To free a story, in the act of reproducing it, from every kind of explanation

Benjamin, Il narratore

Studying the path by which the image of the Jewish child with his hands raised under the threat of a German submachine gun in the Warsaw ghetto, from a mere, unknown and anonymous piece of testimony, became a most famous icon of the Shoah – and thus in recounting the story of this photograph – , F. Rousseau acknowledges that “to look at an image is to interrogate several presents”. The story of a photograph, of this photograph, in fact calls into question not only the moment in which it was taken, but the several presents in which it existed, was considered or repudiated, perceived and manipulated.
The idea that to study an object or an image in fact leads to recounting a story, and that it therefore places us in relation with several sedimented presents that stand in a mutual relationship, offers a fine perspective, however unusual, for studying (and recounting) Fellini Satyricon. On the other hand, the very terms image and narration, together with the past-present relation, already form a useful track for observing, perhaps a little sidelong, the director’s gaze.
At the point where F. Rousseau formulates the idea cited at the outset, almost obvious in some respects and yet important, he refers to a text in which D. Roche reflects on his experience as a poet-photographer. In it, at a certain point, the author lists among the qualities of the photographic art the “intermittence” that, on closer inspection, also marks the story of the photograph of the child of the Warsaw ghetto, which surfaces now and again in the history of recent years, after a long period of absence, comes out of the dark and returns to it, only to re-emerge suddenly, each time slightly altered, relived in form and in meaning.
Intermittence itself, on reflection, or perhaps on close looking, is another of the key words to add to those recalled above, for a reading of Fellini Satyricon: intermittence between past and present, first of all, which continually play at taking turns in the foreground, between parts faithful to Petronius’s text and parts utterly and deliberately invented (which is in its own way another form of intermittence between past and present, between a text written two thousand years ago and pages of our own time that are set into it), and intermittence between darkness and glow, between a dark that absorbs the colours into itself, fading them, and a candid light that underscores them and hurls them, brilliant, into the spectator’s eye.
And it matters little if, from Fellini’s own words, all this might appear to be untrue. In the thousand contradictory statements he releases before, during and after the making of the film, he goes so far as to maintain the impossible, namely that upon antiquity “I, by contrast […] project nothing”, or that in order to express it “I first wanted to eliminate what is usually called history”, that is “the idea that the ancient world ‘really’ existed”; and likewise he locates the primary correspondence between Petronius’s society and the present of the film, which evidently is no longer our own, in the figures of the three young protagonists, likened to the hippies so dear to Fellini himself and so poetically transfigured in his eyes. Among these several presents that the sum of the film’s images already calls upon, what cannot fail to strike our own is the insistence of the director, and together with him of the debate that immediately took shape around the work, on the role of Christianity, and on the dichotomy between a pagan society, supposedly brought to light in the film, and a Christian one, with its (moreover presumed) moralizing function and its role as the solution to the ethical crisis said to have gripped the society of the time. A debate that to us today seems almost as remote as Petronius’s text, and in some respects – like the hippy experience as well – even more foreign than the Satyricon.
Beyond the director’s statements, who elsewhere went so far as to say that this was a “film about Martians”, a science-fiction film, or simply that “I was looking […] for a prestigious pretext that would allow me to make a film of pure fantasy, a fine tall tale, a spectacle for spectacle’s sake, without having to reckon once again with neorealism”, this last idea being, probably, in the great ocean of false trails scattered by an amused and knowing liar, the one perhaps closest to reality, beyond – as I was saying – this variegated tangle of assertions, what matters is to begin this journey through the film in the light of what was said at the outset, namely the projection that the director and his present produce of the ancient, in particular from the standpoint of the “intermittences”: almost a stylistic signature, this last, of the whole cinematic narrative.
The very idea of intermittence has much to do with the film, indeed with the choice of the film’s subject itself. In a fine interview woven together with Moravia, Fellini states that the fascination of the Satyricon lies first of all in its being fragmentary. But for the director this trait ends up being a metonymic allegory of the way in which the ancient world appears to us today, “like an unknown landscape, wrapped in a dense fog that tears open now here and now there, and always for a short time”. A wholly intermittent vision and reality, then, lie at the origin of the narrative itself.
