Amarcord
Encyclopedia
Amarcord is a 1973 Italian
comedy-drama film
directed by Federico Fellini
, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age
tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo (based on Fellini's hometown of Rimini
) in 1930s Fascist Italy
. The film’s title is Romagnol
for "I remember".
Titta's sentimental education is emblematic of Italy's "lapse of conscience". Fellini skewers Mussolini's ludicrous posturings and those of a Catholic Church that "imprisoned Italians in a perpetual adolescence" by mocking himself and his fellow villagers in comic scenes that underline their incapacity to adopt genuine moral responsibility or outgrow foolish sexual fantasies.
The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
, and was nominated for two Academy Awards
: Best Director and Best Writing, Original Screenplay.
At the hairdresser’s, a Fascist has just had his head newly shaved when Fiorella arrives to accompany her sister Gradisca (Magali Noël
), the village beauty, to the traditional bonfire celebrating spring. As night falls, the inhabitants of Borgo make their way to the village square where Fellini presents his comic characters: the blind accordion player (Domenica Pertica) relentlessly tormented by schoolboys; Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli), the stringy blond nymphomaniac; the stout and buxom tobacconist
(Maria Antonietta Beluzzi
); Titta (Bruno Zanin), the rosy-cheeked adolescent protagonist based on Fellini's childhood friend; and Aurelio (Armando Brancia), Titta’s father, a construction foreman of working-class background. Modest and reserved, Aurelio responds in frenzied anger to Titta’s pranks while Miranda (Pupella Maggio), his wife, always comes to her son’s defence. Miranda’s brother, Lallo (Nando Orfei), lives with Titta’s family, sponging off his brother-in-law. In tow are Titta’s grandfather (Peppino Ianigro), a likeable old goat with an eye on the family’s young maid, and a street vendor, Biscein (Gennaro Ombra), the town’s inveterate liar.
Giudizio sits an effigy of the "Old Witch of Winter" in a chair on the stack and Gradisca is given the honour of setting it aflame. Lallo maliciously removes the ladder, trapping Giudizio atop the inferno. "I’m burning!" he screams as the crowd dances gaily round the bonfire and schoolboys run amuck exploding firecrackers. From a window, the Fascist bigwig (Ferruccio Brembilla) fires his pistol into the air. "I feel spring all over me already," says Gradisca in ecstasy.
The local aristocrat and his decrepit wife raise a toast to the dying flames. Schoolboys drag Volpina near the cinders then swing her back and forth in rhythm to the blind accordionist’s tune. A motorcyclist roars through the glowing coals in a mindless display of exhibitionism. Black-clothed women scoop the scattered embers into pans as the town lawyer (Luigi Rossi) appears walking his bicycle. Like Giudizio, he addresses the camera to explain choice titbits of the town’s history. A florid suite of raspberries interrupts his charming pedantry and he departs in a huff.
Zeus (Franco Magno), the red-haired crusty schoolmaster, presides over an official class photograph. After showing us a wall hung with the portraits of the king, the pope, and Mussolini, Fellini serves up a sequence of classroom antics involving Titta, Gigliozzi (Bruno Lenzi), Ovo (Bruno Scagnetti), and Ciccio (Fernando de Felice), the class fat boy who has a crush on Aldina (Donatella Gambini), a lovely brunette. If the schoolboys are stereotypical delinquents, their teachers are ridiculous. During her inane lessons on Giotto’s perspective, the Fine Arts professor (Fides Stagni) dips a breakfast biscuit in milk. Expanding her voluptuous chest, the feral-faced math teacher (Dina Adorni) demonstrates an algebraic formula. Clicking tongue and palate to pronounce a syllable, the Italian professor (Mario Silvestri) is reduced to hysterics by Ovo’s parody of him. Myopic religion instructor Don Balosa (Gianfilippo Carcano) wipes his glasses and drones on while half the class sneaks out for a smoke in the boys’ room.
