TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Blutch

budget-Shakespeare look he liked (Welles also filmed Petit’s ballet); Joseph Mankiewicz; and Italian B movies. If Peplum avoided Hollywoodian flamboyance, it was also a response to the venerable, slightly musty peplum tradition in Franco-Belgian comics—say, The Adventures of Alix , an educational sensational staple of Blutch’s childhood. But the elephant in the room, whose importance Blutch has alternately avowed and denied, praised and repudiated, is Federico Fellini. Indeed, Fellini’s description of his intentions and process in making his 1969 Fellini Satyricon is surprisingly apt for Peplum : Sparse fragments, in large part repressed and forgotten, made whole by what might be called a dream. Not by a historical epic reconstructed philologically from documents and positively verified but by a great dream galaxy sunken in the darkness and now rising up to us amid glowing bursts of light. I think I was seduced by the possibility of reconstructing this dream with its puzzling transparency, its unreadable clarity. Fellini’sspectacle focusedonthebaroqueanddebauched. Blutch’s vision, without sparing any barbarity or hedonism, is ultimately less cynical, more fantastical, darker and starker. Blutch has called the Satyricon as exciting and estranging as science fiction: . . . a literary UFO from the fourth dimension, because you don’t really get what’s going on, people are laughing but you don’t know why, things you’d find sad they think are funny. . . . The incredible thing is they don’t have any of the same norms, it’s like life on another planet. At the same time, they’re sodistant fromus they’re almost prehistoric: in the boat scene, they’re living with animals. Back then animals were still very much with us, beside us; we were almost on an equal footing. I wanted to depict a world

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