Word: amarcord
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Amarcord...
...most recent film, Fellini Roma, Fellini occasionally has members of the cast step out from the tapestry to address his audience, like Anna Magnani as she reaches the door to her apartment and bids us all good night. In Amarcord Fellini plays around further with this device; along with the exquisite diction of the Italian actors and the rhythm and beauty and strangeness (to the English ear) of what they are saying, this lends a theatrical, almost ritualistic quality to the film. These characters, though, are faintly ridiculous. By stepping out of the community to address us, they forfeit...
...Amarcord has no plot. Like Roma, it is a "portrait" of a city, with no particular story to tell. But because the emphasis is on the simplicity of the city rather than its complications, Amarcord seems much more structured and homogeneous than Roma. It's also less daring. Fellini takes no chances, and it's his holding back that's responsible for the lack of any sequence as creative as the transforming of the traffic jam in Roma from urban ugliness to post-industrial beauty, a change much more convincing than anything in Amarcord. In Roma...
...view of life Fellini takes in Amarcord may be partly excused because it is a self-confessed sentimental journey home, its lesson modified by the cruel world of Roma and the stark heroic drama of Satyricon. Fellini's achievement, in Satyricon, of a coherent interpretation of the ancient classical world different from anyone else's, was much greater than anything he's done since, but his audience seems to have missed it. Now critics are falling head over heels in a rush to congratulate him on having made a sweet, accessible movie--he just received the New York Film Critics...
...Fellini probably won't need that kind of reminder. He won't stay any longer in the world of Amarcord than he remained in ancient Italy or modern Rome. Amarcord affirms human creative power in a far more unqualified way than most other artists would dare, but its message isn't nostalgic. It's not any one memory that's beautiful and good, but the totality of memories and their succession one after each other. The best things pass away, but so do the worst, and there are always new apparitions to come. The hat of the magician Fellini will...