To anyone who likes cinema, Fellini is plainly one of the greats. But the widespread appreciation of his films is often tainted by condescension. He is understood to be an unsurpassed finder of faces, a marvellously impressive ‘scene-painter’ and (if you like) a raconteur of genius, but where, people ask, is the intellectual depth? What view does he have of the world, beyond a robust sexual libertinism and a liking for marginals and freaks?

If there was ever any excuse for holding such a crude view of the matter it is unlikely to survive immersion in C.’s relentlessly intelligent and wide-ranging new study of the director, which examines Fellini's oeuvre firstly under the optic of our contemporary Christian civilisation (what is left of it) and secondly in the light of his career-long fascination with the classical world – the city of Rome (palimpsest city par excellence), providing a clear link between the two ideas.

On the matter of Christianity, Fellini is usually taken to be a critic. One thinks of his sardonic treatment of the clergy – the ‘third sex’ as he often refers to this class – in films such as Il Bidone/The Swindle (1955), 8½ (1963) and Roma (1972). What else is it but satire when, in the famous opening sequence of La Dolce Vita (1960), Fellini shows us a gigantic statue of Christ being helicoptered across the Eternal City while the vehicle's pilot and accompanying journalists wave and blow kisses to a bunch of pretty girls whom they have spotted sunbathing on a nearby rooftop? It would be rather hard to miss the ‘message’ here, that, if the icon exists, the substance has vanished – without regrets perhaps. And, in a way, that is exactly what Fellini is saying.

But it is very far from the whole picture. In interviews and autobiographical writings Fellini went out of his way to call himself a Christian; naturally, with reservations (for example, he admits to being careless about observing the sacraments). The essential message of love and forgiveness, however, is one he agrees with. One can see this emerge unmistakably in the early films he co-wrote with Roberto Rossellini, such as Rome Open City (1945), Paisà (1946) and The Little Flowers of St Francis (1950), as well as in later masterpieces of neo-realism like La Strada (1953) and The Nights of Cabiria (1956). C. is very fair about these films, I think. He is as modern as can be, in intellectual outlook (as we will see in a moment), but there is no programmatic dismissal of the claims of religion such as one comes across all too often in contemporary academic writing. Some of the most interesting pages of the book go into Fellini's personal relationship with individual maverick clergymen; and in general, there is a lucid, un-tendentious discussion of the cultural interplay (which was not always as sinister as you might think it was) between the Roman Catholic Church and the Italian film industry across the decades.

The ancient world sits underneath the Christian world and interpenetrates with it from below, so to speak. That is the message that one might be tempted to draw from the wonderful excavation scenes which everyone remembers in Roma. And not only in those sequences either. Surely, as C. points out, the pageant of the Church that is guyed, or satirised, in the film's famous fashion parade section (gorgeously-attired Cardinals slipping down the walkway on roller skates and so on) takes us back to the ancient triumphs of the Caesars. In a way, all pageant is pagan. Everywhere in the Mediterranean world the ancient gods and goddesses can be seen to morph into their modern descendants: Dionysus, or Pan, becomes Christ; Demeter, or Persephone, the Virgin Mary. The precedent for such speculations is already there in Dante, and C. (a professor of world cultures and literatures) picks up on the connections with impressive and appropriate erudition. ‘In Fellini’, says C., ‘Christianity and paganism constitute neither an opposition nor an antagonism’ (p. 12).

Yet there is another way of looking at the matter, which is that the ancient world, on the contrary, can only be, for us, ‘a vertiginously remote and unknown reality’. This is the view that is put across with most consistency perhaps in Fellini's masterly adaptation of the Satyricon of Petronius (1969), to which C. devotes two fascinating chapters. The essential question being posed – continuity or rupture? – is answered in favour of the latter. This is how Fellini himself understood the matter:

We might note the elegant poise of Fellini's written prose here. Perhaps indeed such statements go some way towards redressing the myth (if it still has adherents) that this director was ‘uneducated’. One sees no evidence, here or elsewhere, of lack of sophistication – on the contrary. He is a Christian imagining paganism – but not from a Christian perspective! Of course there were many ways in which the ancient world had been conjured up previously on the silver screen. One thinks of the popular Italian peplums of the silent era (and later) as well as of Hollywood epics like Ben Hur. Yet surely no film before (or since) Satyricon has evoked so masterfully the utter Otherness of antiquity: the strange, beguiling and pansexual amoralism that reigned on large areas of the earth before the coming of Christ, with his all-devouring message of pity.

C., an Italian national who teaches at an American university, writes very well – an unusual enough attribute in current academia to prompt the reviewer to mention the fact. You feel that there is at all times a mind working on the issues that is independent and dialectical. Thus in many ways the book is extremely ‘readable’. If one has any reservations at all, they revolve around the perennial question of what level of interpretation – ultimately, what degree of theory – it is appropriate to bring to bear when writing about individual films. Fellini's world in many ways is open to psychoanalysis, whether of the Freudian, Jungian or Lacanian stamp. C. is expert in all three vocabularies, just as he shows expert acquaintance with other modern masters of interpretative discourse: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and so on. Some of the finest passages in the book (such as his hyper-nuanced reading of the final seashore sequence of La Dolce Vita) derive their power from an ability to deploy analytic – in this case Lacanian – speculation of considerable complexity inside a written prose of sparkling aphoristic bravura.

Nonetheless (must there always be a ‘nonetheless’?), one has to record that the book is sometimes hard-going, or so I imagine readers will feel it to be. It is admirably succinct – only 167 pages long (excluding the bibliography and index); yet it demands to be read in the study, in small doses, with a pencil in the notes section. How, one wonders, might C. have arranged the matter so that the effect on the uninitiated reader (some of us have never read Michel Foucault and maybe are happy in our ignorance) was not quite so ‘relentless’, so hegemonic? As if to rub in the general effect of austerity and hard work, Bloomsbury has issued the book without a single illustration. On the contrary, I can imagine a different kind of book that could be just as suggestive by consisting, as it were, only of illustrations or illustrations accompanied by captions. The captions could be as learned as you like, but, by this methodology, the reader would have space to breathe, to think his own thoughts and to avoid being so browbeaten by ‘meaning’.