Maddening Odysseys

July 18, 2025September 13, 2025 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Let’s ignore for a second who’s directing it. It’s insane that hordes of young movie nerds are buying tickets to an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey a full year in advance of its release date next summer. Of course, what those nerds are actually buying tickets to is The New Christopher Nolan Picture, as they’d show up to just about anything with that director’s name on it, in blind faith. There’s nothing culturally current or relevant about Homer otherwise, at least not in the decade since JLo was wooed with a thrifted “first-edition” copy of The Iliad in the dipshit erotic thriller The Boy Next Door. So, there’s something incredibly funny about Nolan leading Dark Knight die-hards into Greek Lit scholarship for the next year, studying ancient verse and Wikipedia summaries in anticipation of the biggest summer blockbuster of 2026. I won’t be purchasing an advanced Odyssey ticket myself (partially because they’re already selling out), but I can’t pretend I’m above that kind of literary hoodwinking either. In fact, in the past week I’ve watched multiple 3-hour epic adaptations of ancient literary texts that I wouldn’t have any personal interest in if they weren’t repackaged as Movie Nerd fodder. Whether I was lured in by the director, the genre, the screengrabs, or—my biggest weakness—a physical media flash sale, I found myself spending hours getting lost in maddening odysseys into literary adaptation every night after work this week, finding way more academia than usual in my cinematic escapism.

Watching Federico Fellini’s 1969 adaptation of the ancient Roman epic Satyricon, it becomes clear why humanity bothered to invent the film camera in the first place: pornographic opera, operatic porno, and everything in-between. Every image elicits a “Whoa,” while every sound earns an “Eww,” splitting the difference between Hollywood Babylon extravagance & Grand Guignol grotesquerie. It’s also an impossible adaptation, as entire chapters of its source text have been lost to time, leaving gigantic holes in the story Fellini dared himself to tell. What’s left is a long journey in which our hero Encolpius attempts to reclaim a lost love slave who was stolen & sold by his best frenemy, Ascyltus. Much like Odysseus finding his way home after the Trojan War, Satyricon is an episodic adventure in which Encolpius repeatedly fails to reclaim ownership of his beautiful boy-slave while repeatedly running into Ascyltus having the time of his life no matter what perils the former bros find themselves in from scene to scene. There’s often no connective tissue between the individual set pieces, since entire chapters of the book are missing. So, it mostly functions as a collection of living tableaux, with Fellini striving to create images as beautiful and, to quote him directing the background actors on-set, “as wild & crazy as possible!” In some scenes, characters lament that fine arts like poetry, painting, and sculpture are not what they used to be while chatting in the ancient Roman equivalent of an art gallery. Other scenes are built around fart jokes & sexual farce in which the cure for impotence is getting your tush spanked by a harem of late-60s hippie babes. For your sanity, it’s best not to pay too close attention to the beat-to-beat progress of the story and instead save that energy for planning the next decade of Mardi Gras costumes around what lewks the hundreds of extras are modeling in the background.

Paying too close attention to every narrative avenue of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript would also drive an audience insane, which in that case is entirely the point. A Polish adaptation of an early-19th Century novel written in French but set in Spain, it’s already a Russian nesting doll of international post-modern contexts before you get into the particulars of the plot. In the first framing device, Spanish & French officers on opposing sides of The Napoleonic War find the titular manuscript in a home that’s crumbling under gunfire. Illustrated with surrealist art & vulgar erotica, the manuscript appears to tell the story of the Spanish officer’s own grandfather, baiting him to continue reading with promised insights into his own heritage. Roaming a countryside populated almost exclusively by demons & “evil ghosts,” the Spaniard in the manuscript finds himself listening to the endless anecdotes & half-remembered dreams of fellow travelers (each with their own characters who have stories to tell), mapping out an impossible labyrinth of framing devices within framing devices so absurdly complex even Guy Maddin couldn’t find the exit. By the time he’s five or so layers deep into anecdotes within dreams within tales within sagas, the Spaniard complains that he has lost track of the border “where reality ends and fantasy takes over,” which fellow listeners helpfully compare to abstract concepts like Poetry and The Infinite. Nothing especially exciting happens in The Saragossa Manuscript. The story involves demons, ghosts, Spanish Inquisitors, dream-realm polygamists, and swashbuckling swordplay, but it’s all just as mundane as listening to a friend describe a dream they had last week (in which a dreamed-up character recounted their own half-remembered dream). The most thrilling plot development is a moment when the Spaniard within the manuscript places his hands on a copy of the manuscript himself and starts reading the book of his own life, making it clear that the audience is being relentlessly fucked with without mercy.

