French Literature Reviews - 2026

Anne-Violaine Houcke, L'Antiquité n'a jamais existé. Fellini et Pasolini archéologues
Art and Visual Culture

Review published in Acta Fabula (May 2022, vol. 23, no. 5): "Terrestrial & Lunar Archaeologies of Fellini and Pasolini" by Amandine Gouttefarde-Rousseau

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“Antiquity may never have existed, but there is no doubt that we have dreamed of it.” It is with these words that Federico Fellini comments on his Satyricon, a hallucinatory film in which the past, in this year of 1969, takes on a psychedelic appearance. That same year, during the filming of Medea, Pier Paolo Pasolini has a vision: that of an ancient Figure who realizes she is no longer loved and decides to take her own life.

This book examines how these two filmmakers—born under a regime that manipulated antiquity for ideological purposes—in turn confront the ancient world and "invent" it to reflect upon their own era (fascism followed by "neo-fascism" and contemporary consumer society) and to reinvent their medium, cinema. It thus combines an aesthetic reflection on what has been called cinematic modernity with a political reflection on modern times in the economic, social, and political sense.

Here, the ancient world is not confined to the traditional chronological boundaries of Antiquity, nor to the monumental figures staged by genre cinema: it is found solely in the present, manifested in the humble, the marginal, the ruined, and the fragmentary. Fellini plunges into the chaotic, placental universe of studio creation. Pasolini, by contrast, ventures ever further from the center, encountering new bodies and new lands to traverse. Yet both draw upon psychoanalysis and ethno-anthropology to unearth survivances, bring to light what modernity represses, and Fabulate from there. For both, invention is thus as much an archaeological process of unearthing as it is a frontally poetic gesture. The ancient prism thus highlights how one aesthetic modernity managed to take shape against, or right alongside, another social, economic, and political modernity.

With the support of Paris Nanterre University (HAR laboratory, ED 138, Research Commission) and the labex Les passés dans le présent, Investments for the Future, ref. ANR-11-LABX-0026-01

Contents

Genealogies
Archaeologies
Revolutions
Visions

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The cinematic landscape of postwar Italy was deeply marked by attempts to renegotiate historical memory, particularly in relation to the authoritarian political past and the rapid onset of consumer capitalism. Directors of cinematic modernity frequently turned to fragmentary visions of the past rather than monumental historical reconstructions, using non-traditional approaches to antiquity to engage with contemporary ideological transformations. Readers interested in the intersections of cinema, politics, and historical representation in twentieth-century Italian culture may find this volume relevant to their inquiries.

This book examines how Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini confronted the ancient world and invented it to reflect upon their own era and to reinvent their medium, cinema. The volume combines an aesthetic reflection on cinematic modernity with a political reflection on modern times. Both filmmakers drew upon psychoanalysis and ethno-anthropology to unearth survivances, bringing to light what modernity represses and Fabulating from there as part of a poetic process of invention.

You can read an article about this book on en-attendant-nadeau.fr...