Satyricon

Set in Rome during Nero's reign, Satyricon's loose story follows a young man (Potter) as he fights to retain the affection of his lover. We watch as he attends the dinner party of a rich man, is captured by pirates and kidnaps a hermaphrodite demigod. If this sounds surreal, that’s because it is, and the film makes zero concessions to comprehensibility; the audio even placed out of sync with the footage to increase the viewer’s sense of alienation.

It’s a carnivalesque journey through a decadent society on the verge of collapse, one that speaks to the film’s present – a politically and sexually liberated late 60s Europe – as much as Italy’s past. The overblown nature of the piece renders it dated, yet the film’s twisted visual aesthetic and narrative sense of the bizarre would echo in the work of those later masters of the surreal, Lynch and Herzog. [Sam Lewis]