MANY OF HISTORY'S great cataclysms, so it seems, have followed periods of extreme indulgence. The legendary decadence of Rome prior to the invasion of the barbarians, the opulence of the French court on the eve of the Revolution, the elegance of the ante-bellum South and the insouciance of Europe during the 1920's are all instances of a culture's last frenzy before the deluge Accurate or not, dozens of films, including movies as diverse as "Gone with the Wind," "Cabaret" and most recently "La Nuit de Varennes," have sought to document these moments, sometimes for memory's sake and others as warning.

Now added to this list is Federico Fellini's "And the Ship Sails On", a dreamy, allegorical film set in the tension-filled days of August 1914, when the European continent girded for its first encounter with modern warfare. The film, Fellini's fifteenth, is an adult fairy tale gone bad. The story takes place aboard a luxury liner somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea with a group of passengers representing Europe's elite. This array of artists and nobles have gathered for the scattering of the ashes of a renowned opera star named Edmea Tetua whom they all knew at some point in their lives. The only person present who had no connection with the prima donna is the comical journalist, Orlando (Freddie Jones). Supposedly broadcasting the voyage for a newsreel, Orlando serves as the film's narrator.

Divided into two parts, the film first focuses on the eccentricity of the characters who have come to pay tribute to the fallen star. Vain opera celebrities upstage one another while rehearsing for Tatua's memorial concert, a foppish conductor reveals his obsession with the dead soprano while an English lord is cuckolded by a member of the ship's crew. The film moves without direction, as scene after scene of extravagant dinners and meaningless tete-a-tetes follow one another and avoids any serious character or plot development. Instead it concentrates upon painting a picture of the rich, the bored, and the effete.

Sidestepping any human drama, Fellini strives to give the film an other-worldly quality, embellishing the opulence, dress and mannerisms of the time. And indeed he does produce an aesthetically pleasing picture. In the process the director creates a distance between the audience and the film, as if the audience were watching a group portrait from the turn of the century.

In the second portion of the movie, the plot assumes a sense of urgency when the crew saves a group of shipwrecked Serbians atempting to flee the Austrians presently ravishing their country. While at first the entourage resent the peasants' intrusion, they gradually develop a fascination and sympathetic affection for the newcomers. Disaster looms imminent, however, when an Austrian battleship accosts the liner demanding that it hand over the refugees. The closing scene where the passengers defiantly sing to the sounds of cannons fittingly foreshadows a century where man's destruction has often outdistanced his creativity.

WHILE THE FILM BIDS farewell to a fading epoch, it also offers a glimpse of what lies ahead. The snooping newsreel journalist heralds the advent of the mass media, a trademark of the age. In one of the movie's most intriguing scenes, upon request, passengers perform arias for a troop of sweaty, soot-besodden stokers in the ship's bow, auguring the workingman's increasing visibility. And, of course, there is war.

The one-dimensionality of the characters is the movie's greatest shortcoming. Although they may be mere caricatures, they nevertheless appear human enough to arouse the audience's interest, even if only for their peculiarity. But Fellini, alas never satisfies that interest. The connections between the passengers and the ashes in the urn remain unclear all through. "And the Ship Sails On," and the burial seems little else than the director's pretext for gathering a bunch of people on a doomed ship. The funeral's insignificance convinces the audience that something else must happen, a lack of subtlety that mars the film.

With "And the Ship Sails On," Fellini holds up a picture only to have a terrible fist punch right through it. But because so little is known about what and who has been destroyed, the sense of loss felt cannot be very great.