Alternative Film Guide

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:

Federico Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord has often been linked with Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny och Alexander / Fanny & Alexander as films made by old men looking back on their youth. While this is true, in the main Amarcord has a loose narrative structure in which the lives of many characters are detailed in comic vignettes, whereas Fanny & Alexander is a straight drama.

In fact, Amarcord shares a deeper affinity with a film that was obviously influenced by it: Woody Allen’s grossly underrated Radio Days. Which of those two films is better is debatable, though Radio Days is both tighter and a bit deeper in characterization. (Allen’s opening classroom scenes in Annie Hall also owe a debt to the school scenes found in Amarcord.)

Amarcord is not a masterpiece on a par with earlier Fellini classics such as Le Notti di Cabiria / Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce vita, or 8½, but it is a thoroughly enjoyable romp. The film opened the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for best foreign-language film for that year.

Reportedly, the proper Italian for ‘I remember’ is ‘mi ricordo,’ but Fellini used his own native Romagnolo dialect’s version of the term a m’arcòrd, to limn his lost boyhood in the coastal town of Rimini — the film’s central character. In any case, he constructed a remarkable film, which follows a year in the life of a town and its citizenry from one spring to the next, even though it heralded the weaker and even more loosely constructed films that ended his career.

This is the last film that most cineastes even bother arguing about its greatness. Yet, many of the labels applied to it are simply incorrect — e.g., it is not surreal, for it is grounded in reality, even as flights of fancy take place; it is not a satire, even though there are satirical elements. The very impulse to always definitively characterize something as this or that, without allowing comfortable straddling of boundaries says more about the critic’s flaws than about the film. Also, despite its picaresque nature, Amarcord does not move too quickly. Most of the famed scenes plat out in seven- to ten-minute stretches where small details filter into the subconscious without us even realizing it.

Yes, the color palette is extravagant — almost at the level of Giulietta degli spiriti / Juliet of the Spirits — and sexual contact is shown as distasteful and grotesque. Witness, for instance, the huge breasts of the town tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi) being shoved into the mouth of poor, horny Titta Biondi (Bruno Zanin), the film’s Fellini surrogate. The sequence ends with him unable to satisfy her. She then dismisses him with the payment of a single cigarette — a phallic symbol. Far too much, however, has been read into such things by critics who feel that artistic ‘depth’ means that every second is larded with symbolism. Thus, they masturbate over the silliest and most manifest scenes and images, and miss the truly important moments in Amarcord.

The aforementioned scene — among others — has allowed much to be written over Fellini’s supposed misogyny — when he’s really critiquing regressive male attitudes toward sex — and the director’s use of symbols — which are evident, but not dominant. In Amarcord, Fellini also attacks xenophobia and other provincial biases but many critics fixate on just a few of their own personal political axes against him while ignoring one of his greatest traits: sentiment.

Note that I wrote ’sentiment’ not sentimentality,’ for Fellini always stays on the proper side of the boundary between the two. Characters who suffer — think of the great characters portrayed by Giulietta Masina or Marcello Mastroianni – never suffer merely to evoke sympathy but to invoke cogitation about their plights. Similarly, while there are characters who suffer in Amarcord, none of the suffering is simply to foster a connection for the viewer. Instead, suffering is depicted so as to illuminate some truth.

Think of the scene where the beautician Gradisca (Magali Noël — aka ‘S’il vous plait’, but literally meaning ‘Please enjoy’) gives herself to the Fascist officer in the Grand Hotel. Some critics have predictably ripped Fellini, especially in this film, as not being critical enough of the Fascists. After all, they state, the worst we see them do is give castor oil to their enemies and shoot at a bell tower, which is rigged with a phonograph playing the Communist marching song, The Internationale. But such complaints ignore the very ludicrousness of the portrayals.

Imagine criticizing Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator because it did not show mounds of dead bodies of all the enemies of State the Nazis killed. It’s ridiculous, for that film far more effectively shows the buffoonish nature of Hitler, just as Amarcord shows the clownish nature of Mussolini’s black-shirted sycophants. In fact, Fellini does take some direct, if subtle shots at them, e.g., the puff of dirt that swirls in and away as the Fascists start their march through town. This is his view of all the false promises the Fascists made.

