Amarcord (Criterion Collection)
by Federico Fellini
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DVD details
Actor: Armando Brancia, Bruno Zanin, Ciccio Ingrassia, Magali No?l, Pupella MaggioDirector: Federico Fellini
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Giuseppe Rotunno
Writer: Federico Fellini
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Producer: Franco Cristaldi
Writer: Tonino Guerra
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Greek (Original Language); Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 123 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-09-05
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of Amarcord (Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: Did Not Function, was a gift
Summary: 1 Stars
Contacted seller as initially given as a gift. Seller resonded that Amazon will be in contact. As of 2 weeks later, not heard from either as I had the defective product shipped back to me to include the original paperwork. Very disappointed in both Amazon and seller.DVD Review: Amarcord
Summary: 5 Stars
A great classic movie that I had to buy as I loved it so much.This Criterion collection is great because apart from being a very good copy of the movie,it comes with a story book and lovely packaging.DVD Review: Memory Play
Summary: 4 Stars
Fellini's 1973 AMARCORD was hailed by critics in both Europe and the United States as a return to the standard of quality of his earlier works. It certainly was more controlled than several of the films that immediately preceded it (like FELLINI'S ROMA and FELLINI SATYRICON), and it's one of his most visually striking films, with celebrated images like the famous peacock flying in a snowfall or the torn turning out to greet the great ocean liner Rex passing by the harbor (shown to be as impossibly large--and as artificial--as the townspeople had hoped). But the film lacks much of a sense of human suffering which always provides the emotional resonance of his best films, and those few moments when it does--such as the town beauty Gradisca pouring out her hopes for a conventional marriage to the townspeople while waiting for the ocean liner's passage--are the best of the entire film.
The film centers upon an entire seaside resort town on the Adriatic in the mid 1930s, during the height of fascism, and it truly stars the entire town, and centers in a cyclic, seasonal way on the few times they all come together: for fascist holidays, a funeral, a ritual bonfire, the greeting of the ocean liner. Gradisca (the voluptuous Turkish actress Magali No?l) makes the biggest impression on the audience; golden-haired Titta (Bruno Zanin) is meant to be the key figure and stand-in for Fellini himself... though, perhaps ungallantly, he is the only physically attractive male character in the entire film (most of his friends seem practically deformed). Indeed, since this is late Fellini there are more physical deformities among his characters than seem fully plausible; but this is all a memory play--showing us Rimini not as it actually was but as the artist remembers it. (This seems to account for the excess of bathroom and bedroom jokes, which are amusing but sometimes repetitive.) You do wish for more sometimes if you've seen Fellini's thematically similar, but far more richly scripted, I VITELLONI; but this is one of the later Fellini's best and most pleasing films.
DVD Review: emotionally resonant and visually memorable
Summary: 5 Stars
A Fellini movie is never about the "plot" -- it's about the images, the music, the mood and the vast tapestry of human lives being lived that he conjures. In this affectionate memoir of growing up during the Fascist era in a seaside town, the old master delivers a final, wistful performance. What we get here is a complete picture of an era shown through the eyes of an adolescent.
Yes, the familiar Fellini types inhabit this movie -- the women with massive breasts and bums, the toothless men, the priests, the temptestuous family members -- but in this movie the caricatures are toned down. A professorial narrator shows up from time to time, lecturing us on the history of the town -- and greeted with contemptuous farts by onlookers.
The music as usual is superb.
There is also a serious side to this gentle movie. The bumptious fascists are ridiculed for their ridiculous parades but they are also capable of serious abuse bordering on torture.
Of many stunning images, the scene of a huge luxury liner looming through the mists is perhaps the most memorable. But for me the final scene of a country wedding carried the biggest emotional wallop. The camera slowly retreats as the party breaks up until it is literally saying goodbye to the guests, the party, the memories -- and life itself. I don't know of any other scene in a movie that has the actual feel and quality of a memory.
DVD Review: Fellini in second gear
Summary: 4 Stars
Federico Fellini's 1973 Amarcord is a film that has often been linked with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander as films by old men looking back on their youth. While this is true, in the main, the fact is that Amarcord has a loose narrative structure, in which the lives of many characters are detailed in comic vignettes, whereas Fanny & Alexander is a straight drama. The film that Amarcord shares a deeper affinity with is one which was obviously influenced by it; Woody Allen's grossly underrated and terrific Radio Days. Which of those two films is better is debatable, although Allen's film is tighter, shorter, and a bit deeper in characterization. Allen's opening classroom scenes in Annie Hall also owe a debt to this film's school-based scenes. Amarcord is not a masterpiece, on par with earlier Fellini classics like Nights Of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, nor 8?, but it is a very good and enjoyable romp, which opened the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film that same year.
