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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Ah, Fellini. Ah, Amarcord! This lusty, luscious lulu of a movie, a paean to the director's Italian childhood in the 1930's, ranks high in the pantheon of imagined memories turned art. Memory is never more memorable, or more reliable, than when it is fixed, when the shadows on the bedroom wall loom large as monsters and ancient relatives assume mythic personas. Amarcord remains, in the years since its 1974 release, an exemplar of how the past coupled with an artist's working imagination can create a hybrid of what-if and what-was to celebrate wouldn't-it-be-wonderful-if.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if you woke up one morning to snow so high you could make tunnels in it? Wouldn't it be wonderful if you were squeezed to the chest of a large-breasted woman? Wouldn't it be wonderfully comic if your nutty uncle climbed a tree and stayed there, calling out, "I want a woman!" Amarcord-the made-up word comes from the Romagnola dialect word amarcor ("I remember")-makes you believe in what you see even when what you see is as magical as a peacock appearing in the middle of winter.

The movie, which opens Friday for a week run in a beautifully restored print at the Tivoli, in Westport Square, stands out both in Fellini's career and in cinema's recent history. It was the last jewel in a career that began as a screenwriter in 1939 and endured, in the last decade, increasingly disappointing projects; despite the early classics that defined him and his generation of filmmaking it may be his most purely entertaining movie. Homages such as Woody Allen's Radio Days and Lasse Holström's My Life as a Dog and Paul Mazursky's Next Stop, Greenwich Village, as well as dozens of other nostalgic-tinted movies with adult narrators and remembrances both comic and tragic, have followed Fellini's formula, though most without his light touch. The movie is a visual aria (photographed as ever by his great cinematographer, Giuseppe Rotunno), and an aural one, too-the lilting score is by Nina Rota, who happened to come up with another memorable score the year before, in The Godfather.

Set in the 30's amid the rise of Fascism and Mussolini, Amarcord, like John Boorman's World War II British remembrance Hope & Glory, revels in the craziness of wartime.To read about it, as in the British film critic David Thomson's new memoir Try to Tell the Story, one would never imagine what fun it was to grow up then. Fellini had been an assistant to Rossellini on several of his films, whose neorealistic approach was intended to get under the viewer's skin; but Fellini's own sensibility was closer to the movies in large boisterous theatres and the highly theatrical circuses he enjoyed as a child in Rimini, a coastal town on the Adriatic Sea.

His alter ego in the movie, young Titta (supposedly based in part on a childhood friend, Titta Benzi), is a wonderful innocent around whom a rapidly changing world is spinning. Unlike in, say, Truffaut's semi-autobiographical film The 400 Blows or Bergman's baroque childhood fantasy Fanny and Alexander where the director's youthful stand-in already suffers like an adult, Fellini's Titta remains open-eyed. The familial world around him is enough, and his village is self-supporting when it comes to growing up. Scene after scene depict how Church, Family and Country collided and sometimes colluded to shape young minds. To further enhance the overlap of fantasy and reality, the set, modeled after Rimini (down to movie posters on walls), was built on the legendary Cinecittà studio, which Mussolini himself opened in 1937.

This hymn to home reminds us how thoroughly Italian Fellini was: not in the garish, contemptuous way that he came to use the idea of Italian-ness in his latter films, as a prop like his freaks and mammoth-chested women when he seemed exhausted of inspiration, but in a proud manner. This movie celebrates the nonsensical sides of Italy-the priest is as much a fool as the soldier and the mayor-but more so the artistic material found in living there and then. Why not a peacock in winter? Why not Uncle Teo up in a tree? Why not the magic of turning a movie theatre inside-out?  


Now Showing
Tivoli Cinemas
Westport Manor Square, 4050 Pennsylvania, KCMO
Visit www.tivolikc.com or call 913-383-7756 for showtimes.  

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.