Fellini's life has been spent in the service of both reality and nonreality, largely because he knows, as one of the few film masters who also understand theatricality, that theater without artifice is a fake ideal and a naïf's idea of truth.

His movie dream of Petronius [Fellini Satyricon] is another work of truth and artifice…. [Fellini Satyricon] is elegiac, joyless, resigned. There are many scenes of revel and of sex in it; there is very little gusto.

Another burden from which Fellini has to be freed is our expectation of method. He has taught us to expect lightning play in his editing, swift referential humor and counterpoint, drama and dialectic by deft junctures of material, and he has used this method even in his recent short film Toby Dammit (a part of Spirits of the Dead). There is some splintery referential editing in Satyricon, but the principal method is immersion in texture and color, steady progression through the "feel" of a scene, rather than any lightning mosaics or kaleidoscopic flow. (pp. 250-51)

[What] is there—in the picture itself—that indicates why this man, who has made only contemporary films that were psychologically pertinent even when stylistically extravagant, has abandoned pertinence for extravagance: has chosen a subject that freed him of pertinence and allowed him to concentrate on the extravagance?…

[There is] a connection, at the very base, between this Satyricon and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Both are the works of mature artists that reflect the contemporary artist's relation to the world as material for art. Experience is not less than it was, it is too much more: our culture's expanded consciousness (within) and amplified communication (without) overwhelm and enervate some artists and produce, finally, a bankruptcy, rather than a surfeit, because of a sense of incompetence to deal with that enlarged experience.

Still, artists must work or wither. Antonioni's solution … was an emigration to a different place and a different generation. Fellini's emigration was to the past: where his sense of futility and oppression was relieved of the necessity of point and could express itself as a function of film making itself…. It is difficult—at least for me—to imagine Fellini making this film unless, in a way, he was forced to. Satyricon is a step past 8 1/2, which was about a director looking for a film to make and (despite the desperate ending) failing to find one. Satyricon is the film that Guido, the hero of 8 1/2, might have made. (p. 253)

It does indeed deal with the monstrous and impure; its moral tone is funereal. It might better have been called Fellini Inferno, rather than his Satyricon. But the inferno, I believe, is the sum of the conditions of life, and his life in particular, that forced him to make the film at all.

So the film depends for its being entirely on the way it is made. There are of course recognizable Fellini hallmarks: the silent opening (as in 8 1/2), the big fish (La Dolce Vita), the abrupt ending (like the freeze frame at the end of I Vitelloni), the earth mother whore (from several pictures). But it is the first Fellini feature film that has, in the post-Renaissance sense, no characters. There are only persons, some of whom are on screen more than others. The film has no cumulative story, let alone drama. There is not even a cumulation of adventures, in the picaresque manner; many of the sequences are simply scenes observed. Satyricon depends entirely on its look, and, unlike 8 1/2, which finally lives through its style, there are few afferents to bind us to the style, to make us care about it in anything more than a graphic arts, "gallery" way—a way that is directly opposed to theatrical experience. (p. 254)