020 - Amarcord, 1973, Italy; Dir. Federico Fellini.

Friday, January 20, 2017

020 - Amarcord, 1973, Italy. Dir. Federico Fellini.

Ah, Fellini!

Welcome to Italy.

Or Rimini, to be precise.  The land of Fellini's birth.

For the first time in his career, at 53, he has decided to go home.

Fellini is the giant of Italian cinema.  He released this movie in 1973, 31 years after he began as a writer for directors such as Mario Bonnard and the great Roberto Rossellini, and 22 years after he broke out as a director with Variety Lights.

His three great masterpieces, La Strada, La Dolce Vida, and 8-1/2, came out in 1954, 1960, and 1963 respectively, so this one is still ten years out.  (We will watch these three and others later this year.)

Amarcord means "I remember," so it has to do with Fellini's memories from childhood.

Well, actually, in standard Italian, "I remember" is "Io ricordo" in the present indicative, or "(Io) Mi ricordo" in the present indicative reflexive.  I think.

So Amarcord must be in the dialect of the region in which Rimini is located, the Emilia Romagna.  At least one native speaker has suggested it derives from pronunciation:

          Io-mi-ricordo ---> Amarcord

Either that or the word never existed and Fellini just made it up.

After all, Fellini is a born liar.

Regardless, because of the movie it is a word now, and it is used throughout Italy as a noun denoting memories of the past, or "old times."

The film is about Fellini's memories from childhood.

Whether they happened or not.

Who said they had to happen for him to remember them?

He remembered a lot of things that he made up.  Just ask him.

This is a year in the life of a town.

The town is Rimini, on the Adriatic Coast, in the northeast section of Italy, northeast of Florence, southeast of Bologna.

We are about to travel through the four seasons.  Ready?  Here we go.

The Spring brings puffballs.  Or when the puffballs come, you know it is Spring.  The children leap at them like snowflakes.  So do the adults.

Now, what are puffballs?

It is time for the annual ritual to mark the beginning of Spring--the Burning of the Witch of Winter.

It is like Burning Man, only with a witch as the effigy.

And all the town comes out--every age, race, shape, size, economic class, and IQ level.

Would you like to be an extra in this town?

Casting Call For Amarcord!

Must appear as though you have just escaped from the circus.

We need--

Bald men with large bumps on their heads.  Women with giant bottoms.  Women with giant tops.  Very tall men.  Very short men.  Fat boys.  Ugly girls.  Big noses.  Crazy hair.  A blind accordion player.  A dwarf nun.  A schizophrenic nymphomaniac.  Coke-bottle glasses.  Must be willing to pee on camera.  Or stand up in a bathtub.  Or flatulate.  Or self-consolate.

In other words, the usual for a Fellini film.

Yet it all comes across as celebratory.

Not lurid or vulgar or embarrassing, but bawdy.  Like The Canterbury Tales.  Like parts of Shakespeare.

These are people of the earth.  Fleshly.  Physical.  They live in their bodies.  They eat.  They drink.  They fight.  They fart.  They are not sitting around discussing Plato's conceptualization of invisible forms.  They are living.

A man climbs atop the pyre so that folks can throw the witch and a wooden chair up to him.  Gradisca, the town beauty, lights the fire.  Someone removes the ladder--as a joke!  The man now sits atop the blazing bonfire without a way down.  No one worries.  No one pays any attention.  It is just another day in Rimini.  The film does not even follow him.  We simply assume he jumps off the back of the pyre.  Some boys pick up Volpina, the town nymphomaniac, and swing her back and forth toward the fire as if they are going to toss her in.  These folks sure do like to horse around.

When it is over, after Volpina has left, after the motorcyclist has driven through the hot coals, after the women have carried the coals away in buckets to their homes, a man approaches us in camera in the empty streets and begins to pontificate about the grandeur of their heritage.  Someone off camera blows a raspberry.  He turns, upset, frustrated by the irreverence, and quits.

We see children at school.  Bored.  Creating pranks and games to tease their teachers and one another.

If you have seen Woody Allen's Annie Hall, then you may remember the flashback where Alvy Singer is a boy in school, and Allen shows how much he hated it.

If you have seen Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (we will later), then you may remember the scenes where Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is a boy in school, and Truffaut shows how much he hated it.

When you see Amarcord, you will see the scenes of young people in school, and Fellini will show you how much he hated it.

The boys in school roll up papers and put them together to form a long pipe.  Titta, the young man who becomes the kind-of protagonist in this ensemble film, pees into it, and it travels all the way to the front of the class.  When the teacher sees it, he thinks the boy standing up front did it.

Titta will get in trouble with his father.  His father is a passionate man, and dinner at home is an event.  If you can survive dinner without dying by blunt force trauma, then you have a shot at life.

Titta's father, Aurelio, will himself get into trouble with the Fascists.  It is dangerous living in this town.

Mussolini was in power, and the teachers, according to Fellini's memory, were sympathetic to the Fascists.  This made him hate it all the more.

The film makes plenty of fun of Fascism.  A parade comes to town, and the marchers carry a giant image of Mussolini's head, as a woman proclaims the propaganda, and as a man announces that Mussolini has balls this big.

During the Summer the family goes to get Uncle Teo.  Uncle Teo lives in an asylum.  He loves his family and is thrilled to see them.  They ride out to the country.  Uncle Teo gets out to pee but forgets to unzip, so he pees on himself.  Then he climbs to the top of a great tree and refuses to come down, shouting, "I want a woman!"  When they try to climb up after him, he pelts them with nuts.  So the back-ups arrive, and the dwarf nun somehow manages to bring him down.

The whole town goes out to see the great ship pass by, the SS Rex.  They leave in their small boats.  One man misses the embarkation, so he jumps in the sea in his underwear and swims out to join them.  He gets in one of the boats and announces that the cold water has shrunk his balls this little.

They fall asleep.  In the middle of the night, in the fog, the ship's foghorn awakens them.  They celebrate.  They capsize in its wake.

The people who grew up with Fellini saw the movie and remembered this event with great fondness.  Oh, yes.  I remember (Io mi ricordo, amarcord) that time the SS Rex came by and we went out to see it.  Except it never happened.  Fellini made it up.

So many of these great movies we are watching celebrate the movies.  Many of them have cinemas in their story lines.  Here, Titta goes to the Cinema Fulgor, and Gradisca is the only other person in the audience.  So he sits next to her.  And he makes a move on her.  He is a teenager.  She is a grown woman.  She rebuffs him.  No worries--another woman, one of those with a giant top, will put the moves on him later, and all he wanted was a cigarette.

Other nods to the movies include Norma Shearer poster and an Abbott and Costello cardboard cut-out.

The Fall will come.  The Winter will come again.

The snow banks will be so high that they are shoveled into giant walls in the town square, creating a life-sized maze, like the hedges in The Shining, only not quite as terrifying.

At this moment Fellini stops the action as all the townspeople present witness the landing of the bright peacock in the white snow.

A single image.

Arresting in its beauty.

Gadisca will finally marry and Spring will come again.

Along with the puffballs.