event.

Here is a link to the full calendar of films being shown and here is the Scalarama Facebook page. There's a very good article about the background to the season here at Mostly Film.

Curzon Mayfair introduction to Satyricon: Curzon Cinemas is proud to welcome back 'A Nos Amours', a collective founded by filmmakers Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts dedicated to programming over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema. This time 'A Nos Amours' presents a newly restored 35mm Cinemascope copy of Fellini-Satyricon by Federico Fellini (1969), as supervised the film’s original cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno at the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome with the contribution of Dolce & Gabbana, presented by Ka Studio and Edoardo Ponti.

A place that might be ancient Rome recreated and torn down over a couple of delirious hours by Federico Fellini. The Latin text that provides a spring board, a fragmentary account of debauchery, dissolution and sexual adventure during the reign of Nero, is shaken and poured out as the most intoxicating cinematic cocktail the world has ever seen. Bizarre, jarring, angular, operatic, sordid, stunningly beautiful. Superficially it is a historical pageant in full sail, but also a dream of the past, buffeted by modernist strategies.

Time Out review:
Sprawling and conspicuously undisciplined, this is less an adaptation of Petronius than a free-form fantasia on his themes. Fellini's characteristic delirium is in fact anchored in a precise, psychological schema: under the matrix of bisexuality, he explores the complexes of castration, impotence, paranoia and libidinal release. And he pays homage to Pasolini's ethnographic readings of myths. It's among his most considerable achievements.
Tony Rayns

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