Fellini's return to his roots mixes nostalgia with some thorns of real history. The title is a contraction of the Italian for "I remember" as might be spoken by Fellini himself or anyone from his native Rimini. It's like someone from where I grew up saying "I 'member". The point to create as much distance as intimacy with the life of the townsfolk, to remind us, also, that recollection can trouble as well as ease. For instance, Titta and his gang of boys play pranks and gad about but they are doing this through a weave of the spectre of '30s Italy, fascism. It's there in the big ceremonial event but is still there when the bands stop playing and the banners are rolled back up, holding onto surfaces like the unscrubbable grime of an old spittoon.
But anyone could show that. Fellini pushes our heads into it as young Ciccio is inspired by the Disney-like promise of fulfilment of the fascist spectacle that he is plunged into a fantasy of marrying the girl who spurns him by day. They are joined between rows of youth, boys on one side wielding phallic submachineguns and girls on the other holding up vaginal hoops. Ken Russell would have made this more literal. Fellini knows he doesn't have to. It's not even just that he's a subtler film maker but one who lived through fascism and its psycho symbolism (and the later lethal weirdness of nazism that it inspired). Ciccio's finding a way through the bizarre pressure of the militarism and turning it into a self-pleasing moment to return to later, alone in the dark.
The pre-fascist mobsters of the Church don't get off any lighter. Titta is trying to confess his masturbation as the priest keeps interrupting to berate one of his orderlies about flower arrangements. By the time Titta gets to his admission he has had time to whittle it down to something mild that the priest won't be too troubled by. This is followed by his loping bullish schoolfriend who, as the son of the mayor, can admit to any atrocity and be absolved without penance. The twin fists of church and state combine in the classroom where teachers stridently fail to connect with their students and all but squeeze prankish rebellion from them. Fellini's casting of the schoolboys here is hilarious. They are all too old to be in that class with their moustachioed Eurostyling but this isn't Grease casting; Fellini wanted them to have the awkwardness of teenage boys almost to pantomime lengths to show the apelike wrongness felt by the thirteen year old. This is never commented on, the audience has to do its own reconciliation between what they see and what they are meant to see.
And this is before we get to the women of the town from the constantly frowning and feebly ancient countess to the beauty who remains alone as no suitor would consider himself a match. I was worried that the scene between Titta and the massive-breasted tobacconist might not travel well through time but it is far more nuanced and sobering than I recalled (which tells you more about what I was like when I first saw it). Volpina, the nymphomaniac girl comes across as eerie rather than bawdy. The cart of new sex workers heading to the brothel are taunted throughout the town by the males who will be their customers or at least dream of such. And there is the Italian Mama, Titta's mother, who suffers the frenetic energy of her children and the clownish bluster of her husband. While her violent retorts and remonstrances show as a constant strain from having to maintain control of the near chaos of her family, she does take them seriously and becomes one of the most poignantly drawn characters among this vast cast.
I used to say as a kind of swagger point that I preferred my Fellini '70s. What I meant by that was Roma and Amarcord and the point was more a mask to cover my lack of experience with the more famous and better loved earlier films. Even now, though, having seen and admired those like the decadance of La Dolce Vita or the proto-Amarcord of I Vitelloni or the panging pathos of La Strada, I feel I've finally earned the preference. I do love Roma and Amarcord better, after all. This is not just a case of first seen first loved but something I find irrestistable about them.
I've long had a strange relationship with nostalgia, seeing it as a kind of art directed pastiche of memory and memory as more of a frantic foraging of sensual messages with only the vaguest of forms. The endless timeline of Roma is held in place by some of Fellini's strongest visual flare and Amarcord adds more depth to the notion of an artist giving an account of themself. It's strange to think that my memories of seeing this film as a late nighter in Brisbane at the start of the '80s arise with such pleasure and then seeing it anew and depths that didn't make it across the decades as a memory.
There is too much to say about this episodic epic and it could be said without serious spoilers but I'll leave it here in hope that something I've written o'erhead will inspire a reader to find a copy and watch it for themselves. I watched Criterion's stunner of a Blu-Ray which rendered the passing ocean liner more of a model than I recalled it but brought the flaring of the peacock's tail late in the film into such sudden beauty that I gasped to see it. Seeing it again only resolved me to watch it regularly, especially to introduce it to others. By the time he got to Amarcord, Fellini had amassed a wealth of craft that allowed him to finally approach his own nostalgia with a credible wisdom as well as archness, with grief and deep comedy, with everything, in fact, that the overriding melancholy of his similarly autobiographical 8 1/2 could not prevent from coming through. That's important, the stifling cynicism of the earlier confession is barely on screen here at a time when the maestro had perspective to present the warmth of the world of his adolescence with pain that can be indistinguishable from fondness. That takes growing.
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