That most of the characters in the film, save one or two, either love or are indifferent to the Fascists is not a latter-day bourgeois forgiveness of their crimes, but a reflection of reality as it was in the 1930s. True, after the Fascists plunged Italy into the ruinous Second World War, they were reviled, but in the 1920s and 1930s they were seen as saviors of the nation, for they lifted it out of the economic doldrums of the post-Great War period.

Even if some of the critics were correct — not only about film’s approach to Fascism, but on its depiction of the generation gap, the worthlessness of the school system, or the uncaring nature of the Roman Catholic Church — they would still miss the whole point of Amarcord. For what we see is not Italy as it was in the 1930s, but Italy as remembered, and remembered by Fellini alone.

The terrific scenes are many. There is the Biondi family’s picnic outing with crazy Uncle Teo (Ciccio Ingrassia), who’s let out from the insane asylum for a day, where he first pisses in his pants, and then climbs an apple tree, shouting, ‘I want a woman!’ until the doctors and a midget nun — a woman, indeed! — get him down. There is the snowfall scene where a peacock appears out of nowhere, the fog scene where a white bull similarly appears with no reason.

There is Titta’s and his pal’s obsession with the asses of women, especially Gradisca’s, as well as their joint masturbation sessions. There is Gradisca’s search for love, and town whore Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli) and her search for sex. There is the marital woes of Papa (Armando Brancia) and Mama Biondi (Pupella Maggio), and then her death.

There are the fantasy and tall tale sequences at the hotel, narrated by the Lawyer (Luigi Rossi) — one of several Fourth Wall breakers — the fantasy marriage of fat boy Ciccio to sexy Aldina at the behest of the floral image of Mussolini, and the townsfolk rowing out to see the fantastical America-bound luxury liner, The Rex.

The film ends with the salvation and doom of Gradisca, as she marries a Fascist officer, and the film comes to a dim end, literally, as Fellini seems to have buried the past, which fades like the Fascist promises.

The two-disc DVD, put out by The Criterion Collection, is a great improvement on the 1998 single-disc edition. It is a radiant film transfer, in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Thankfully, the film comes with not only subtitles but in an dubbed English version.

The first disc has Amarcord, the American trailer, and an audio commentary by film scholars Peter Brunette and Frank Burke, as well as a deleted scene of a lost ring in a toilet. The commentary often suffers from the duo’s reading way too much into the film, even as they decry the very same thing done by others. They also delve into longwinded explanations of the obvious, such as Fellini’s use of self-representation in a film laden with deliberate grotesques, his attacks on Fascism, the church, schools, and sexual mores, or even the manifest themes of the intrusion of the real world into memory — the peacock, foreigners, the Fascists, The Rex, etc. — especially considering the film ends with the word Amarcord, not Fin, onscreen. Yet, overall Brunette and Burke’s commentary is solid and devoid of the usual critical fellatio that often bogs down such endeavors.

Disc two has a 45-minute documentary called Fellini’s Homecoming, an interview with Magali Noël, a gallery of Fellini’s drawings of the film’s characters, a collection of stills and radio ads, and audio interviews with Fellini, and others, done by Gideon Bachmann, a Fellini cohort. There is also a video restoration demonstration on disc two, and a 63-page booklet, with the full text of Fellini’s 1967 essay "My Rimini," and an essay by film scholar Sam Rohdie.

Nino Rota’s score is the best thing in the film, though Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography is not far behind, especially in the sunset scene where Uncle Teo is coaxed down from the apple tree and back to the asylum. Yet, Amarcord succeeds because its totality is greater than any of its parts. It may not be a great film, but it is a great display of artistic excellence, as the director marshals countless disparate elements into a film that succeeds far more often than it doesn’t. In Amarcord, Federico Fellini shows he is a great artist even when his art is not great.

© Dan Schneider

Amarcord (1960). Director: Federico Fellini. Cast: Magali Noel, Bruno Zanin.

Writer, critic, and poet Dan Schneider is the editor of Cosmoetica, which he describes as “the most popular non-commercial literary site online.”

Other reviews by Dan Schneider can be found at Cinemension, Cosmoetica’s “film division.”

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.

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