The Late Tom La Farge on Fellini's "Satyricon"

Now by the swelling of things
and the empty din of phrases
students have reached this point,
that when they come into court,
they think they have been carried
into another world.
– Petronius, Satyricon, 1

Fellini starts exactly here, at the swelling of things that transfers us to another world, the empire of rhetoric, populated by the grotesque, ornate, far-fetched, hysterical figures by which rhetoric is said to denature true language, purus sermo; but Fellini’s figures are human.