An Ethno-Electronic Soundscape: Nino Rota's Music for Fellini-Satyricon (1969)

The film Fellini-Satyricon (1969), as Peter Bondanella pointed out, is an attempt “to create an ‘objective’ oneiric narrative that had no direct connection with Fellini’s private life.”1 To this paradox of the objective dream, we should also add the famous question of “science fiction in reverse, which explores the past rather than the future.”2 The result is, as Fellini stated, the creation of “a lost, vanished, defunct world, about which . . . we have no real relationship.”3 But what kinds of music, what sounds, can come from, or be attributed to, such a world? How did Nino Rota contribute to this new “oneiric work” of Fellini? How did he approach the task of achieving this effect of total otherness? The main object of my article is to attempt to respond to these questions, analyzing the two types of music present in the soundtrack of the film: electronic and ethnic music. What I have aimed at demonstrating is on the one hand the way they work together, and on the other how this combination impacts the film.