MUBI

Amarcord stands as testament to the grandeur of Fellini’s mastery of the cinematic form, both stylistically and thematically. Here he presents a visceral recollection of his upbringing in Rimini, rendering his portrait as a bright fantasia of ordinary life. Yet he subverts the facile romanticism that often accompanies nostalgia by heightening the farcical nature of these surroundings, fashioning a minute caricature of coastal life––and a pointed critique of fascism––through a very particular, highly perceptive set of eyes. Throughout the length of the film, Fellini is able to sustain a delicate, effervescent––and seemingly effortless––balance between robust comedy and moments of indelible tenderness and piercing resonance. It is as though one senses the personal nature of Fellini’s subject matter and subconsciously internalizes these events, as one would cherished memories of one’s own youth. It is precisely in his presentation of the material as farce, as caricature, that Fellini is able to deceptively take rein of the viewer’s emotions, just as he finds them unguarded.

If François Truffaut immortalized his coming of age in a tender, earnest––yet always lively––fashion in The 400 Blows and Stolen Kisses, Fellini chooses to render the complexities of age by highlighting the absurdity of youth pitted against the backdrop of a world of equal absurdity. It is incredible that, given such disparate treatments, both filmmakers should wind up in the same place, deep within the heart of the viewer.

Fellini’s Amarcord is a film that truly lives up to its title. Drawn entirely from Fellini’s memories and imagination, it could only have been made by a director who knows the ways of small Italian villages first-hand. The atmosphere jumps out at you from the onset hitting all of your senses with everything from the Mediterranean heat to the smell of la cucina.
Amarcord is brimming with life and at one point we have to ask, just how much of this does Fellini miss? In a quasi-documentary mode of observation, Fellini hints at why he developed a love-hate relationship with the town of Rimini. It’s a lively town, full of laughter and festivities and few can deny the unity of the people. But during an early scene in which a huge bonfire is built to welcome the spring (signaled by the falling of puff balls from the sky), the depiction does not hide that this is a village of pranks that jump out of hand, reckless gags, and dangerous rowdiness.
Typical of Fellini, the film takes us in and a narrator personalizes the experience by interacting with the audience. In Mr. Lawyer (Luigi Rossi), we have a guide who may very well be Fellini himself. His films become the most absorbing lectures and they actually educate us while providing us with infinite pleasure. Much of Amarcord is pure farce. Particularly amusing are the scenes in the town school, where the students do just about everything except remember their Greek lessons.
These vignettes add up to an overview of the town that made such an impression on the young Fellini. They have a cumulative strength in that they paint a more definitive picture of the director’s youth than any biographer could. Each character we meet on this journey gives us words of wisdom that, for better or worse, shaped Fellini. Perhaps drawing from their rich ancient heritage, Italians have always had a passion for sharing bits of philosophy, talks on health, life, and mental well-being.
In one of the film’s best scenes, the elders talk over each other at the dinner table set at the house of Titta (Bruno Zanin), Fellini’s avatar. Just listening to them talk is a marvel of dialogue. Of course, Fellini never allows his conversations to run dry. The words sprout like candy from a piñata with vigor and gusto. Suddenly, the conversation erupts into an angry chase between Titta and his father (Armando Brancia) that goes out into the courtyard and turns the family upside down. Sometimes, the actions of the Biondi family get so bizarre that the film takes on an almost cartoon-like surrealism.
There is a variety of moods and tones that Fellini employs to tell the stories he remembers (or imagined). The thread? Well, there is the bike riding narrator and the upper-class middle-age ladies who know full well that they catch the eye of every man in town.
For the most part, Amarcord is a bouncy jolly film in which we never know what to expect next, much like vaudeville. But it also casts a serious indictment at the hypocrisy of the town. The women purposely draw the attention of lustful men, the tobacconist takes advantage of a sexually inexperienced young man, a hooker flirts with workers at a construction site, and yet the church has a firm handle on the town. Confession is a mandatory ritual and in its strictest tradition (no eating before confession). And yet, after confession the boys go off to masturbate in the secrecy of a car. Such unquestioning acceptance of the church teaching makes the citizens susceptible to and the arrival of fascism marks a new era.
But this is a spoof of fascism rather than a tragic telling of its effect. The talking Mussolini head is very funny as is the film’s jab at the absurdity of the government and the small percentage of Italians who supported it. We do get a sense of the fear cast on the villagers during a serio-comic questioning of Mr. Biondi by government officials who suspect him to be an anarchist. It’s not so much humorous as absurd. But he is let free and he returns home to Chaplinesque gags.
Besides Chaplin, Fellini shares commonalities with Mel Brooks as is evident in a scene depicting the arrival of a Middle Eastern prince and his seductive concubines. The truth is, Amarcord is a joke of a memoir and that is meant as praise. Like Woody Allen, his American admirer and imitator, Fellini depicts his own reality as comedy. Arguably, the funniest scene in the film involves Titta’s uncle Teo (Ciccio Ingrassia) predicament when he gets stuck atop a tree during a family excursion in the country.
Amidst the laughs, however, Fellini makes room not so much for intensity (the fascist movement is dropped half-way through), but for tenderness and family connections. There are some beautiful moments, as when the family goes out to sea on a boat holiday and finds time to gaze and wonder about the stars or, when Titta’s mother (Pupella Maggio) reminisces about how she met her husband. There is also an unusual (though decidedly Fellinian) moment when a peacock flies down during a snowball fight. It is a moment of biblical allusion, in which a being from another world (in this case, the tropics) appears in the middle of the children’s game, causing them to stop and reflect. Perhaps, this moment should be taken as the centerpiece for the whole film. If only the town could stop and reflect on itself. On what it has and what it is losing. On its unity and on its hypocrisy. Amarcord is a heartfelt memoir, tribute, and plea to the town of Rimini told through Fellini’s most proficient language, laughter.