There is nothing strange, therefore, in the almost constant darkness in which most of the film’s sequences are steeped, or in the livid, leaden light that soaks many of the scenes, torn open at times – an instantaneous, intermittent flash – by the candid little tunic of Gitone, the young, ephebic and slightly malign object of desire who drives much of the story. This obsessive and oppressive darkness appears interrupted, once again in an unexpected and sudden manner, by the clean white light that now and then allows the breath to open, in a few rare episodes, such as that of the aristocratic suicides and that of the picture gallery, to which we shall in any case return. Darkness dominates, then, except in sporadic and intermittent situations, because the deep, the abyss, the thick of the fog is the place that in the Fellinian imagination receives and guards the ancient.
The dark that grips the film almost constantly, that confines most of its scenes, restores the image of a subterranean, unemerged antiquity, as is well shown, after all, by the long sequence of the crossing of the Suburra, placed practically at the start of the film. The two young men, Encolpio and Gitone, the presumed Fellinian hippies, cross this long dark and underground corridor amused and curious, a corridor onto which small rooms open, from which quick images emerge, instantaneous fragments of the sight of “unusual” sexual encounters for payment, which also provide the occasion for repeated and complacent glances at what one would normally call vice and depravity, from which every canonical form of beauty is excluded, dwelling rather on immoderate and dissipated bodies, of decaying forms.

The destination of the journey is the enormous residential complex in which the protagonists live, a boundless hive, as we would say today, always immersed in a livid, leaden light because, as we discover while the camera slowly widens the frame, it is carved out underground, that is, contained within an enormous structure from whose sole narrow opening at the top the sky is glimpsed, itself marked by a motionless darkness. We are faced, then, with a subterranean reality, because dug into the caves, and in any case closed in on itself. But it is subterranean also because it presents itself as a dreamlike sequence of obsessive and forbidden drives, which find the possibility of existing precisely because they are acted out in a dark, hidden world. It is twice subterranean, then, this antiquity, in its spatial arrangement, but also in its psychological placement, because it contains and allows the living of what appears to the director – and evidently, in his conception, to the ancients as well – as inexpressible in the light of the sun (and here the presents overlap inextricably).
This subterranean dimension, defined in a spatial, temporal and light-subtracting sense, is interrupted by luminous intermittences, whose peak is given by the scene set in the museum. Suddenly, in fact, the light becomes candid, almost blinding, of a modern intensity, reflected by the white with which the walls of the “picture gallery” are painted. This fragment of light, however, which in the Fellinian vision is a form, a flash, through which antiquity appears, is in its turn composed of multiple fragments of the ancient: that instant of intermittence contains, in fact, several instants as expressions of as many intermittences. Indeed, the works appear as shreds, fragments, mutilated parts, some of them already undergoing restoration. Although it is a museum contemporary with the present of the story, and therefore for us a space of antiquity, it shows the works of that time as already musealized, that is, prior to the very time of the story, even when, in truth, in “historical reality”, they are paintings and sculptures of a time later than that of the Satyricon.
The scene therefore contains an almost inextricable interweaving of different times: the present of the story, which is our past, speaks of itself in the past tense, showing its own ‘contemporary’ art as already under restoration, as already conceived within a museum display, as already the offspring of a time that is no more, even when it is a matter of art that has yet to happen, while the mobile scaffolding, full of people, passing fleetingly in the background, casting a hurried glance at the works on display, and inexorably calling to mind modern mass tourism, inserts into the scene a contemporary present, which coincides moreover with the very sense of the Petronian text, namely the celebration of the death of art, because by now, for the present (that is, in Fellinian terms, for the sum of the presents that in that scene interweave and act), “there is more beauty in a heap of gold than in all the art of Phidias and Apelles, those crackbrained little Greeks”.