"Fu Manchu!" cries Volpina prowling on a sunburnt beach. When workers at Aurelio's construction site invite her to join them, the foreman promptly sends her off. Mortar, an old brick-maker, is asked to recite his new poem titled Bricks:
Aurelio replies with a homily on the virtues of hard work. During dinner with his family, Aurelio explodes when news arrives that Titta urinated on the neighbor's hat. The ensuing squabble builds into a delirious domestic fit.
Titta and his gang follow Gradisca on her promenade under the arcades and when that proves fruitless, flatten their noses against an irate merchant’s shop window. Lallo and his fellow Don Juans spot a carriage-load of new prostitutes on their way to the local brothel. The news spreads like wildfire to the town's male population.
Doubling as the town's parish priest, Don Balosa's main concerns are floral arrangements and making sure his schoolboys avoid masturbation. At confession, he warns Titta that "Saint Louis cries when you touch yourself." Given his fantasies involving the busty tobacconist, the sensual math teacher, the fat-bottomed peasant women on bicycles, Volpina the man-eater, and Gradisca whom he tried to grope at the Cinema Fulgor, Titta complains that it can’t be helped.
A dirty dust cloud announces the visit of the federale during a parade led by the local gerarca. Following behind him are the math teacher and her colleagues rejuvenated by Fascist rhetoric. Now in uniform, Lallo joins the parade shouting, "Mussolini's got balls this big!" In a wild daydream, Ciccio stands before the giant face of Mussolini who blesses him and his "Fascist bride", Aldina. Surreptitiously wired into the bell tower of the town church, a gramophone plays a recording of the Internationale but it is soon shot at and destroyed by gun-crazy Fascists. Due to his anarchist past, Aurelio is brought in for questioning and forced to drink castor oil. He limps home in a nauseous state to be washed by Miranda. We discover later that it was Lallo who betrayed him.
In a series of fantasy sequences at the Grand Hotel, Gradisca is encouraged to bed the Fascist high official in return for government funds to rebuild the town's harbor while pimple-faced Biscein recounts the night he made love to twenty-eight women in the visiting sultan’s harem. The Grand Hotel also provides the backdrop to Lallo’s gang of mother-controlled layabouts who obsessively pursue middle-aged female tourists.
One summer afternoon, the family visits Uncle Teo (Ciccio Ingrassia
), Aurelio’s brother, confined to an insane asylum. They take him out for a day in the country but he escapes into a tree yelling, "Voglio una donna!" ("I want a woman!"). All attempts to bring him down are met with stones that Teo carries in his pockets. A dwarf nun and two orderlies finally arrive on the scene. Marching up the ladder, the nun reprimands Teo who obediently agrees to return to the asylum. "We are all mad at times," sighs Aurelio.
The town's inhabitants embark in small boats to meet the passage of the SS Rex
, the regime’s proudest technological achievement. By midnight, they have fallen asleep waiting for its arrival. Awakened by a foghorn, they watch in awe as the liner sails past, cap-sizing their boats in its wake. Titta’s grandfather wanders lost in a disorienting fog so thick it seems to smother the house and the autumnal landscape. Walking out to the Grand Hotel, Titta and his friends find it boarded up. Like zombies, they waltz on the terrace with imaginary female partners enveloped in the fog.
The annual car race provides the occasion for Titta to daydream of winning the grand prize: Gradisca. One evening, the buxom tobacconist is about to close up shop when Titta tries to weasel a cigarette. She ignores him but he catches her interest by boasting that he can lift her. Daring him to try, she’s aroused when he succeeds. Setting her back down, he goes to sit breathlessly in a corner as she draws the shop's iron shutter and exposes a breast, overwhelming Titta by her sheer size. The teenager’s awkward efforts end with him being suffocated by the very objects of his desire. Losing all interest, she sends him away after giving him the cigarette for free.
