Amarcord

Amarcord is Federico Fellini’s visually stunning memoir about being a boy and an adolescent in rural Italy during the rise of Fascism. Set in the mythical coastal town of Rimini, “Amarcord” is not as much a narrative as a series of vignettes tracing Italian history from the rise of Mussolini (1923) to the collapse of the fascist Black Shirts in 1943. But politics in “Amarcord” is always entwined with the lusts, fantasies and desires of Fellini’s teenage alter-ego. By satirising fascism as a burlesque, Fellini creates some of his most ravishing set-pieces, scenes of colour, magic and movement which encompass the many facets of human expression: spiritual, sexual, familial and political. The anchoring of the satire to the memoir of his early life, including his love and obsession with women and their bodies, makes this one of the director’s most accessible and joyful works. It might sound paradoxical that a film dealing with the bleak atrocitities of fascism can command the words “warmth” and “joy” but it is part of Fellini’s purpose in this film to acknowledge the full range of Italian history, and to juxtapose the horrors of the Mussolini period with the perennial cycles of birth, sex, work and death in rural Italy: “Armacord” reminds us that dictators pass but sexuality, family and love are constants. The music score by Nino Rota is one of his finest compositions. The rich colour cinematography is by Giuseppe Rotunno. The DVD edition of “Amarcord” is a carefully digitally restored print and the DVD features a demonstration of the digital restoration of the original damaged negative. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974.