fellini's satyricon: effect on modern music.

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discuss. preferably heatedly and with many references to things i haven't heard of or probably wouldn't understand.

― fields of salmon (fieldsofsalmon), Saturday, 7 June 2003 04:38 (twenty-two years ago)

Golly, fishwife, that's a brain buster.

Sayricon gave some rock stars permission to be pretentious, ludicrous, dadaist, sexually voracious and ambiguous, and ultra-ornate.

Influenced by Sayricon:

Rolling Stones around Sticky Fingers, and especially the movie 'Performance'.

David Bowie and high art glam in general.

The Sex Pistols (via Vivienne Westwood's fashion)

Fisher Spooner.

I will now refer to stuff you haven't heard and wouldn't understand: Machig Labdrom and the Tibetan practise of Chod; fugue states in psychopathy; Anton Ehrenzweig; the systematic derangement of the senses in the pursuit of art; various obscure marxists; semiotics in the construction of the prefrontal cortex; and, of course, Tupac Shakur.

Oh, you have heard of these? Bugger.

― colin s barrow (colin s barrow), Saturday, 7 June 2003 08:29 (twenty-two years ago)

Ah yes Nino Rota and Tod Dockstader were a dream team. Satyricon prolly has the most experimentalist music / sound effects this side of a Road Runner cartoon, and is rather unobtrusive about it. There are lots of drones, electronic noises, and even a Balinese monkey chant IIRC, but you never notice them unless you turn the picture off.

I don't know if any musicians have claimed to be influenced by Satyricon (except for Meat Beat Manifesto) but the last time I watched the film I thought it sounded quite a bit like a zoviet*france record. And for the sake of namedropping, I think it's safe to say that Alan Splet has seen the film more than once.

― Sommermute (Wintermute), Saturday, 7 June 2003 08:33 (twenty-two years ago)

― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 7 June 2003 11:28 (twenty-two years ago)

― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 7 June 2003 11:29 (twenty-two years ago)

Momus IS the left half of Elton John in Electric Dreams II: the Quickening.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 7 June 2003 13:29 (twenty-two years ago)

mimaroglu link

dockstader link

― jl, Sunday, 8 June 2003 00:25 (twenty-two years ago)

I know this is an ubernerd thing to say but the book Satyricon is 1,000,000 times better than the movie only everybody sees the movie and is all "oh Fellini yah he is such a genius yah sure you betcha" and meanwhile old Petronius, one of the noblest writers who ever lived, gets bupkes

what a world, what a world

― J0hn Darn1elle (J0hn Darn1elle), Sunday, 8 June 2003 01:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Satyricon is definitely worth the read. :-)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 8 June 2003 01:38 (twenty-two years ago)

J0hn, you're so right! I read so much about the film when I was in high school but it just wasn't playing anywhere near my small Southeastern Connecticut town. But I was able to find a copy of the book at the local Paperback Trader and it was the sexiest, funniest thing I'd ever read.

When I finally got to NYC and saw the movie at Cinema Village (it was always on a double bill with Roma), I felt a little let down. It just wasn't quite as vivid as I'd imagined. And the guys weren't as sexy as I'd hoped. The main "pretty" boy, the one they're all chasing after, was really not my type at all. It's still great, though. I have a poster of it up in my bedroom.

What was that stupid thing the boy kept doing with his hands, though? It was kind of like voguing.

― Arthur (Arthur), Sunday, 8 June 2003 02:14 (twenty-two years ago)

'With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
'What shall we ever do?'
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

― only konnekt, Sunday, 8 June 2003 02:19 (twenty-two years ago)

The book is great, but is really quite a different product from the film. The film, with its matchless music and visuals, takes us into a stranger world than the book does, which is odd considering how the books is from 2000 years ago, is all about casual homosexuality and bulimic eating habits and the Roman Empire... actually, maybe it's not odd at all. Maybe that's all closer to us now than the spirit of the 1960s is.