On the cusp of winter, Titta falls sick and is tended by his mother. "This will go down as the Year of the Big Snow!" announces the lawyer peering out from behind a snow bank. As Gradisca makes her way to church in the town square, Titta follows in hot pursuit and is almost run over by the motorcyclist bombing through a labyrinth of snow. On a visit to comfort his ailing mother in hospital, she tells him that it’s time he matured. A friendly snow fight breaks out between Lallo, Gradisca, and the schoolboys but is quickly interrupted by a piercing bird call. They watch mesmerized as a peacock, on the rim of a frozen fountain, struts his magnificent tail.
Titta wakes to find the house in mourning: Miranda has died. Locking himself in his mother’s bedroom, he breaks down and cries. After the funeral, he walks out to the quay just as the puffballs return drifting on the wind. In a deserted field with half the village present, Gradisca celebrates her marriage to a balding, pot-bellied officer. A man raises his glass and exclaims, "She’s found her Gary Cooper
!" Someone asks, "Where's Titta?" "Titta’s gone away!" cries Ovo, as Gradisca drives off with her carabiniere
to the tune of the blind accordion player.
Released in Italy on December 18, 1973, Amarcord was an "unmitigated success". Critic Giovanni Grazzini, reviewing for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera
, described Fellini as "an artist at his peak" and the film as the work of a mature, more refined director whose “autobiographical content shows greater insight into historical fact and the reality of a generation. Almost all of Amarcord is a macabre dance against a cheerful background".
The film was screened at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival
, but wasn't entered into the main competition.
Russell Davies
, British film critic and later a BBC
radio host, compared the film to the work of Thornton Wilder
and Dylan Thomas
: "The pattern is cyclic... A year in the life of a coastal village, with due emphasis on the seasons, and the births, marriages and deaths. It is an Our Town
or Under Milk Wood
of the Adriatic seaboard, concocted and displayed in the Roman film studios with the latter-day Fellini’s distaste for real stone and wind and sky. The people, however, are real, and the many non-actors among them come in all the shapes and sizes one cares to imagine without plunging too deep into Tod Browning
freak territory."
Rapidly picked up for international distribution after winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1975, the film was destined to be Fellini's "last major commercial success".
United States
When Amarcord opened in New York
, critic Vincent Canby
lauded it as possibly "Fellini's most marvelous film... It's an extravagantly funny, sometimes dreamlike evocation of a year in the life of a small Italian coastal town in the nineteen-thirties, not as it literally was, perhaps, but as it is recalled by a director with a superstar's access to the resources of the Italian film industry and a piper's command over our imaginations. When Mr. Fellini is working in peak condition, as he is in Amarcord (the vernacular for "I remember" in Romagna), he somehow brings out the best in us. We become more humane, less stuffy, more appreciative of the profound importance of attitudes that in other circumstances would seem merely eccentric if not lunatic."
In his review, critic Roger Ebert
discussed Fellini's value as a director: "It's also absolutely breathtaking filmmaking. Fellini has ranked for a long time among the five or six greatest directors in the world, and of them all, he's the natural. Ingmar Bergman
achieves his greatness through thought and soul-searching, Alfred Hitchcock
built his films with meticulous craftsmanship, and Luis Buñuel
used his fetishes and fantasies to construct barbed jokes about humanity. But Fellini... well, moviemaking for him seems almost effortless, like breathing, and he can orchestrate the most complicated scenes with purity and ease. He's the Willie Mays
of movies." Jay Cocks of Time Magazine considered it "some of the finest work Fellini has ever done - which also means it stands with the best that anyone in film has ever achieved."
aspect ratio
fully intact. The format was the RCA
CED Selectavision Videodisc system.
Amarcord was released on DVD twice by the Criterion Collection, first in 1998, then re-released in 2006 with an anamorphic widescreen
transfer and additional supplements. Criterion re-issued the 2006 release on Blu-ray
in 2011.