The narrative shape of Marcell Jankovics’s animated epic The Tragedy of Man is much easier to define than either Satyricon‘s or Saragossa Manuscript‘s. It’s just as maddening in its narrative ambition & scale, however, as it attempts to recount the entire history of everything — from the birth of the universe to its inevitable future collapse. Completed over several decades of hand-drawn animation, The Tragedy of Man is a psychedelic infographic that illustrates humanity’s entire existence through the visual art, philosophy sermons, and methods of power in each era depicted. It’s as visually stunning as it is intellectually exhaustive, not least of all because it is adapted from a 19th Century play cited as the pinnacle of Hungarian literature. It’s difficult to imagine what a staging of that play might look like based on the constantly shifting psychedelia rendered here, in which early humanity is depicted in a series of cave paintings, ancient Egypt is depicted in animated hieroglyphics, modern times are depicted in Ralph Bakshi-style pop art, and the distant future is depicted in unfathomable science fiction speculation. The stage-play source text makes sense in the constant dual-voiced dialogue between the Biblical figures of Adam & Lucifer, however, who spend the entire three-hour runtime narrating the evolution of man’s self-destructive introspection & philosophy. No matter how harshly the art style or historical circumstances shift from segment to segment, it’s a constant refrain that humanity’s main folly is our ambition for everlasting fame, which leads us only to harm ourselves & each other instead of being happy with our current, temporary lot in life. What’s staggering about the film is its millennia-spanning quest to prove that point with visual & historical citations across the entirety of time, which is too large of a scale for the human brain to fully comprehend, let alone contain in a single work of art.

Each of these epic-scale literary adaptations were immensely satisfying as self-contained art films, but I’m not convinced that they’re effective as advertisements for their source texts. I’m no closer to reading Petronius’s Satyricon now that I’ve enjoyed the perverse visual delights of Fellini Satyricon. Likewise, I doubt Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is going to spark a renewed cultural interest in ancient art & poetry beyond inspiring a few opening-weekend clickbait articles. These unwieldy, impossible-to-fully-adapt literary source texts are much more useful to filmmakers than they are to the resulting films’ audiences. They inspire grand-scale, abstract storytelling in a medium that’s at its best when it reaches for Poetry & The Infinite instead of getting mired in pettier concerns like Logic & Plot. According to The Tragedy of Man, that kind of transcendent ambition is corruptive to the human spirit, but since all we’re doing here is telling stories and making pretty pictures, I guess it’s okay in this case. Hopefully, adapting a saga as immense & sprawling as The Odyssey will help break Nolan away from the more clinical, reserved approach he generally takes to blockbuster filmmaking. And if he happens to sell a few paperback copies of The Complete Works of Homer in the process, all the better.

-Brandon Ledet

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

March 16, 2025September 13, 2025 / swampflix / 2 Comments

The standout sequence in Juliet of the Spirits that dropped my jaw lowest in the theater was its ugliest & most mundane. The 2015 restoration of the 1960s Fellini classic is, for the most part, a gorgeous swirl of vibrant color. It’s a dark fantasy movie in which the Italian master invents the cinematic language for later texts as disparate & monumental as Lynch’s dream sequences, Jodorowsky’s circuses, and Friedkin’s exorcisms, all rendered in sinfully lurid Technicolor. That was all expected, though. What really caught me off guard is when Fellini pauses his gaudy reverie to also invent the cinematic language for the television program Cheaters. It happens in the sequence where his real-life wife & muse Giuletta Masina visits the private detective agency that’s been trailing her husband, and they play back to her a full week of documented adulterous behavior. The way the head dick in charge narrates the sepia-tone surveillance footage with time stamps and sneering innuendo is so specific to the Joey Greco era of Cheaters that I now understand that reality TV show to be a loving homage to the film’s legacy. Such is the power of Fellini.

