Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Kerr discussed nudity, film, and participatory theatre...
Maestro's Strength. Yet in so plotless a pastiche, the population matters less than the imagination that propels it. That quality the film has in superabundance. Fellini's style is less theatrical than amphitheatrical. Colossal grotesques leap from private fantasy to public mind. In a set daubed with indelible cerulean and blood red, an albino hermaphrodite possessed of occult powers is abducted-only to wither pitifully in the desert. A quadruple amputee somehow manages a deep...
...original. Petronius could only describe the obscenity of the banquet staged by Trimalchio, the nouveau riche. Fellini could portray it as a vignette of Rome at the end of its parabola of grandeur, complete with elaborate jokes and hoaxes. It is an occasion as bizarre and funny as the film's conclusion-in which a lady leaves a fortune to friends, with the proviso that they dissect her corpse and eat it. As always, the maestro's greatest strength is anecdotal. His account of a patrician husband and wife who commit suicide rather than submit to imprisonment...
...rated smirks. When, in a climactic scene, Encolpius recovers his potency at the thighs of a gigantic black Venus, the viewer feels less a voyeur than an observer of some elemental sexual ritual brought intact from the beginning of the world. To be sure, between such moments, the film proves so personal that it amounts to solipsism. "The pearl," as the director once modestly observed, "is only the oyster's autobiography." Fellini Satyricon, at the end, may even be considered no more than an orgy of self-indulgence. But what a self! And what indulgence...
...life. Stella Stevens is cynical and wistful with equal facility, and David Warner is wonderfully funny and moving as the lickerish cleric. Together with Peckinpah's usual stock company of Martin and Jones, they make the old desert as real and recent as yesterday. With this film, Peckinpah unmistakably becomes the successor to John Ford, not only as a director of westerns but as an American film artist...