Cinema of Italy
The history of Italian cinema began just a few months after the Lumière brothers had patented their Cinematographe, when Pope Leo XIII was filmed for a few seconds in the act of blessing the camera.-Early years:...
comedy-drama film
Comedy-drama
Comedy-drama is a genre of theatre, film and television programs which combines humorous and serious content.-Theatre:Traditional western theatre, beginning with the ancient Greeks, was divided into comedy and tragedy...
directed by Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age
Coming of age
Coming of age is a young person's transition from childhood to adulthood. The age at which this transition takes place varies in society, as does the nature of the transition. It can be a simple legal convention or can be part of a ritual, as practiced by many societies...
tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo (based on Fellini's hometown of Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
) in 1930s Fascist Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
. The film’s title is Romagnol
Romagnol language
Romagnol is a Romance language mostly spoken in Romagna , Republic of San Marino and Northern Marche.-History:...
for "I remember".
Titta's sentimental education is emblematic of Italy's "lapse of conscience". Fellini skewers Mussolini's ludicrous posturings and those of a Catholic Church that "imprisoned Italians in a perpetual adolescence" by mocking himself and his fellow villagers in comic scenes that underline their incapacity to adopt genuine moral responsibility or outgrow foolish sexual fantasies.
The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...
, and was nominated for two Academy Awards
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
: Best Director and Best Writing, Original Screenplay.
Plot
A young woman hanging clothes on a line happily points out the arrival of "manine" or puffballs floating on the wind. The old man pottering beside her replies, "When puffballs come, cold winter’s done." In the village square, schoolboys jump around trying to pluck puffballs out of the air. Giudizio (Aristide Caporale), the town idiot, looks into the camera and recites a poem to spring and the swirling, drifting "manine".At the hairdresser’s, a Fascist has just had his head newly shaved when Fiorella arrives to accompany her sister Gradisca (Magali Noël
Magali Noël
Magali Noël is a Turkish-French actress and singer. Originally from Izmir, she emigrated from Turkey to France in 1951, and her acting career began soon thereafter. She acted in multilingual cinema chiefly from 1951 to 1980, doing several films in Italian with renowned director Federico Fellini,...
), the village beauty, to the traditional bonfire celebrating spring. As night falls, the inhabitants of Borgo make their way to the village square where Fellini presents his comic characters: the blind accordion player (Domenica Pertica) relentlessly tormented by schoolboys; Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli), the stringy blond nymphomaniac; the stout and buxom tobacconist
Tobacconist
A tobacconist is an expert dealer in tobacco in various forms and the related accoutrements .Such accoutrements include pipes, lighters, matches, pipe cleaners, pipe tampers, ashtrays, humidification devices, hygrometers, humidors, cigar cutters, and more. Books and magazines, especially ones...
(Maria Antonietta Beluzzi
Maria Antonietta Beluzzi
Maria Antonietta Beluzzi was an Italian born actress who appeared in a number of films in her native country. She is probably best known and remembered as the large as well as huge-breasted tobacconist in Federico Fellini's Amarcord, whose sexual arousal by the male teenager protagonist ends with...
); Titta (Bruno Zanin), the rosy-cheeked adolescent protagonist based on Fellini's childhood friend; and Aurelio (Armando Brancia), Titta’s father, a construction foreman of working-class background. Modest and reserved, Aurelio responds in frenzied anger to Titta’s pranks while Miranda (Pupella Maggio), his wife, always comes to her son’s defence. Miranda’s brother, Lallo (Nando Orfei), lives with Titta’s family, sponging off his brother-in-law. In tow are Titta’s grandfather (Peppino Ianigro), a likeable old goat with an eye on the family’s young maid, and a street vendor, Biscein (Gennaro Ombra), the town’s inveterate liar.
Giudizio sits an effigy of the "Old Witch of Winter" in a chair on the stack and Gradisca is given the honour of setting it aflame. Lallo maliciously removes the ladder, trapping Giudizio atop the inferno. "I’m burning!" he screams as the crowd dances gaily round the bonfire and schoolboys run amuck exploding firecrackers. From a window, the Fascist bigwig (Ferruccio Brembilla) fires his pistol into the air. "I feel spring all over me already," says Gradisca in ecstasy.