Much like an episode of Cheaters, watching Juliet of the Spirits feels like intruding on a private domestic dispute that’s really none of our business. Our director is working through his real-life conflicts with his wife by illustrating his own adulterous behavior onscreen, through the avatar of actor Mario Pisu. Giuletta Masina stars as Giuletta Boldrini, a wealthy but lonely housewife who’s increasingly isolated by the extramarital indulgences of her husband Giorgio, played by Pisu. As Giorgio spends increasingly long stretches away with his latest fling, Giuletta seeks spiritual advice from the dark arts, meeting with a series of psychics & mystics in search of a calmer, wiser perspective on her broken marriage. This pursuit opens her mind to a loud circus of perverted spirits & ghosts that constantly parade through her head, pulling her out of her Catholic comfort zone towards a larger religious truth: pleasure is the true religion, and she should be cheating too. The whole thing plays like a plea from Fellini to his wife to start cheating on him to help balance things out and to take her mind off the marital injustice he initiated.

Unlearning Catholic guilt is easier said than done. The proto-Exorcist imagery results from a childhood memory in which Giuletta starred as a martyred saint in a church play, burned alive for the transgression of accepting Christ in her heart. Anytime the adult Giuletta considers indulging in an extramarital affair (with a handsome ghost, demon, or otherwise), her mind flashes back to this scarring memory, which has taught her to associate Earthly pleasure with guilt & pain. Everyone around her is fully enjoying what being alive has to offer—especially in the pleasures of the flesh—and yet Giuletta continues to fret, unable to let go and enjoy herself as much as her wandering husband. Buried somewhere in the film’s increasingly dreamlike imagery, there’s eventually a healing moment in which she frees her flaming inner child from her Catholic shackles and comforts her with a motherly embrace, but it’s still not enough to fully make up for what Giorgio has done to their marriage. Maybe Fellini’s admitting personal guilt there more than he’s attempting to shake his wife loose from her own self-limiting Catholic guilt. Again, it’s not really any of our business.

For all of its messy offscreen domestic drama and the deep psychological pain caused by religious repression, Juliet of the Spirits is often a light confection. Snazzy jazz scores the backyard wanderings of a mystic housecat and the Italo-fashion beachwear modeling of Giulietta’s fabulously amoral neighbor with no attempt to underline the dark-fantasy elements of the plot with any palpable menace. Fellini feels just as preoccupied with injecting eye-searing beauty into every frame of his first in-color picture as he is with working out his domestic issues with his wife. Even the candlesticks in the couple’s home are tinted lavender instead of the typical white, just to squeeze more color into the frame. It is, without question, the most gorgeous, surreal episode of Cheaters in the history of the show; and yes I am including the one where Joey Greco got stabbed on a boat.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 7: 8½ (1963)

March 19, 2016April 22, 2016 / swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where 8½ (1963) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 47 of the first edition hardback, Ebert refers to 8½ in the discussion of his devout Catholicism as a youth. In particular, he mentions that a photograph of the saint from whom he took his confirmation name, Dominic Savio, appears on the wall of the grade school in the film’s childhood flashbacks.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “‘La Dolce Vita’ remains, for my money, the best of Fellini’s films; it’s a sad, shocking, exuberant portrait of a Roman gossip columnist having a crisis of the spirit. But ‘8 1/2’ is a great film in its own way, and despite the efforts of several other filmmakers to make their own versions of the same story, it remains the definitive film about director’s block.” -From his 1993 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“‘8 1/2’ is the best film ever made about filmmaking. […] It does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn’t know what he wants or how to achieve it, and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.” -From his 2000 review in his “Great Movies” series

