Bloomsbury Fellinis Eternal Rome

From the beginning of his career, when he was a screenwriter and assistant to Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini wrote scripts that addressed religious issues and classical antiquitys relationship to Christianity. This book is the first study of this important aspect of Fellinis work, taking into account the film that is perhaps his most famous, Fellini-Satyricon, but also looking at case studies from his many other films from the earliest in 1948 to his last in 1990, the much-misunderstood The Voice of the Moon. Carrera teases out the allusions to connections between paganism and Catholicism, the mythical side of pagan/Christian Rome, and Rome as Babylon. Specific references to Roman antiquity and early Christianity are pitted against the jet-setting scene of modern Roman life. Fellinis new approach to representation of pre-Christian Rome is revealed in and after Fellini-Satyricon (1969): marked by a complete epistemological rupture (in Foucauldian terms), it puts to question the very possibility to represent and understand the non-Christian past in linear-historical terms. Roma (1972) digs deeper into this shift, adding the failure of the archaeological gaze to the failure of historicism (present-day Rome, the film implies, will soon be as incomprehensible as the ancient Rome). Students and scholars of Classics, Reception Studies and Film Studies will find this an insightful and important analysis of one of the twentieth centurys major filmmakers.