Amarcord (1974)

From moment to moment and shot by shot, 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 sleep--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 Oscar 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 Oscar derby occasioned an exquisite cultural moment: the young Steven Spielberg, realizing that he had not been cited for his direction of Jaws, gasping, "They gave my nomination to Fellini?!" --Richard T. Jameson Amazon.com essential video

on the nostalgia wings

It's a sincere documentary of the era it depicts. Excellent in every respect thanks also to Criterion treatment. May 5, 2008

Don't give up on this one...

Movie set in the 1930's in a small town in Italy on the Adriatic. The movie initially feels like a series of disconnected and chaotic sequences that lack structure and direction. But hang in there - it comes together masterfully. The story of the town, a young boy growing up, a family and the community dealing with the fascist regime is filled with colorful and whacky characters. It is wrapped in beautiful spell bounding scenes of dandelion seeds drifting in the wind bringing on the spring season - to a wide-winged peacock mesmerizing the watchers in light snow fall - to a massive new ship approaching crude boats as the town watches on from far below. This is a funny, beautiful, dreamlike movie...

May 3, 2008

Fellini's Masterpiece

Fellini's most personal film remains his masterpiece--a rich, beautiful pageant of small town life and an examination of one family that is brimming with funny scenes of fantasy and satire, as well as magical moments of intimate nostalgia and pathos as it moves through the cycle of the seasons. April 15, 2008

Doesn't Withstand the Test of Time

What may have passed for great art in the narcissistic seventies must today be seen for crude, overbaked claptrap by a once-great cinematist who was just treading water by 1973.

I took this dvd out because some reviewers somewhere wrote that it was better than "La Dolce Vita". It is far worse, in truth, despite being in color while only black and white film was available in 1950's Italy.

I also listened to the "learned" commentary on the Critereon Collection disc, trying to derive some meaning from the disjointed and often offensive scenes I was viewing (movie is obsessed with backsides and flatulence). Whatever those guys were seeing, it was in their own minds, not on the screen. I suspect they had no more idea than I what Fellini was trying to say with this mess, but admitting it would never do for professors of film studies. So they pontificated about feminism and the role of women--topics in which Fellini was not interested at all--for two hours! November 2, 2007

Author Cinema

After two deaths at the end of July (Bergman and Antonioni) one more appreciates the revolution in film language, which took place in the 1960s.
Fellini has a different spot in this era of Film-Becoming-Poetry. In near future his dicoveries would be valued no less than Eisenstein's or Vertov's. In many ways Amarcord (and Rome) is more sofisticated than 8.5, which is constructed around plot (last cry of modernism), when the PoMo (late) Fellini is focusing story around thought-feeling, that is a true existential EVENT. Is possible for a requiem to be humorous?
Dante called it "Divine Comedy" ...
I hardly know any episode that doesn't belong to the poem... I think it is a philosophy piece and, maybe, should be viewed as such.

August 2, 2007

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