Word: fellini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since 8½, his work has been piecemeal and ruminative. The spiritual and artistic crisis at the core of 8½ was as much truth as drama, and the movies that followed it showed 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...
...title, translated from its rendering in an Italian regional dialect, means "I Remember." The movie finds Fellini once again back in his boyhood, in the same place-Rimini, a small seaside town-and in rather the same mood as in his earlier masterwork, I Vitelloni (1952). The film's framework is a full year in this small town, from the coming of one spring to another, although the true time of all events seems to be rooted in Fellini's imagination. The look of clothes, the political talk and the movies people go to see fix the period...
...Fellini is so bountiful with incident and observation that he makes most other film makers seem stingy. Stories, anecdotes, often just images succeed each other in splendid profusion, as regal and surprising as the peacock that lands on the town fountain one gray afternoon and spreads his plumage in elegant display. There are family chronicles: a meal that turns into an intramural brawl, a trip in the country with an uncle on loan from the local funny farm, who climbs a tree, refuses to come down, and howls, "I want a woman!" until the nuns and doctors come to take...
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...