I watched most of Fellini’s Black and White classics and this is my first time watching a film of his in color. Man what the fuck can I say about this movie, except it’s poetic, sensual, hysterical, and EPIC! SCENES just stick into your mind!

You want big tits? Check
Men screaming from the top of trees? Check
Kids pissing in classrooms? Check

And it’s so much more than that. The final scene alone….you are watching LIFE on celluloid….it’s incredible. The final fuckin scene is simple but it makes so much sense.

Got the new Criterion DVD of course. Listened to the commentary…ehhhhh not bad it’s alright some good facts not the best made me sleep a bit. I can’t wait to see the rest of the documentaries/features though.

Don’t listen to the English Dub though that shit is atrocious!

The most beautiful film around the theme of nostalgia, Amarcord reminds me of my own village and its caricatures, traditions, rituals, bonfires, weddings, deaths, wild winds and gushing rains in hot summers, the cinema halls, the warm feeling of being at home and many more aspects that can be identified universally. Fellini’s creation is a coming-of-age classic, a circus of emotions, hopes, desires, slapstick, vulgarity and life itself.

This is perhaps my personal favorite of Fellini’s many extraordinary films. It strikes me that this film pulls off something unique – there are many, many very good films constructed around the idea of an adult looking back upon their own childhood or adolescence, through a haze of nostalgia, and Fellini does plenty of that here.

But he also does something a bit more precise as well – this film, in it’s own rambling fashion – revisits the moment in adolescence when your adult, critical fashion of interpreting the world (and the events occurring within it) first begins to coalesce, at a time when your sense of childlike wonder hasn’t completely evaporated, and I think many of the events seen here – foremost among them, the caricatured Fascists – are being viewed from this specific vantage point. It’s an interesting perspective – I can’t think of very many films to inhabit the same precise space, and it does make AMARCORD considerably more powerful than a simple excursion into nostalgia would have been.

