Amarcord

Judged on structure, and the subtractive test bites hard. Some parts are required. The bonfire and the manine open the year, and the manine return to close it; the rally, the gramophone and the castor oil are the political spine; the mother’s illness and death are the one irreversible event, placed so that the year cannot simply repeat; the wedding closes the circle with a departure. Much else could go without loss of anything the film knows. The Emir at the Grand Hotel, the Mille Miglia, the motorcyclist, several school sketches and the tobacconist each delight, and each could be exchanged for another anecdote of the same kind; perhaps a fifth of the film is of this order. That holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: a form of accumulation permits more than it compels.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: Fascism in the provinces was not imposed on a people but grew out of a collective adolescence, the same appetite for spectacle, the same sexual fantasy and the same obedience that the Church and the family had already trained. It is disclosed through image, and the image is credited fully. At the rally a fat boy dreams his wedding to the girl he loves under a vast head of Mussolini made of flowers, and desire and the regime are one picture. Aurelio, made to drink castor oil, comes home soiled and is washed by his wife, farce and humiliation unseparated. Held below the gate because the film’s governing register is remembrance, a mood it renders more fully than any meaning, and the disclosure lives in a few scenes within it.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Elevation recurs and is the film’s way of thinking, but its register is warm and its summits are lyric and comic. The town rows out at night to see the liner Rex pass, a lit city on black water, and Gradisca weeps. In the fog the grandfather loses his way a few steps from his own door, and Titta meets a white ox standing in the grey. A peacock opens its tail in the snow on the square. Uncle Teo shouts his want from a tree into the country afternoon. Nino Rota’s theme lifts the whole with a melancholy carried in a fairground tune. Held at the figure because the heights are tender rather than terrible, and the long middle stretch of anecdote runs between them at a level pitch.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Myth built at the root and evoked above it. The load-bearing structure is the oldest calendar: winter burned in effigy at the start, the seasons turning through summer, the fog and the snow, a death in the household in the dying season, and spring returning with a wedding. The year as rite is the film’s structure, not its setting. Over it the town makes its own figures: Gradisca, the town’s Venus and every man’s dream, who marries a carabiniere and leaves; the Rex, a god passing in the night whom the town goes out to worship; Teo in the tree as desire unbound. Held below the gate because beyond the calendar these archetypes are emblems, built as images rather than as action that bears weight, and the particulars carry more than the myths.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is double: neorealism and the Italian comedy of the provinces, and Fellini’s own films, above all I vitelloni (1953), set in the same town among its idle young men, and Roma (1972), which had already made a city’s portrait from episodes, direct address and memory. The departures are real: a film about Fascism made as carnival and memoir rather than as accusation, when Italian political cinema of the early 1970s worked in the register of indictment, and a town built whole in the studio with its artifice shown. But the stake was small. Fellini was at the height of his fame, the production was large, and the form extended a manner he had proved the year before. That holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: much of the turn was made by the earlier films, and this one refines his road.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told as a plot, Titta’s coming of age or his father’s arrest, it would be the story of one family under Fascism. Told as a year of episodes without a protagonist, with townspeople stepping out to address the camera and mocked for it, it knows that the town is the subject, that it lives as gossip and spectacle, and that history passes through it as one season among seasons. The cycle is the knowledge: the year returns to spring, and nothing has changed except that the mother is dead and Gradisca has gone. The studio artifice belongs to the form, memory shown as made. Held at the figure because the episodic form that makes the knowledge also admits episodes the knowledge does not need, and there the form is a container.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Evidence over fifty-three years. An argument has been sustained and has not closed: whether the film is a nostalgic idyll that softens Fascism into charm, or a critique that shows complicity as charm, which is the more troubling reading; how much of it is autobiography and how much invention, since Fellini wrote and spoke of the town of his boyhood; and what Gradisca and the tobacconist are as images of women seen by a boy and left as he saw them. Formally it yields on return, in the rhymes of the manine, of arrivals by sea and by road, and of the town gathered as a crowd for every spectacle. Held at the figure because much of the return the film earns is affectionate rewatching of its set pieces rather than new reading, and affection is not depth.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Released in 1973, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a mature, popular form of the cinema of memory as carnival, in which a whole community, its politics and its sex, is remembered at once with tenderness and judgement: the most complete statement of a manner. It perfected rather than reorganised, and the deeper reorganisations of narrative and of the self as subject that Fellini made belong to his work of the early 1960s, not to this film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the memory film of a town or a childhood that followed is often traced to it, and its title passed into Italian as a common noun for nostalgic reminiscence, a reach beyond cinema that few films achieve. It is reach along one line, not a redirection of the field.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-three years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, with nothing lost. Its presence has been continuous and wide: the Academy Award, revival and repertory showing, television, home video in every format, teaching, and a title in common Italian speech; Rota’s theme is among the most played film themes of its time. The surface ages little, because a film of the 1930s made in the 1970s, in a studio and as remembrance, does not carry the date of its making as a contemporary surface would. Its frank sexual comedy and its regard for women now read as of their moment; they colour its reception without removing it from view. Its presence passes beyond cinema in the word, though not to the widest degree.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as in every art. The making bears weight: Giuseppe Rotunno’s colour, soft and warm in summer and drained to grey in the fog; Danilo Donati’s town, costumes and faces, one studio square serving for rally, snow and wedding; Nino Rota’s score, whose theme carries the elegy the film never speaks; and the staging of crowds, frames full of faces each of which reads. The fog and the Rex are made from almost nothing, smoke, plastic and light. The costs are real and they weigh: the post-synchronised dialogue floats free of the mouths and loosens scenes; casting by face rather than by performance gives caricature where a scene wants more; and the middle episodes run long, so that the rhythm slackens.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the tobacconist’s comic assault on the boy who tries to lift her, and the mother’s death. One law governs both: everything is seen as it is remembered and retold, enlarged by appetite, by fear and by love to the size the memory gives it. The tobacconist is as huge as a boy’s desire; the death is quiet because grief shrinks the world to a room. The castor oil, the most violent scene, obeys the same law, farce and degradation in one remembered image. The range is wide, from schoolboy flatulence to political violence and death. But the Emir’s harem and the Grand Hotel stories, told by the town’s liars, drift toward the revue, and there the law holds loosely; the strain is felt across the middle of the film.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The orders are many, and the year integrates them: the family at Titta’s table, with the father’s rages and the mother’s death; the Church in the confessional; the state in the rally, the federale, the police interrogation and the castor oil; the school; sexuality as the town’s continuous preoccupation; the natural order in the seasons, the sea, the fog and the snow; history in the 1930s, the Rex as national pride and Fascism as civic theatre; and madness in Teo. Each passes through the same square. What holds the axis down is the depth of the holding: consciousness stays at the surface of caricature, Titta’s included; labour appears only at the edges; the sacred is institution and rite, the calendar apart; and the world beyond the town arrives only as spectacle passing through.

Score: 7.8 / 10