Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5295 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-09-27
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: Italian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 118 minutes

Synopsis
Federico Fellini's AMARCORD, an acclaimed semiautobiographical episodic drama, examines life in a small Adriatic village just before Mussolini's reign in the 1930s. As the weather changes and spring arrives, the village holds a festival in which it burns a symbolic bonfire and celebrates new life. This gathering in the central square is the first of many others throughout the film. Each time the community assembles, its colourful members show themselves in full force, boasting their bizarre, disjointed personalities--and pure mischief is the result. Several of the village ladies wear their eyebrows pencilled on in high, provocative arches, a style that seethes sex and drama, coaxing the camera to follow them. The film takes on a circusy, chaotic tone, making it difficult to see a clear plot structure; AMARCORD instead breaks up into several memorably surreal sequences, a few of which follow a young man named Titta (Bruno Zanin, who represent the director himself), who wanders in and out of the animated provincial landscape obsessing over sex, meeting assorted crazy characters such as his parents, his lascivious grandfather, a dizzy hairdresser in search of her "Gary Cooper," and a mad uncle who straddles a tree demanding sex. The beautiful clashes with the grotesque and politics and family matters blend together while sex is offset by violence in the inimitable style of Italy's late master of cinema whose tour de force won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating fantasia, but not Fellini's finest
"Amarcord" ('I remember') is Federico Fellini's impression of a year in the 1930's: a surreal carnival of memories, it is a film with no plot, but with haunting images - caricatures of the petit bourgeoisie, satires of provincial institutions. Teachers are portrayed as inflexible, autocratic. The Church is obsessed with stamping out masturbation. Families are dysfunctional - a crazed uncle climbs a tree to shout that he needs a woman ... only to be coaxed down by a midget nun. The whole town takes to the sea to wait, late into the night, for a glimpse of a passing liner.

"Amarcord" is a series of loosely linked vignettes. A lawyer tries to act as ringmaster, giving us background information about the town of Rimini. It had been bombed flat in 1943-44. Fellini reconstructs fantastic memories of the place. Nostalgia, he implies, is fantasy - our reconstruction of memories as little dramas.

There is a monochrome quality to "Amarcord"; the actors wear dark clothing ... a few appear in red, such as the local hairdresser, Gradisca, focus of much teenage lust. The costumes evoke a sense of how and why that person is remembered.

If there is a central character, it is the town square, the focus of communal life. Here, the townsfolk come and go, participating in spectacles like burning an effigy of a witch or watching a Fascist politician deliver his speech.

The direction emphasises Fellini's affection for people. Fellini's politics is humanist rather than doctrinaire ... he invites an exploration of consciousness, famously asking his audience to see his films, not to try to understand them. Many of his films are autobiographical - you take to them and from them something of your own memories ... some shared feeling, some new insight.

Fellini turned his back on realism. He espoused the surreal. There is not necessarily any subject to the film. You, as viewer, are not there to be entertained, but to interpret, to deconstruct the work and evoke and reconstruct your own emotions.

Fellini plays with light and darkness; fog, smoke, snow, or a storm of seedlings caught on the wind obfuscate both the images and the memories. This is poetic film making. Fellini constructs his characters in two dimensions, then builds them into full-bodied people for whom you can feel affection and sympathy. It is the institutions - education, religion, family life, or Fascist organisations which are portrayed as farcical, grotesque and dysfunctional. People are merely fallible - the first narrator is an old down-and-out who appears to forget his lines and stumble over his words.

The actors look like real people - they are hardly glamorous. They are often grotesque, their physique, make-up, hair, and clothing taken to extremes ... the sort of extremes you find imprinted on your memory. Fellini dubbed the sound afterwards - often making the actors sound unreal.

If there are underlying themes to "Amarcord" it is Fellini's portrayal of the emptiness of Italian society, of a nation living on memories of the glories of Rome, so vacuous it failed to note the rise to power of morally and intellectually bankrupt Fascism. Fellini counterpoints this with an exploration of teenage sexuality. His teenagers are fascinated by bodily functions - gross, bawdy, inexperienced, and ultimately impotent.

Fascism is as impotent as teenage sexual fantasy ... and intellectually, it is every bit as insubstantial. When the townsfolk go out to watch the passing liner, a triumph of the Fascist state, they are eventually given the spectacle of a huge, two-dimensional image, lit up like a giant Christmas tree. It is obviously fake ... as illusory as the national identity created by the Fascists.

Not Fellini's finest work, but a fascinating series of images which will have a very individual impact. It is a film which benefits from being watched more than once. It may not get under your skin the first time ... but.

Outstanding 70's Continental Cinema at its Best
A series of visually astonishing vignettes evoking Fellini's childhood Rimini. The Biondi family form the focal point through which we meet a series of colourful characters and situations, none greater than than the gorgeously teasing 'Gradisca'. Funny, lustful and yearning without a hint of mawkish sentimentality. Quite simply wonderful, one of Fellini's most accessible and certainly one of my favourite films of any time or genre.

One point to take care with (without stating the obvious) is that the dubbing is mind-numbingly atrocious so make sure you select the subtitle option at the outset.

(Incomplete) Amarcord !
Already having a video recording (complete with adverts) I was pleased to see 'Amarcord' was finally out on DVD however, unfortunately in the transfer to DVD the film has suffered from a number of cuts. Why ?
It was a wonderful film.
I can only presume that whoever has done this is frightened to death to have a portrait of 'Fascist Italy' shown sometimes rather sympathetically and with humour, although I don't think the film seeks to make an opinion one way or the other. It is too busy telling the story of Fellini's childhood and this is, inevitably, set against the backdrop of 'Fascist Italy'.
The cuts do seem to focus on these areas.
How sad. Anyone who has seen the original complete version will be disappointed by this (abridged) version.
A word to the editor (censor) 'Don't live your life in fear !'