It is, then, a song upon the death of art, of all art, springing from the idea that the beautiful belongs – by definition – to a time that is no more, and that it can touch the present only in fragmentary form, only in the quick and fleeting echo of single intermittences. In this the several presents end up overlapping, the temporal dimension is almost surpassed, evoking the idea that the beautiful is possible only in the instantaneous perception of fragments and, above all, the idea, which Fellini makes explicit in some statements, that artistic discourse, the narrative, is possible only because fragments exist, narration being born from the recomposition, or if one prefers the recombination, of the fragments themselves.
Fellini, in fact, compares his narrative act to the attempt to “evoke through the medium, as the artist always does”, considering it similar to that of the archaeologist, “when, with certain shards, or with certain ruins, he reconstructs not an amphora, or a temple, but something that alludes to an amphora, to a temple”, such allusion being, moreover, “more suggestive than reality”. For this reason, in defining his work, he considers it as characterized by “a figurative and narrative structure of an almost archaeological nature”. But in this proceeding by recombination of fragments, a combination always redefinable and always open to a new possibility, there finds its place the idea of W. Benjamin cited at the outset, whereby this formula of narrating is always open to a different meaning.
The earthquake, which brings about the thunderous collapse of the insula Felix, and which, by destroying it, reduces the ancient to fragments, therefore appears an inevitable premise for the possibility of the narrative itself, as does, after all, the Vesuvian eruption, which with its ruinous character for Pompeii and Herculaneum guarantees to the present the (fragmentary) possession of the ancient.
The confirmation of this reading, beyond the director’s assertions, comes from the final scene of the film, which presents itself as another shred of clear, airy, breathable light. While the one who among the characters also functions as narrating voice sets off by ship toward distant shores, his tale suddenly breaks off, cutting the voice short in the middle of a sentence, and the image of the protagonist himself is transformed into a portion of fresco on the remnant of a ruin, so that, as the camera widens, other ruins appear one after another, dilapidated remains of buildings on which shreds of fresco survive, whose images are the faces of the protagonists of the cinematic narrative.
We have returned, then, to the heart of the Fellinian discourse, to the idea of the sudden apparition of fragments, to the intermittent presence of the ancient, as intermittent, after all, in that it is fragmentary, is Petronius’s text. It is from the recomposition of these fragments that the director’s narrative is generated. Together, however, returning in closing to the only truth of the ancient possible for him, namely its nature as sporadic ruins, its presence by intermittences, Fellini reveals the origin of the narrative itself and at the same time suggests – like Benjamin, but without knowing it -, that from precisely there another, different narration can begin again: from those same fragments a new tale is possible, indeed every other tale is possible. Forever.

Bibliographic paths
For this brief note I have made treasure of, or rather, better said, shamelessly taken advantage of, the contributions to the study day Fellini-Satyricon 1969-2009. Tra memoria, racconti e rovine: un sottosuolo dell’anima, held at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Perugia in December 2009, whose proceedings are being printed. To all the authors I am naturally very grateful.
I enjoyed and above all was interested by the essay by F. Rousseau, Il bambino di Varsavia. Storia di una fotografia, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2011 (It. trans. of L’enfant juif de Varsovie. Histoire d’une photographie, Paris, Edition de Seuil, 2009), which follows the historical vicissitude and hence the mechanisms by which an image is transformed from historical document into an icon of the collective memorial space. While analysing the system by which an icon is built, the author asks himself (and answers) how far the decontextualization of the image itself, as a necessary precondition for its transformation into an icon, does not also end by stripping it of its original meaning, to the point of transforming it, almost paroxysmally, into something other than itself, if not indeed into its own opposite.
On the concept of “intermittence” as a way of reading and interpreting the ‘prophetic’ signs interspersed with reality, a fine reflection, which at moments verges on a poetic tone, has recently been offered by G. Didi-Huberman, Come le lucciole. Una politica delle sopravvivenze, Torino, 2010, Bollati Boringhieri; (It. trans. of Survivance des lucioles, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), who in turn draws on the fine book by D. Roche, La Disparition des lucioles (réflexions sur l’acte photographique), Paris, 1982, Éditions de l’Étoile, a profound reflection on his way of being a poet and photographer. One cannot fail to catch in both books the reference, explicit from the cover onward, to the celebrated article by P.P. Pasolini, published in the “Corriere della Sera” of 1 February 1975 under the title Il vuoto del potere in Italia, but commonly known as the “fireflies article”, later collected in Scritti Corsari, Milano, Garzanti, pp.128-134.
