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...