One surefire way to get past writer’s block is to write about the writer’s block itself. It worked for Charlie Kaufman when he penned the loopy, meta philosophical crisis Adaptation and it worked for Federico Fellini when he created the art house classic 8½. Ebert called 8½ “the best film ever made about filmmaking”, but I don’t think that’s what 8½ is about at all. More accurately, I think 8½ is a film about filmmakers. It captures the conflicting mess of oversized ego, patience (and at times impatience) for criticism, and constant self-doubt required to make a big budget feature film come together. With 8½ Fellini paints himself as the ultimate control freak. No longer content to merely direct films, he yearns to direct his life, all the people who populate it (especially the women, who include B-movie goddess Barbara Steele among them), and the fabric of reality itself. When I watched 8½ I got the distinct feeling of watching Dewey Cox going through his Bryan Wilson/Pet Sounds pha se in Walk Hard. Fellini (and his fictional surrogate Guido) are reaching for such a transcendent elevation beyond the limits of film as a medium that what ends up being made is a total mess that accomplishes nothing at all except as a document of that far-reaching ambition.

I’ll admit that I find much of 8½‘s early proceedings to be largely frustrating. The film has a way of mixing the “reality” of a stressed-out filmmaker avoiding progress on a grand scale production with the surreality of his own self-indulgent navel-gazing that’s fascinating stuff, but rarely full committed. Often, 8½ will pull back from its dream logic self-reflection & ego-stroking to voice criticism about that impulse. It’s the same have your cake & eat it too attitude that frustrated me with (forgive me for the horrifically crass comparison) Deadpool: the film is content to exploit the basic tropes of its genre (obscured art house self-absorption in this case), but also over-eager to step back & mock itself for that indulgence at every turn. I also found many of the film’s early stretches to be noisy & chaotic in away that was undoubtedly intentional, but also difficult to focus on. In the long run, though, the parts of 8½ I found to be frustrating proved themselves to be entirely necessary groundwork for the film’s masterful concluding 40 minutes. Like a lot of art house cinema that tackles “great truths” about life & art, the film requires a lot of effort on the audience’s end, but the rewards are plenty for those who make it through.

8½ doesn’t truly come alive until the walls separating “reality” & fantasy fully collapse in its final hour. Guido spends the first couple acts stressing over his own creative process, his critics, his producers, and the tension between his wife & mistresses. It isn’t until this fictional stop & start film production lets go if its self-examination & sardonic self-deprecation and devolves into a literal circus that I was fully engaged with what Fellini was reaching for here. There are three major sequences in 8½’s concluding hour that really floored me. In the first, Guido’s wife sits in on a painfully awkward producers’ meeting in which the director must choose actresses to portray his wife & mistress from various screen tests. In the second, Guido fantasizes that his wife is suddenly agreeable with his philandering & all the women in his life come together to live in a harem under his command to please his every whim (marking the break where the film finally abandons all pretense of keeping its dream logic quarantined). The third sequence, of course, is the film’s infamous beach setting conclusion in which Fellini/Guido finally gets his wish and begins to direct all the players in his life in a literal circus.

It’s difficult to grasp whether or not these three sequences (or three ring circus, if you will) completely make up for the frustrating groundwork required to make them work in a narrative sense. 8½ doesn’t transcend into something truly special until it lets go of its own self-doubt & criticism, but it seems Fellini knew exactly what he was doing with that structural choice. In the all-important harem sequence when “reality” & fantasy truly homogenize for the first time, a woman asks Guido, “Is this how the film ends?” and he ominously responds, “No, this is how it starts.” The film leading up to that break felt almost like doing my cinematic homework, but I’m glad I pushed through. Those last 40 minutes or so were a rewarding glimpse into the self-absorbed psyche of a filmmaker seeking total control beyond the confines of a movie set. I believe 8½ has far more to say about the filmmaker’s mental disposition than it does about the transcendence of cinema itself, but that’s honestly a much more rarely-covered topic, whether or not it’s a self-indulgent one. I couldn’t quite match the general enthusiasm that has lauded this film as a complete masterwork, but I still enjoyed it a great deal.