Word: amarcord
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...AMARCORD...
...Fellini searching for some new form, like a diary (The Clowns, A Director's Notebook) or a primitive pageant (Satyricon). What began to emerge in Roma was a synthesis of direct reminiscence and fantasy, of dream and experience, of actuality and archetype. Roma was unsteady and uncertain, but Amarcord marks a triumphant consolidation. It represents some of the finest work Fellini has ever done-which also means that it stands with the best that anyone in films has ever achieved...
...remark or reference can alter the time abruptly 20 years into the past or future. There are no fixed boundaries here, just as there is no firm central character. A young man called Titta appears frequently and serves as a kind of unifying autobiographical surrogate for the director. But Amarcord is not about him really, any more than a fresco is about any one person or object...
...Amarcord also has a strong political subcurrent, and like some other recent movies from Italy (Visconti's The Damned, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist), it considers the source and meaning of European fascism. But Amarcord never becomes preoccupied with the phenomenon. Fellini works the politics evenly and gracefully into the fabric of the whole movie and portrays fascism as a crackbrained aberration that allowed for some moments of ritual absurdity even as it brought forth a kind of cagey, half-comic defiance. One of Amarcord's most memorable episodes concerns the playing...
Never Real. Fellini long ago left realism behind him to strike a tone of controlled fancy. Much of Amarcord is altered reality-memory heightened and changed by distance and by imagination. Everything is recognizable but never quite real. Of the large cast, only the actress Magali Noel, who appeared in La Dolce Vita and 8½ is familiar. The other performers were recruited according to the recent Fellini tradition: because the director liked their faces. He worries about performance later, frequently even giving them other voices, dubbed in once he has finished shooting. Whoever his actors are, and whatever tricks...