Fellini Remembers

By JAY COCKS

AMARCORD

Directed by FEDERICO FELLINI

Screenplay by FEDERICO FELLINI

and TONIO GUERRA

Fellini has found the vein again.

Since 8 1/2, his work has been piecemeal and ruminative. The spiritual and artistic crisis at the core of 8 1/2 was as much truth as drama, and the movies that followed it showed Fellini searching for some new form, like a diary (The Clowns, A Director's Notebook) or a primitive pageant (Satyricon). What began to emerge in Roma was a synthesis of direct reminiscence and fantasy, of dream and experience, of actuality and archetype. Roma was unsteady and uncertain, but Amarcord marks a triumphant consolidation. It represents some of the finest work Fellini has ever done--which also means that it stands with the best that anyone in films has ever achieved.

The title, translated from its rendering in an Italian regional dialect, means "I Remember." The movie finds Fellini once again back in his boyhood, in the same place--Rimini, a small seaside town--and in rather the same mood as in his earlier masterwork, I Vitelloni (1952). The film's framework is a full year in this small town, from the coming of one spring to another, although the true time of all events seems to be rooted in Fellini's imagination. The look of clothes, the political talk and the movies people go to see fix the period in the middle to late 1930s, although a casual remark or reference can alter the time abruptly 20 years into the past or future. There are no fixed boundaries here, just as there is no firm central character. A young man called Titta appears frequently and serves as a kind of unifying autobiographical surrogate for the director. But Amarcord is not about him really, any more than a fresco is about any one person or object in it.

Fellini is so bountiful with incident and observation that he makes most other film makers seem stingy. Stories, anecdotes, often just images succeed each other in splendid profusion, as regal and surprising as the peacock that lands on the town fountain one gray afternoon and spreads his plumage in elegant display. There are family chronicles: a meal that turns into an intramural brawl, a trip in the country with an uncle on loan from the local funny farm, who climbs a tree, refuses to come down, and howls, "I want a woman!" until the nuns and doctors come to take him away.

There are recollections of adolescence: scatological pranks in a schoolroom, masturbation contests in a car, an encounter with a fat, aging woman with enormous breasts. There are asides (Titta's grandfather lost in the fog and thinking himself dead), bits of local color (practically the whole town moving out of the harbor in small boats to cheer a new ocean liner). Under all, there is a steady stream of events that do not change: a family death, a wedding.

Amarcord also has a strong political subcurrent, and like some other recent movies from Italy (Visconti's The Damned, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist), it considers the source and meaning of European fascism. But Amarcord never becomes preoccupied with the phenomenon. Fellini works the politics evenly and gracefully into the fabric of the whole movie and portrays fascism as a crackbrained aberration that allowed for some moments of ritual absurdity even as it brought forth a kind of cagey, half-comic defiance. One of Amarcord's most memorable episodes concerns the playing of the socialist anthem from atop a church steeple, an incident that is part practical joke and part moral gesture; it implies a kind of human resiliency more moving than any call to arms.

Never Real. Fellini long ago left realism behind him to strike a tone of controlled fancy. Much of Amarcord is altered reality--memory heightened and changed by distance and by imagination. Everything is recognizable but never quite real. Of the large cast, only the actress Magali Noel, who appeared in La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 is familiar. The other performers were recruited according to the recent Fellini tradition: because the director liked their faces. He worries about performance later, frequently even giving them other voices, dubbed in once he has finished shooting. Whoever his actors are, and whatever tricks he uses on them, Fellini has a conjurer's talent to shape them all to creatures of his fantasy.

Some years ago, Fellini remarked that "in the hands of traditional film makers, the cinema has become a form of art which allows no space for meditation." Like other great directors, Fellini, now 54, has shown other, younger film makers the possibility of finding such a space. It has been argued that Fellini has spent too much time in this space, resifting the same phantoms of personal history and illusion. This has been said as well, and predictably, about Amarcord. What is so different, and so significant, is a whole new strengthening of tone and depth of feeling, the exhilaration of an artist re-exploring old territory with heightened powers. In a real sense, it seems that much of Fellini's work over the past decade has been a preparation for Amarcord, a masterly film in which half-formed jottings and free flights of fancy merge together and are exalted into art.

qedJay Cocks

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"With every movie," says Fellini, "I revisit my life as a fantasy of the past."

His latest film draws not only on his youth but also on Europe's turbulent prewar years. In an interview with TIME'S Erik Amfitheatrof in his Rome office, Fellini unreeled an intensely personal vision of his work and his times.

ON AMARCORD. They say that I have made a political movie. Actually, Amarcord conveys mostly the emotive, psychological part of being fascist--fascism as mental sluggishness, as a loss of imagination. But the movie is also nostalgic.

Nostalgia for the past is just as valuable for us as rejection of its mistakes. In order to change, we have to assimilate the past and demystify it.

THE POSTWAR ERA. It is always difficult for an author to judge his own work. This is particularly true for me, since I emerge from my movies, once they are finished, like a sleeper awaking from a dream. But I think La Dolce Vita caught a sense of anxiety that ran through the euphoria of the late '50s and early '60s. It conveyed, perhaps, the birth of an uneasy realization that the future could be indecipherable--the reason why we clung to that carnival-like spiral of pleasure and desire that exploded through much of the globe at the end of World War II.

THE 1970s. There has been a perceptible change, at least in Italy, since the early 1960s. A change and loss of psychological cohesion. The sense of catastrophe that was inherent in La Dolce Vita has grown. There is a stronger desire for self-defense and aggression, a deeper mistrust of one's fellow human beings.

People are losing faith in the future. Our education, unfortunately, molded us for a life that was always tensed toward a series of achievements --school, military service, a career and, as a grand finale, the encounter with the heavenly father. But now that our tomorrows no longer appear in that optimistic perspective, we are left with a feeling of impotence and fear. People who can no longer believe in a "better tomorrow" logically tend to behave with a desperate egotism. They are preoccupied with protecting, brutally if necessary, those little personal gains, one's little body, one's little sensual appetites. To me, this is the most dangerous feature of the '70s.

THIS DECADE'S MOVIE. Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is the visionary movie of the '70s. It is a beautiful film. It gave me an authentic feeling of apprehension. It seemed to me a chilling document on what could be, and perhaps already is, a world dominated by insecurity toward the future, and thus a life of pure biological reaction--a life of mice, with the ferociousness, the greed, the atrocious existence of mice.

THIS DECADE'S WOMEN. La Dolce Vita still reflected the conditioning of a Catholic upbringing. Woman is seen as the fascinating, mysterious image of something even more desirable because it is sinful. The Catholic myth of experiencing sin in order to return to goodness is very much there. But women are changing. I have complete respect for the attempt of women to liberate themselves, but I fear that the feminist movement has also made men feel less secure. Man has always been accustomed to look at woman as a mystery onto which he projects his fantasies. She is mother, wife or whore, or Dante's Beatrice or the muse. Man through the ages has continued to cover woman's face with masks that to his subconscious, probably, represented the unknown part of himself. For a man of my generation, women preserve all their mystery because we are still unable to see them objectively. Suddenly, the feminist movement has revealed a totally new aspect of woman, unknown to man, unsuspected. Another reason for men to mistrust the future.

THE FUTURE. Basically I am not pessimistic. If ours is truly an apocalyptic time, it may promise a new beginning rather than an end. We could not go on living with stale ideas. Certainly, we are faced with an extreme psychological test. The way to pass it is to accept the idea that life has rebelled and plunged us into such uncertainty because we have too long humiliated it. A season of change does not necessarily mean the collapse of civilization.

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