A young man views life in a 1930s Italian village.
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From moment to moment and by , Amarcord delivers more
sheer pleasure than any other Federico Fellini movie. That's not
to say it's his greatest film, or that anything in it rivals the
emotional, lyrical, or metaphysical wallop of the finest passages
in Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, La Strada, or even La Dolce Vita,
the big early-'60s crossover hit that made the director king of
the international film world. But Amarcord was the last clear
triumph of Fellini's career, his prodigious gifts for
phantasmagoria, amazing fluidity, and gregarious choreography all
feeding an emotional core that caught at audiences' heartstrings
and carried them away.
The title is supposed to mean "I remember," and the film is
ostensibly a memory-dream-diary of life in the director's seaside
hometown of Rimini during one year in the 1930s. But Fellini was
an irrepressible showman who loved pulling the audience's
collective chain, and Amarcord is no more straightforward as a
recollection of his real adolescence than "amarcord" is a real
word--Fellini made it up as a bit of pretend vernacular. So the
strolling town historian who pops up occasionally to supply
antiquarian footnotes directly to the camera more often than not
gets pelted with snowballs from offscreen. Just as Nino Rota's
(wonderful) music score recycles melodies from his scores for
earlier Fellini masterworks, Fellini's movie is full of lyric
ecstasies--spontaneous parades, comic ceremonies, eye-popping
surrealist moments--that exist principally because that is what a
Fellini movie is supposed to be like. There's no dominant story
line, no individual character or player to be identified as the
center of the film's swirling movement. Yet we do get to "know,"
and begin to cherish, literally dozens of goofy, eccentric,
funny/sad creatures who have their distinct places in the
continuum of Fellini's made-up town and reimagined Italy of a
bygone era.
The era was, of course, that of Facsism. Fellini's take on
Fascism here is anything but portentous; the giddy nationalism
given voice occasionally by delirious crowds of townsfolk is no
more sinister than the same crowd might have been in cheering on
the local football team. In the movie's most famous set-piece,
dozens of locals put out to sea in small boats to witness the
passage of a fabulous ocean liner, the Rex, "the greatest
construction of the regime." Waiting, they --till suddenly
the luminous (and entirely unreal) vision is towering above them,
threatening to swamp them all. The moment is both ecstatic and
terrifying. It's not the only one.
One last memory: In 1975 Amarcord received the O for best
foreign-language film of 1974. Since the film went into general
U.S. release in '75, it was eligible for the Motion Picture
Academy to turn around and nominate Fellini again, in '76, for
best director and best original screenplay of 1975. He didn't win
any further awards, but his repeat appearance in that year's
O derby occasioned an exquisite cultural moment: the young
Steven Spielberg, realizing that he had not been cited for his
direction of Jaws, ping, "They gave my nomination to
Fellini?!" --Richard T. Jameson
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Additional Features
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Many rereleases and "special editions" of films already available
on DVD turn out to be more than a little superfluous. Not so with
Amarcord, which was the fourth title Criterion brought out in the
1990s. Advances in telecine technology have made possible a
markedly richer, sharper presentation--explained and permissibly
bragged about in one of the extras on disc 2--that alone
justifies Criterion's 2006 release. Now Giuseppe Rotunno's color
cinematography is richer, more breathtakingly gorgeous than any
35mm print '70s audiences could have seen after it had clattered
through the projector gate a few times. But there's also a warm
and illuminating new 45-minute documentary, Fellini's Homecoming,
that should deepen anyone's understanding of and affection for
the movie and its creator.
Several lifelong friends of Fellini's--including "Titta," the
real-life counterpart of one of the teenage chums in the
film--reminisce about the youth and hometown they shared, and
about Fellini himself. There's nothing tearily nostalgic or
idolatrous in their tone or what they have to say; he and they
maintained their friendship throughout his life, and apparently
never stopped razzing one another. They portray the mutual
estrangement of the town of Rimini and its most celebrated son:
how people sniffed that during his rare visits he was never seen
on the main street--and how, for his part, Fellini himself
avoided the main street precisely because he didn't want to seem
to be strutting his celebrity. There's also testimony from
Amarcord's great cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno about Fellini's
re-creation of Rimini entirely in the Cinecittà studio, the
director's fear that even this fabrication would look "too real,"
and Rotunno's own in that "deep down he was afraid of being
reabsorbed by the past."
Elsewhere, in an audio-only feature accompanied by stills, film
critic Gideon Bachmann, a friend (and friendly gadfly) of three
decades, interviews Fellini about his working methods and presses
him as to whether there is one particular "phantom" the director
pursued through all his films ("What is this madman saying?"
Fellini protests, to a probably imaginary bystander). Fellini
refused to look at dailies because he didn't want to find out
that the film he was making wasn't the one he carried in his
head. He also prized "obstacles," including uncooperative
producers, because they forced him to be creative: "I am very
afraid of ideal conditions." Bachmann also interviews Fellini
family members.
The audio commentary on the film itself, by two scholars who
have written books on Fellini, is far less satisfying. Their
ins about sexuality, misogyny, the nature of fascism and so
forth are undoubtedly valid, but most of it comes across as
academic bloviating--something Fellini would have parodied with
relish. But scholar Sam Rhodie's essay "Federico of the Spirits,"
printed in a monograph with Fellini's pre-Amarcord notes "My
Rimini," succinctly defines Fellini's aesthetics overall and
those of this film in particular. There are also a charming video
remembrance by actress Magali Noël, a hasty and entirely happy
substitution in the key role of "Gradisca"; a deleted sequence,
visually striking but without sound; the usual collection of
stills, theatrical trailer, and (not so usual) radio ads for
Amarcord; and an optional, English-dubbed soundtrack for the
reading-impaired. --Richard T. Jameson
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