/ Director
Federico Fellini
/ Cast
Pupella Maggio, Armando Brancia, Magali Noël, Ciccio Ingrassia, Nando Orfei
/ Length
123 min.
/ Year
1973
/ Sponsor
San Diego Italian Film Festival
Date :: Thursday, April 8, 2010
Time :: 7:30 pm
Location :: UltraStar Cinemas Flower Hill
Cost :: $7.50
Tickets :: Advance tickets available at the Box Office
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Date :: Friday, April 16, 2010
Time :: 7:00 pm
Location :: MoPA
Suggested donation :: $5.00
Language :: Italian with English subtitles
Amarcord
Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) provides the perfect segue and apt closure for this series, for his entire body of work, albeit always on the dangerous verge of misogyny, is also a constant engagement with the follies and flaws of Italian masculinities. In this provocative film, whose title means “I remember” in Fellini’s native Romagnolo dialect, which features prominently in it, the director returns to memories of his childhood during Fascist times in his birthplace, the provincial town of Rimini, on the Adriatic coast, although the entire film was shot, as usual for him, in Cinecittà.
Here we get to know some of the most memorable female characters of Fellinian creation, deformed according to their most prominent physical traits: Gradisca and her behind and the tobacconist and her breasts. Written in collaboration with Tonino Guerra, Amarcord, which won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 1975, is the coming of age tale of Titta and his pals who never want to grow up, a theme Fellini had dealt with in I Vitelloni (1953) as well, but that can also be extended to 8½ (1963). The director presents a series of vignettes acting like circus’s numbers, as a critic put it, enveloped in the ever-present local fog (of memory?) capturing social life and rituals in the province: the school, the family with its set of odd members, the passeggiata along the town’s main street, the gymnastic exercises and the megalomaniac fascist parades for the arrival of Il duce, the dream-like sequences and orientalist visions in the Grand Hotel and finally the appearance of the transatlantic liner Rex, all satirized to the point of the grotesque. Nostalgia is not the mood here, rather Fellini affectionately chastises the complacency of a population that allowed the Fascist regime to stay in place for so long and does not spare gruesome anecdotes of its presence in the everyday life of the town and its people.
BRANDING: MIRIELLO GRAFICO // WEB DESIGN + MARKETING: JACOB TYLER CREATIVE GROUP
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