The local aristocrat and his decrepit wife raise a toast to the dying flames. Schoolboys drag Volpina near the cinders then swing her back and forth in rhythm to the blind accordionist’s tune. A motorcyclist roars through the glowing coals in a mindless display of exhibitionism. Black-clothed women scoop the scattered embers into pans as the town lawyer (Luigi Rossi) appears walking his bicycle. Like Giudizio, he addresses the camera to explain choice titbits of the town’s history. A florid suite of raspberries interrupts his charming pedantry and he departs in a huff.
Zeus (Franco Magno), the red-haired crusty schoolmaster, presides over an official class photograph. After showing us a wall hung with the portraits of the king, the pope, and Mussolini, Fellini serves up a sequence of classroom antics involving Titta, Gigliozzi (Bruno Lenzi), Ovo (Bruno Scagnetti), and Ciccio (Fernando de Felice), the class fat boy who has a crush on Aldina (Donatella Gambini), a lovely brunette. If the schoolboys are stereotypical delinquents, their teachers are ridiculous. During her inane lessons on Giotto’s perspective, the Fine Arts professor (Fides Stagni) dips a breakfast biscuit in milk. Expanding her voluptuous chest, the feral-faced math teacher (Dina Adorni) demonstrates an algebraic formula. Clicking tongue and palate to pronounce a syllable, the Italian professor (Mario Silvestri) is reduced to hysterics by Ovo’s parody of him. Myopic religion instructor Don Balosa (Gianfilippo Carcano) wipes his glasses and drones on while half the class sneaks out for a smoke in the boys’ room.
"Fu Manchu!" cries Volpina prowling on a sunburnt beach. When workers at Aurelio's construction site invite her to join them, the foreman promptly sends her off. Mortar, an old brick-maker, is asked to recite his new poem titled Bricks:
- My grandfather made bricks
- My father made bricks
- I make bricks, too,
- but where’s my house?
Aurelio replies with a homily on the virtues of hard work. During dinner with his family, Aurelio explodes when news arrives that Titta urinated on the neighbor's hat. The ensuing squabble builds into a delirious domestic fit.
Titta and his gang follow Gradisca on her promenade under the arcades and when that proves fruitless, flatten their noses against an irate merchant’s shop window. Lallo and his fellow Don Juans spot a carriage-load of new prostitutes on their way to the local brothel. The news spreads like wildfire to the town's male population.
Doubling as the town's parish priest, Don Balosa's main concerns are floral arrangements and making sure his schoolboys avoid masturbation. At confession, he warns Titta that "Saint Louis cries when you touch yourself." Given his fantasies involving the busty tobacconist, the sensual math teacher, the fat-bottomed peasant women on bicycles, Volpina the man-eater, and Gradisca whom he tried to grope at the Cinema Fulgor, Titta complains that it can’t be helped.
A dirty dust cloud announces the visit of the federale during a parade led by the local gerarca. Following behind him are the math teacher and her colleagues rejuvenated by Fascist rhetoric. Now in uniform, Lallo joins the parade shouting, "Mussolini's got balls this big!" In a wild daydream, Ciccio stands before the giant face of Mussolini who blesses him and his "Fascist bride", Aldina. Surreptitiously wired into the bell tower of the town church, a gramophone plays a recording of the Internationale but it is soon shot at and destroyed by gun-crazy Fascists. Due to his anarchist past, Aurelio is brought in for questioning and forced to drink castor oil. He limps home in a nauseous state to be washed by Miranda. We discover later that it was Lallo who betrayed him.
In a series of fantasy sequences at the Grand Hotel, Gradisca is encouraged to bed the Fascist high official in return for government funds to rebuild the town's harbor while pimple-faced Biscein recounts the night he made love to twenty-eight women in the visiting sultan’s harem. The Grand Hotel also provides the backdrop to Lallo’s gang of mother-controlled layabouts who obsessively pursue middle-aged female tourists.
One summer afternoon, the family visits Uncle Teo (Ciccio Ingrassia
Ciccio Ingrassia
Ciccio Ingrassia was an Italian comedian.He was born in Palermo, Sicily and began his career in the 1950s, although his career only really took off in the 1960s. He starred in many comedies, mainly as a duo with comedian Franco Franchi...