Reportedly, the proper Italian for `I remember' is `mi ricordo', but Fellini used his own native Romagnolo dialect's version of the term a m'arc?rd, to limn his lost boyhood in the coastal town of Rimini- which is the central character of the film. Regardless, the film he constructed is a very good one, which follows a year in the life of a town and its citizenry- from one spring to the next, although it heralded the weaker and even more loosely constructed films that ended his career. This is the last film that most cineastes even to bother arguing the greatness of. Yet, many of the labels applied to it simply are not correct- it is not surreal, for it is grounded in reality, even as flights of fancy take place; it is not a satire, even though there are satirical elements. The very impulse to always definitively characterize something as this or that, without allowing comfortable straddling of boundaries says more of the flaws of the critic than they do of the film. Also, despite the picaresque nature of the film it does not move too quickly. Most of the famed scenes plat out in seven to ten minute stretches where small details filter into the subconscious without even knowing it....The musical soundtrack, by Nino Rota, is stellar, and the best thing in the film, although the cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno is not far behind, especially in the sunset scene where Uncle Teo is coaxed down from the apple tree and back to the asylum. Yet, Amarcord succeeds because its totality is greater than any of its great to mediocre parts. It may not be a great film, but it is a great display of artistic excellence to marshal such disparate elements into a film that succeeds far more often than it doesn't. Federico Fellini, in this film, shows that he is a great artist, even when his art is not great.
Description of Amarcord (Criterion Collection)
Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 09/05/2006From moment to moment and shot by shot, Amarcord delivers more sheer pleasure than any other Federico Fellini movie. That's not to say it's his greatest film, or that anything in it rivals the emotional, lyrical, or metaphysical wallop of the finest passages in Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, La Strada, or even La Dolce Vita, the big early-'60s crossover hit that made the director king of the international film world. But Amarcord was the last clear triumph of Fellini's career, his prodigious gifts for phantasmagoria, amazing fluidity, and gregarious choreography all feeding an emotional core that caught at audiences' heartstrings and carried them away.
The title is supposed to mean "I remember," and the film is ostensibly a memory-dream-diary of life in the director's seaside hometown of Rimini during one year in the 1930s. But Fellini was an irrepressible showman who loved pulling the audience's collective chain, and Amarcord is no more straightforward as a recollection of his real adolescence than "amarcord" is a real word--Fellini made it up as a bit of pretend vernacular. So the strolling town historian who pops up occasionally to supply antiquarian footnotes directly to the camera more often than not gets pelted with snowballs from offscreen. Just as Nino Rota's (wonderful) music score recycles melodies from his scores for earlier Fellini masterworks, Fellini's movie is full of lyric ecstasies--spontaneous parades, comic ceremonies, eye-popping surrealist moments--that exist principally because that is what a Fellini movie is supposed to be like. There's no dominant story line, no individual character or player to be identified as the center of the film's swirling movement. Yet we do get to "know," and begin to cherish, literally dozens of goofy, eccentric, funny/sad creatures who have their distinct places in the continuum of Fellini's made-up town and reimagined Italy of a bygone era.
The era was, of course, that of Facsism. Fellini's take on Fascism here is anything but portentous; the giddy nationalism given voice occasionally by delirious crowds of townsfolk is no more sinister than the same crowd might have been in cheering on the local football team. In the movie's most famous set-piece, dozens of locals put out to sea in small boats to witness the passage of a fabulous ocean liner, the Rex, "the greatest construction of the regime." Waiting, they sleep--till suddenly the luminous (and entirely unreal) vision is towering above them, threatening to swamp them all. The moment is both ecstatic and terrifying. It's not the only one.
One last memory: In 1975 Amarcord received the Oscar for best foreign-language film of 1974. Since the film went into general U.S. release in '75, it was eligible for the Motion Picture Academy to turn around and nominate Fellini again, in '76, for best director and best original screenplay of 1975. He didn't win any further awards, but his repeat appearance in that year's Oscar derby occasioned an exquisite cultural moment: the young Steven Spielberg, realizing that he had not been cited for his direction of Jaws, gasping, "They gave my nomination to Fellini?!" --Richard T. Jameson
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