― Momus (Momus), Sunday, 8 June 2003 09:00 (twenty-two years ago)

Well - to be fair to Petronius, no English translation has yet conveyed his astonishing sense of wordplay, which has an hallucinogenic sort of effect, disorienting & playful & utterly wild. Also, it's hard to read the book without hearing a lot of hooey about how the original manuscript probaly ran to this or that outrageous length & we've only got fragments, which I don't think is true. (There are some textual scholars, albeit not too many of them, who'd back me up on this point.)

But yeah, Fellini's eye for faces is second only to Pasolini's, and the visuals for the film make in uniquely his own.

― J0hn Darn1elle (J0hn Darn1elle), Sunday, 8 June 2003 12:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Found the soundtrack to Satyricon at Academy a few monthe ago. 30 minutes of what's perhaps Rota's most spaced out compositions ever. Super gorgeous.

On the Petronius tip: search Apuleius' " The Golden Ass" for more ancient Rome adventures and sex frolics. Especially the Oxford World Classics edition, which rocks.

― Jay Vee (Manon_70), Sunday, 8 June 2003 21:42 (twenty-two years ago)

ha the great Professor who taught me Latin specializes in Apuleius: Apuleius is the reason that postmodernism bores me so bad - literally anything that postmodern authors might claim to have discovered/done first/originated/I know these are all loaded terms hence my sandbagging thereof/dug up, Apuleius did & then overdid in his Metamorphoses (translated as "The Golden Ass" since whenevah). The scene with the mirror before he gets turned into a donkey is film theory 1700 years before film.

― J0hn Darn1elle (J0hn Darn1elle), Sunday, 8 June 2003 23:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Better to hang a dead husband than to lose a living lover.

― colin s barrow (colin s barrow), Sunday, 8 June 2003 23:50 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh dear, I found the film v of Satyricon totally unwatchable, but this was a couple years back. Tell me this, I've seen part of a Peter Greenaway film, Prospero's Books, which I also utterly despised & found unwatchable in pretty much the same way. Is it just a matter of aesthetics? What is so compelling about this Fellini film? It bored me silly, to be honest, and I have a pretty high amount of patience (am a huge Tarkovsky fan for example).

― daria g, Monday, 9 June 2003 03:14 (twenty-two years ago)

I have not read Petronius. But Satyricon I found enjoyable as a pretentious but comic period piece like Barbarella - another great influence on modern music.

― colin s barrow (colin s barrow), Monday, 9 June 2003 07:41 (twenty-two years ago)

three years pass...

http://rapidshare.de/files/24168959/fellini_satyricon.zip.html

― fez (fez), Monday, 26 June 2006 12:24 (nineteen years ago)

That was very nice of you. :)

(I love both the book and the film btw. there are some outragously beautiful shots in the film.)

― Omar (Omar), Monday, 26 June 2006 19:17 (nineteen years ago)

wow, rota's soundtrack is a lot further out than I remember

self-consciously tricked out cross between late 60's psychedelic music and Musique de la Grece Antique

if they'd included the mimaroglu and dockstader pieces on the soundtrack album, they would have fit right in

― milton parker (Jon L), Tuesday, 27 June 2006 21:01 (nineteen years ago)

thanks fezaffe, I'm going to have to buy this.

I hear Amarcord & Casanova step over the acid line at moments as well.

― milton parker (Jon L), Tuesday, 27 June 2006 21:06 (nineteen years ago)

The ultimate effect:
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a61/behemodel/satyricon.jpg

― Ian Christe (Ian Christe), Tuesday, 27 June 2006 21:45 (nineteen years ago)

"I hear Amarcord & Casanova step over the acid line at moments as well"

the most far out Fellini moments are in "Toby Dammitt" - its a fantastic short film deliberately mixing Edgar Allan Poe, LSD-soaked swinging London and all Italian obsessions about sex and death.

― Marco Damiani (Marco D.), Wednesday, 28 June 2006 05:51 (nineteen years ago)

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