), Aurelio’s brother, confined to an insane asylum. They take him out for a day in the country but he escapes into a tree yelling, "Voglio una donna!" ("I want a woman!"). All attempts to bring him down are met with stones that Teo carries in his pockets. A dwarf nun and two orderlies finally arrive on the scene. Marching up the ladder, the nun reprimands Teo who obediently agrees to return to the asylum. "We are all mad at times," sighs Aurelio.
The town's inhabitants embark in small boats to meet the passage of the SS Rex
SS Rex
The SS Rex was an Italian ocean liner launched in 1931. It held the westbound Blue Riband between 1933 and 1935. Originally built for the Navigazione Generale Italiana as the SS Guglielmo Marconi, its state-ordered merger with the Lloyd Sabaudo line meant that the ship sailed for the newly created...
, the regime’s proudest technological achievement. By midnight, they have fallen asleep waiting for its arrival. Awakened by a foghorn, they watch in awe as the liner sails past, cap-sizing their boats in its wake. Titta’s grandfather wanders lost in a disorienting fog so thick it seems to smother the house and the autumnal landscape. Walking out to the Grand Hotel, Titta and his friends find it boarded up. Like zombies, they waltz on the terrace with imaginary female partners enveloped in the fog.
The annual car race provides the occasion for Titta to daydream of winning the grand prize: Gradisca. One evening, the buxom tobacconist is about to close up shop when Titta tries to weasel a cigarette. She ignores him but he catches her interest by boasting that he can lift her. Daring him to try, she’s aroused when he succeeds. Setting her back down, he goes to sit breathlessly in a corner as she draws the shop's iron shutter and exposes a breast, overwhelming Titta by her sheer size. The teenager’s awkward efforts end with him being suffocated by the very objects of his desire. Losing all interest, she sends him away after giving him the cigarette for free.
On the cusp of winter, Titta falls sick and is tended by his mother. "This will go down as the Year of the Big Snow!" announces the lawyer peering out from behind a snow bank. As Gradisca makes her way to church in the town square, Titta follows in hot pursuit and is almost run over by the motorcyclist bombing through a labyrinth of snow. On a visit to comfort his ailing mother in hospital, she tells him that it’s time he matured. A friendly snow fight breaks out between Lallo, Gradisca, and the schoolboys but is quickly interrupted by a piercing bird call. They watch mesmerized as a peacock, on the rim of a frozen fountain, struts his magnificent tail.
Titta wakes to find the house in mourning: Miranda has died. Locking himself in his mother’s bedroom, he breaks down and cries. After the funeral, he walks out to the quay just as the puffballs return drifting on the wind. In a deserted field with half the village present, Gradisca celebrates her marriage to a balding, pot-bellied officer. A man raises his glass and exclaims, "She’s found her Gary Cooper
Gary Cooper
Frank James Cooper, known professionally as Gary Cooper, was an American film actor. He was renowned for his quiet, understated acting style and his stoic, but at times intense screen persona, which was particularly well suited to the many Westerns he made...
!" Someone asks, "Where's Titta?" "Titta’s gone away!" cries Ovo, as Gradisca drives off with her carabiniere
Carabinieri
The Carabinieri is the national gendarmerie of Italy, policing both military and civilian populations, and is a branch of the armed forces.-Early history:...
to the tune of the blind accordion player.
Cast
- Bruno Zanin as Titta
- Magali' NoelMagali NoëlMagali Noël is a Turkish-French actress and singer. Originally from Izmir, she emigrated from Turkey to France in 1951, and her acting career began soon thereafter. She acted in multilingual cinema chiefly from 1951 to 1980, doing several films in Italian with renowned director Federico Fellini,...
as Gradisca, hairdresser - Pupella MaggioPupella MaggioPupella Maggio born Giustina Maggio was an Italian film actress.-Selected filmography:- External links :...