A great, and finely nuanced film.

Amarcord, which means “I remember,” is a severely nostalgic film from Federico Fellini. It is also a movie composed entirely of vignettes that do not seem to be forming into any sort of cohesive whole until late in the film. An apparent lack of narrative force can make the film a difficult one to dip into, but I found that it improves greatly on repeat viewings as we get to know its large cast of characters and its sad, sinister undertones become more apparent. Amarcord follows a year in the life of the people of the Italian village of Rimini. It is the 1930s. Fascism has taken hold and Il Duce is in power.

In watching the film I was immediately struck by its similarity to two nostalgic American movies. It is like A Christmas Story in its structure and its cast of broad, sometimes grotesque, comic characters many of whom are family. Watch any of the dinner scene from Amarcord and then view similar moments in Christmas and you will see that director Jean Shepherd was clearly influenced by Fellini. Amarcord also calls to mind Radio Days, the vignette-filled Woody Allen film about growing up in 1940s Brooklyn. The two are so alike that it is clear Allen was unabashedly emulating Amarcord with his nostalgic look at family and lost youth.

Those two films, however, used an offscreen narrator to tie one disparate moment to the next while Amarcord does not. Fellini’s transitions are more jarring and the sequence of events in the film does not necessarily follow any immediately apparent pattern. This will likely be disconcerting to the first time viewer more attuned to the tidy storytelling of most film and television. More than tell a story, Fellini wants to reminisce. He jumps from one vivid memory to the next without the urgency of arriving at a fixed endpoint.

About a third of the way into the film it becomes clear who its main characters will be. All are plagued by great longing. Titta Biondi, a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood, obsessed with the female bodies of Rimini. His father Aurelio the town’s lone communist, political stalwart, and a frequently ineffectual patriarch. And Gradisca an aging beauty and the obsession of all the boys and men of Rimini. She expresses a continual aching desire for transcendent romance and seeks it out in films, ceremony, and the pomp and trappings of Fascism. This desire for transcendence cannot be satiated and it continually proves allusive even to the end of the film.

The humor of Amarcord is cruel, usually the pain or humiliation. This recalls the humor of another classic Don Quixote which mines much of its humor from the torture of the addled Alfonso. Nabokov found the book, in a famous series of lectures given at Harvard, to be crude and cruel and wonders what he would make of Fellini’s film. In the film, we see townspeople having fun at the expense of the crazed Volpina and the town’s blind musician. Much of the cruelty of Amarcord, however, can be seen as a result of fascism as group think takes over and brings man’s worse tendencies to the fore.

We see much of the film through the eyes of the teenage Titta who is fascinated by the female posterior and to a lesser extent cleavage. The men of Rimini never grow out of this objectifying behavior, however, and long after the female form even as they overlook the women themselves. The oversexed Volpina is teased and handled by the men of the town. Gradisca is hounded by catcalls wherever she goes and the town’s boys direct their sexual longing toward a statue of a mythic naked figure. The film’s priest seems to only care if his young male confessors are engaged in onanism. Sex is the constant obsession of the men of Rimini, but it is forever adolescent and an aggressive, one-sided affair.

The film’s most memorable scenes follow a day of pageantry for visiting dignitaries. All of Rimini gathers together to praise Il Duce and to put on a show of being good Fascists. They move as a group and work themselves into a fury of loyalty. They act in unison and behave as a hive mind. Even the priesthood and school teachers—who more indoctrinate than educate—collude with the Fascists. The lone dissenter is humiliated after an attempt to show solidarity with a different political cause.

Amarcord from moment to moment feels disjointed and even aloof. As the film closes, though, its elliptical structure reveals itself and seemingly unconnected moments come together. We begin to see Fellini’s blueprint and the entire approach seems less scattershot. The film also has a large cast and when viewing the movie a second time each character becomes more distinctive. With Amarcord repeat viewing is a necessity.