As for the Fellinian statements, on the other hand, they all come from the very useful volume edited by D. Zanelli, Fellini Satyricon, Cappelli, s.l. 1969, which accounts for the debate that arose immediately upon the film’s release, but also for the director’s artistic path during the preparation and shooting of the work. His reflections on being a liar, and on the value of the deliberately contrived lie, I have instead drawn from D. Pettigrew, Federico Fellini. Sono un gran bugiardo, Roma, (It. trans. of Federico Fellini. Je suis un grand menteur. Entretien avec Damian Pettigrew, Paris 1994).
Perhaps it is a problem of mine alone, but the scene in the picture gallery with Eumolpus’s discourse on art, and the ensuing eulogy of past art, drawn almost to the letter by Fellini from Petronius’s text, cannot but send me inevitably back to the fine book by G. Didi-Huberman, L’immagine insepolta. Aby Warburg, la memoria dei fantasmi e la storia dell’arte, Torino, 2006, Bollati Boringhieri, (It. trans. of L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris, Èditions des Minuit, 2002), which shows, among many other things, how any history of art, understood of course as narrative, can begin only at the moment when art itself is considered dead. And perhaps it is again I who follow diaphanous fancies or illusory mirages – should I say, in Pasolinian fashion, “fireflies for lanterns”? –, but it seems to me that this idea marries well with a fine observation by W. Benjamin on narrating: “But the fact is that not only man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his lived life – which is the stuff from which stories are made – takes on transmissible form only in the dying man”, Il narratore. Considerazioni sull’opera di Nikolaj Leskov, in the Einaudi 2011 edition at p.44. In this sense, then, the narrated testimonies of the victims of the extermination camps would rise to a value of supreme narrative (though Benjamin could not yet have known it), lived and produced at the extreme edge of life, even if often set down in writing only years or decades later, so unspeakable did and does the tale itself appear: a splendid intuition, therefore, seems to me the title of a very fine book: P.V. Mengaldo, La vendetta è il racconto. Testimonianze e riflessioni sulla Shoah, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2007, which I should like to be read by many.
It has happened that I dealt with another subterranean vision – but only in patches – of antiquity, which perhaps marks a debt to the Fellinian one, coming shortly after it, namely the one that appears intermittently in the fine, if little considered, film by Luigi Magni, Scipione detto anche l’Africano, 1971, in which the director works a disorienting and highly particular interweaving of temporal levels, where the ancient, narrated in the present, and set in its own present through the costumes, the objects, the music, already takes on, however, the visual forms of the ruin, by way of the setting among the Pompeian and Roman remains: G.L. Grassigli, “… detto anche l’Africano”. L’antichità di Roma nello sguardo di Luigi Magni, in P. Iaccio – M. Menichetti (edd.), L’antico al cinema, Napoli, Liguori, 2009, pp.45-58 (but the volume is useful and interesting above all for the other contributions).
The last step in this interweaving of bibliographic paths is confined to a few pages that in their own way capture well the change of an era. In the first manual of archaeological excavation published in Italy (A. Carandini, Storie dalla terra. Manuale dello scavo archeologico, Torino, Einaudi, 1981, p.15 ff.), which appeared, then, a decade after Fellini Satyricon, the author drew the comparison between stratigraphic excavation and psychoanalytic inquiry, far less allegorical, in my view, than one might think, and which, with all the differences of the case, appears nonetheless rooted in the culture that generates Fellini’s film on the ancient. A pity that in the later editions the parallel was removed: there existed, then, a time, not even too distant, in which one had more courage to think, to say, to write and – it seems to me – also to read.

Gian Luca Grassigli, a classicist, in all likelihood by mistake, teaches Classical Archaeology at the University of Perugia. He deals mainly, and with mixed results, with the forms of culture and mentality of the classical world.