as Miranda Biondi, Titta's mother - Armando Brancia as Aurelio Biondi, Titta's father
- Giuseppe Ianigro as Titta's grandfather
- Nando Orfei as Lallo or "Il Pataca", Titta's uncle
- Ciccio Ingrassia as Teo, Titta's uncle
- Stefano Proietti as Oliva, Titta's brother
- Donatella Gambini as Aldina Cordini
- Gianfranco Marrocco as Son of count
- Ferdinando De Felice as Cicco
- Bruno Lenzi as Gigliozzi
- Bruno Scagnetti as Ovo
- Alvaro Vitali as Naso
- Francesco Vona as Candela
- Maria Antonietta BeluzziMaria Antonietta BeluzziMaria Antonietta Beluzzi was an Italian born actress who appeared in a number of films in her native country. She is probably best known and remembered as the large as well as huge-breasted tobacconist in Federico Fellini's Amarcord, whose sexual arousal by the male teenager protagonist ends with...
as the tobacconist
Reception
EuropeReleased in Italy on December 18, 1973, Amarcord was an "unmitigated success". Critic Giovanni Grazzini, reviewing for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera
Corriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...
, described Fellini as "an artist at his peak" and the film as the work of a mature, more refined director whose “autobiographical content shows greater insight into historical fact and the reality of a generation. Almost all of Amarcord is a macabre dance against a cheerful background".
The film was screened at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival
1974 Cannes Film Festival
- Jury :*René Clair *Jean-Loup Dabadie *Kenne Fant *Félix Labisse *Irwin Shaw *Michel Soutter *Monica Vitti *Alexander Walker *Rostislav Yurenev -Feature film competition:...
, but wasn't entered into the main competition.
Russell Davies
Russell Davies
Robert Russell Davies , known as Russell Davies, is a British journalist and broadcaster. He presents a Sunday radio programme on BBC Radio 2 which spotlights popular song, as well as Brain of Britain on Radio 4.-Background:...
, British film critic and later a BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
radio host, compared the film to the work of Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,...
and Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
: "The pattern is cyclic... A year in the life of a coastal village, with due emphasis on the seasons, and the births, marriages and deaths. It is an Our Town
Our Town
Our Town is a three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It is a character story about an average town's citizens in the early twentieth century as depicted through their everyday lives...
or Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood is a 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, adapted later as a stage play. A movie version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released during 1972....
of the Adriatic seaboard, concocted and displayed in the Roman film studios with the latter-day Fellini’s distaste for real stone and wind and sky. The people, however, are real, and the many non-actors among them come in all the shapes and sizes one cares to imagine without plunging too deep into Tod Browning
Tod Browning
Tod Browning was an American motion picture actor, director and screenwriter.Browning's career spanned the silent and talkie eras...
freak territory."
Rapidly picked up for international distribution after winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1975, the film was destined to be Fellini's "last major commercial success".
United States
When Amarcord opened in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, critic Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...
lauded it as possibly "Fellini's most marvelous film... It's an extravagantly funny, sometimes dreamlike evocation of a year in the life of a small Italian coastal town in the nineteen-thirties, not as it literally was, perhaps, but as it is recalled by a director with a superstar's access to the resources of the Italian film industry and a piper's command over our imaginations. When Mr. Fellini is working in peak condition, as he is in Amarcord (the vernacular for "I remember" in Romagna), he somehow brings out the best in us. We become more humane, less stuffy, more appreciative of the profound importance of attitudes that in other circumstances would seem merely eccentric if not lunatic."
In his review, critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
discussed Fellini's value as a director: "It's also absolutely breathtaking filmmaking. Fellini has ranked for a long time among the five or six greatest directors in the world, and of them all, he's the natural. Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and...
achieves his greatness through thought and soul-searching, Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
built his films with meticulous craftsmanship, and Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish-born filmmaker — later a naturalized citizen of Mexico — who worked in Spain, Mexico, France and the US..-Early years:...
used his fetishes and fantasies to construct barbed jokes about humanity. But Fellini... well, moviemaking for him seems almost effortless, like breathing, and he can orchestrate the most complicated scenes with purity and ease. He's the Willie Mays
Willie Mays
Willie Howard Mays, Jr. is a retired American professional baseball player who played the majority of his major league career with the New York and San Francisco Giants before finishing with the New York Mets. Nicknamed The Say Hey Kid, Mays was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979, his...
of movies." Jay Cocks of Time Magazine considered it "some of the finest work Fellini has ever done - which also means it stands with the best that anyone in film has ever achieved."
