Cheap Amarcord - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Magali Noël, Bruno Zanin) (Federico Fellini) Price

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Customer Reviews of Amarcord - Criterion Collection

a great Criterion Collection film. Fellini's youth revisted
The film title means "I remember" This movie, filmed in Fellini's home town of Rimini is his depection of what he remembers of his own teenage years. In it we have a series of unrelated scenes which merge together to create a depiction of what life was like under Musollini's facist regime. It is a very interesting film with some humor in it. My favorite scene was when smeone had put a gramaphone (record player) in the bell tower of a local building and had "Internationale" playing on it! The police reaction is quite humorous. It is cool how the facists considered communism 'subversive'.

Fellini said that is was based loosely on his own teenage years.

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Fellini's Other Deeply Personal Extraordinary Film
Like 8 1/2 before it, Amarcord marks an extremely personal film for Fellini. Like his relationship to Guido in 8 1/2, the character of Titta serves as an extension of Fellini on film. Whereas Guido served as an extension of Fellini's state of mind, Titta serves as an extension of Fellini's childhood memories.

Through the retelling of emotional stories that deal with Titta and his family, Amarcord (which translates into "I Remember") presents a cyclical collage of wondrous nostalgia for the Italy of Fellini's childhood. Starting in the spring and ending their one year later with the return of the yearly "puffballs", we are presented with and touched by the many experiences that Titta comes face to face with.

At the same time, the film is much more than a mere visual presentation of Fellini's own nostalgia, for it also questions the true validity of one's own memories. This questioning of memory by Fellini is made apparent in the manner in which single scenes can go from "reality" based to fantasy-like parody back to "reality" based in a manner of moments.

One of the more noteworthy examples of this technique is the scene in which El Duce visits the local town square. In the scene the serious yet joyous procession of El Duce eventually turns into a comedic/fantasy experience in which schoolchildren are shown happily carrying guns in the imagined wedding of two schoolchildren in front of a giant talking Mussolini head. Moments later the film cuts to nightfall, in which the local Fascists soldiers wreak havoc on the town and afterwards interrogate and beat Titta's father. Depending on Fellini's own presentation of the Italian Fascists, (and just as importantly, the view in Italy towards the Fascists at that time) very different interpretations can be read of them. In using such a juxtaposition, Fellini (in his echoing of Arnheim's formalist theory) is purposely trying to express the impossibility of remembering and re-presenting a true account of the past as a result of the individual nature of memory itself.

Another scene that blurs the real and the imagined is Titta's late-night encounter with a large busty Tobacconist (she is given no true name within the film) just as she has closed up her shop. The woman, who Titta has fantasized about at an earlier point in the film, playfully flirts with Titta, a flirtation that eventually ends in a moment of extreme foreplay between the two. But the inexperienced Titta is unable to please the tobacconist, and she soon forces him to stop. At this time she acts as if nothing has happened, she gives him his tobacco and shows him out the store. How much of this was real, and how much of this was imagined both within the film and with regard to Fellini's own experiences? As is the case with many of the other sequences in the film, the answer is left up to the viewer.

Amarcord is thus not so much about reconstructing mirror images of the past, but rather more about how we would like to, and thus do, remember the past through our own distorted points of view. Andrei Tarkovsky deals with very similar themes in his film Mirror, albeit in a manner that is much less entertaining than Amarcord, which was released shortly after Amarcord.

**** (10/10)

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and i thought my uncle was nuts
this is a great cast of characters that intertwine with one another to tell the story of boys growing up. great anti-facist satire, and visual comedy. perhaps the best coming-of-age film ever, amarcord gets a standing ovation at precisely the 100:00 minute mark (check it yourself) as every young mans dream comes true, in this case, 100 times over.

fantastic transfer that shames my old VHS copy. check it out