Federico Fellini
Amarcord

Masterpieces, depending on the stage of life in which you see or revisit them, always tell you something different, something more. Watching them again, you can grasp or discover nuances, complexities, interpretations, even for the first time. Details that can reinforce the idea you have of a work, while at the same time enriching the overall picture with the addition of new, precious elements.

Amarcord is one of the most important and greatest Italian films of all time, and rightfully so, it belongs to the category of milestones, invaluable works from which you can appreciate something new with each viewing.

Amarcord, before anything else, is Italy, and therefore in some way, it's a bit all of us. And if not us today, those of yesterday. Our past, so distant, so near.

The Italian people love the idea of themselves too much as a fragmented, diverse, and heterogeneous people to realize that they are actually a single entity.

Amarcord delves deep into the character, into the Italian psychology. A provincial psychology, a character little inclined to authority, yet paradoxically fascinated by strong figures; all part of a play that is first farcical and then tragic.

Amarcord indeed is fascism, with which Italy has never fully reckoned. Neither with it as such, nor with how ingrained it was. And with how it represented, to quote Gobetti, the autobiography of a nation. The rituals, the rallies, the conformism, the community, the tradition. An eternal adolescence.

Because Fellini's film - even in its portrayal of a memory of rejection - also brings back to the desire for innocence, for naivety. A desire that would be mortified by a war that would come just a few years after the year portrayed in the film. And so, in perspective, the marriage of Gradisca and her subsequent departure from the town represent the beginning of the end of all this. If Moraldo's departure from Rimini by train at the end of I Vitelloni brought a melancholic but positive sensation, in relation to an opening towards the future and the big city, Gradisca's is much darker, though in a subtle way and fully understandable only in hindsight.

The departure of Ninola (Gradisca's real name, which very few remember, as the character has entered the common imagination and myth with her nickname), the dream and sexual fantasy of the village's hormonally charged youths, and complementarily the funeral of Titta's mother (the latter character inspired by Fellini's great childhood friend, Luigi "Titta" Benzi). These two events mark the end of unawareness and the time of play, the continuous jest, the revelry.

Of the illusion of youth. The end of childhood and innocence. And of the idea that everything can remain as it is, when everything is instead change, transience, transition. Fascism, for those who knew it during adolescence and growth, in a certain sense could represent even this, if not especially this: stability and immutability, despite all the ridiculous, paradoxical, violent, and disastrous aspects of the whole. The context to which one was accustomed and adhered, most often passively, but also convincingly, by the spirit of conformity, or simply to avoid problems.

Amarcord, along with Bertolucci's The Conformist, is therefore the best film ever about fascism and its context. Fellini's spirit, who with Amarcord returned in mind to his homeland and reflected on his roots twenty years after the aforementioned I Vitelloni, however, was not simply accusatory, nor exonerating or least of all apologetic.

Through the filter of the grotesque and the dreamlike, and with significant metaphysical peaks, it staged what had been, so true especially because it was so false, like the somewhat mythical tales of the more benignly deceptive inhabitants of the village. Yet capturing the authenticity of a historical period and a collective psychology.

How will you, how will you stay away from the village...

Fellini, never as in this film, unites high and low, lyrical and vulgar, and creates a fundamental work of world cinema, not only related to the Italian cultural context.

Countless are the authors who will be dazzled and pay homage to this film, from Woody Allen in Radio Days to Wes Anderson in Moonrise Kingdom (whose figure of the narrator is practically taken as-is), to Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his Palme d'Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. And in general, Fellini remains, along with Hitchcock, the director who has created the greatest number of imitators and offspring, more or less legitimate.