Awards
Wins- National Board of Review: NBR Award, Best Foreign Language Film, France/Italy; 1974.
- New York Film Critics Circle AwardsNew York Film Critics Circle AwardsNew York Film Critics' Circle Awards are given annually to honor excellence in cinema worldwide by an organization of film reviewers from New York City-based publications. It is considered one of the most important precursors to the Academy Awards....
: NYFCC Award, Best Director, Federico Fellini; Best Film; 1974. - David di Donatello Awards: David, Best Director, Federico Fellini; Best Film, 1974.
- Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists: Silver Ribbon, Best Director, Federico Fellini; Best New Actor, Gianfilippo Carcano; Best Story, Tonino Guerra; Federico Fellini; 1974.
- Academy AwardsAcademy AwardsAn Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
: Oscar, Best Foreign Language Film, Italy; 1975. - Bodil AwardsBodil AwardsThe Bodil Awards are the major Danish film awards given by Denmark's National Association of Film Critics . The awards are presented annually at a ceremony in the Imperial Cinema in Copenhagen. Established in 1948, it is one of the oldest film awards in Europe...
, Copenhagen, Denmark: Bodil, Best European Film, Federico Fellini (director); 1975. - French Syndicate of Cinema CriticsFrench Syndicate of Cinema CriticsThe French Syndicate of Cinema Critics has awarded 4 prizes - the Prix Méliès annually since 1946 to the best French film of the year. The Prix Léon Moussinac, awarded to the Best Foreign Film category was added in 1967...
: Critics Award, Best Foreign Film, Federico Fellini; Italy; 1975. - Kansas City Film Critics Circle AwardsKansas City Film Critics CircleThe Kansas City Film Critics Circle is a group of media film critics in the Kansas City metropolitan area. James Loutzenhiser, a local psychiatrist and film buff, who died in November 2001, founded the group in 1967...
: KCFCC AwardKansas City Film Critics Circle Awards 1974The 9th Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards, honoring the best filmmaking of 1974 filmmaking, were given in 1975.-Winners:*Best Actor:**Jack Nicholson - Chinatown*Best Actress:**Joanne Woodward - Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams*Best Director:...
, Best Foreign Film, Italy; 1975. - Kinema Junpo Awards: Kinema Junpo Award, Best Foreign Language Film Director, Federico Fellini; 1975.
- Cinema Writers Circle Awards, SpainSpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
: CEC Award, Best Foreign Film, Italy; 1976.
Home media
The film has the distinction of being the first released in a consumer video format in 1984 with the letterboxLetterbox
Letterboxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting videographic image has mattes above and below it; these mattes are part of the image...
aspect ratio
Aspect ratio (image)
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of the width of the image to its height, expressed as two numbers separated by a colon. That is, for an x:y aspect ratio, no matter how big or small the image is, if the width is divided into x units of equal length and the height is measured using this...
fully intact. The format was the RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
CED Selectavision Videodisc system.
Amarcord was released on DVD twice by the Criterion Collection, first in 1998, then re-released in 2006 with an anamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen, when applied to DVD manufacture, is a video process that horizontally squeezes a widescreen image so that it can be stored in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVD image frame. Compatible playback equipment can then re-expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen...
transfer and additional supplements. Criterion re-issued the 2006 release on Blu-ray
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
in 2011.
External links
- Amarcord film trailer at You Tube (Janus FilmsJanus FilmsJanus Films is a film distribution company. It was one of the first distributors to bring what are now regarded as masterpieces of world cinema to the United States...
Channel) - Amarcord soundtrack by Nino RotaNino RotaNino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
at You Tube - Amarcord images at EyeGate