The quasi-hero in the film is Titta, a teenage boy masturbating all day with his school mates, doing nothing good but humiliating the teachers and annoying his parents. The film's omnipresent puberty sexual fantasies remind me of Malèna, another Italian film I have seen years ago, starring Monica Bellucci. And to think I used to regard Malèna as a film bold enough about adolescent masturbation! Well, I completely changed my mind after watching Amarcord. Though a film released nearly 30 years earlier than Malèna, Amarcord boasted the honesty and sincerity that is rarer in the films nowadays. For Titta and his good-at-nothing friends, everything and everyone is sexual: The Victory Monument, the plump buttocks of the women riding bicycles, the tobacconist, the math teacher, Volpina, and of course Gradisca.Though Amarcord never tried to cover up the fact that it is a film, it looks amazingly interesting, funny, revealing, and real with all these undisguised dramas.
The two films are also very different in their respective narrative technique. While Malèna was told through the perspective of the enchanted teenage boy Renato, Fellini had basically abandoned the rules of perspective. Though the most obvious theme of Amarcord is the teenagers' unrequited desires, it is not centered solely on Titta. In the film the point of views include not only that of Titta's, but also Titta's father, Gradisca, and even whimsically that of Titta's mad uncle Teo. There is also that weird historian numerating Italy's glorious past to the audience, reminding them that they are watching nothing more than a film. These scattered perspectives, in turn, contributed to the film's random scene changes.
In doing so, Fellini poetically drew the picture of his own experiences and fantasies living in Rimini in the 1930s Italy as fully as he could: the comical school teachers, the farcical Fascism, the hypercritical Church, the collectively unconscious town folk… This is a colorful world, an innocent world, but also a world lacking climax and intensity. It is somehow too fragile and unrealistically carefree that the audience would ask: when would this life end? The audience gets the feeling that someday, the daydreaming would be stopped, everybody awakened, and innocence lost. And that is what exactly has happened in the end of the film.
Titta's mother died with the advent of winter. And when puffballs started swirling again, his goddess Gradisca found her Gary Cooper. Fellini argued that what he cared most "is the freedom of man" (Bondanella, 299). Clearly here he had the shackles of Church and Fascism and the stifling collective consciousness of the town folk in mind. But I doubt Titta would find himself happier. From the death and wedding, Titta understood something, something he could never have understood simply through masturbating. He had to grow up , to step forward the brink of manhood, and to be a real man. But how was he going to live up to his “enlightened” future in the town of Rimini? Would he not grow bored of his hometown and his friends, who were nothing but losers in the modern world, and eventually abandon Rimini for Rome,just as Moraldo in I Vitelloni? The freedom might be good for heroes in Open City like Don Pietro and Marcello, but it does not promise anything to people like ordinary folks who found nothing worthy fighting for.
Some film critics argued the film as Fellini's nostalgic reminiscence, an interpretation with which Fellini never quite fully agreed. As he had deliberately increased the distance between his five protagonists and himself to avoid the assumption that I Vitelloni was merely his autobiography (Bondanella, 144) , Fellini continued and furthered this effort in Amarcord. Despite the fact that he could easily shoot his scenes in his hometown Rimini, Fellini will fully recreate the Rimini-like town Borgo as the background of Amarcord in Cinecittà.
It is no surprising that residents in Rimini would identify themselves with the scenes that had never taken place. There are films in whose fantasies you would think you were or wish you were, because they are so beautiful and appealing, especially if the scenes of the film happened to resemble your own hometown to a great extent. Fellini could have dismissed the town folks' gathering as, in his words “occasions of total stupidity”, nevertheless he can't deny that he was also part of them, and if he was not, his families were. However hard he tried to be indifferent about Rimini and his town folk, he was and would always be a part of the world he saw, he sneered at and even despised to some degree, because he could not separate himself from the world he intended only to observe.
I always believe that the observer and the observed are closely bound, that's how we can usually tell which film is which director's, since there is always some quaintness of the director's in his or her film. This theory works perfectly for Fellini. In spite his constant efforts of distancing himself from his characters and stories, I can't help identifying himself with his roles. There is always something inseparable between them. He is Moraldo in I Vitelloni, Marcello in La Dolce Vita, the blocked director Guido in 8½, and Titta in Amarcord. While the other directors are exposing to their audience the exterior world, Fellini constantly is revealing himself to us cautiously yet at the same time carelessly.
I think the twentieth century artists like Fellini could no longer depict the world in the same way as artists did back in the time of Renaissance. The collapse of ways of knowing, the sense of betweenness made representational art impossible. How can you claim that the camera can simply function as much detached as its director desires it to be and then document the world as it is? For one thing, pure detachment is impossible. That is why not long after their initial successes in neo-realism, the great neo- realists such as Rosselini, Fellini and De Sica would think the insistence upon social realism artistically confining. (Bondanella, 127) As Wertmüller had shown her audience in Seven Beauties, the world never follows any prescribed order, since any order must be artificial and forced upon. Similarly,there is neither a true memory nor real Rimini for Fellini to imitate devoid of his thinking and initiatives.
Picasso defined art as “the lie that tells the truth”. How romantic and self-justifying! I think all the artists are daring poets and liars, among them Fellini is no doubt one of the most brilliant. And what makes him even more significant is that everybody would buy his lie even though they know he is lying (or telling truth in his way you may say). In Fellini's poetic reconstruction of childhood memories combined with fabrication, he created for us a distorted reality that is so appealing and real .
On the poster of Amarcord, the lovely caricatures of those characters look so lively that you could visualize those individuals' lives, their funny and unaffected lives, just by his or her facial expression. Those simple sketches made up a fantacy world
Amarcord was sometimes categorized as political, a classification I couldn't disagree with more. My reason is non-intellectual and irrational: to imbue the film with any political inclination or social criticism would totally spoil the fun of it. Especially since this fun did not last long anyway. With puffballs in the breeze of spring the film starts, with a bleak wedding scene it ends. I often get the feeling that once the ever-dramatic Italians become contemplative and serious, their world would just break down. Seductive Pasqualino was reduced to be animal-like when he understood the rules of the world; young Titta was no more carefree.
Amarcord reminds me of the impression I always have towards Italians: idle, dramatic, communal, and light-hearted. They can never be beaten, since they either desert or quit, as they did in the two world wars. Looking at the town folk in Rimini, I suddenly thought about the statement made by the Gestapo commander Bergmann in Open City about how Germans are superior to the Italians. I am not writing to condemn Italians; I am in no position to do so. On the contrary, I found in those chirping Italians in Amarcord something I did not know before, and certainly nor did Bergmann, that is: the glories of humanities are not always embodied in human beings' immense perseverance and sacrifice in the face of the endless calamities; very often than not , they shine in the hues of their brightness and joy, like those cherished by the Rimini town folk.
A happiness that never could be retrieved in the modern world.
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