Amarcord

Friday, August 12 - Sunday, August 14, 2016

35mm print!

“AMARCORD…may possibly be Federico 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.

AMARCORD has close associations to Mr. Fellini’s last two films, The Clowns and Roma, both memoirs of a sort, but the likeness turns out to be superficial on closer inspection. This production combines the free form and make-believe splendor of those two films with the comic, bittersweet feeling for character and narrative we remember from some of his best films of the nineteen-fifties… There is no single central character, but an uproariously unruly procession of them. There are Titta (Bruno Zanin), a boy in his teens who could be the young Fellini; Titta’s father (Armando Brancia), a terrible-tempered construction foreman who insists on wearing his Socialist tie every time the Fascists hold a local rally; Gradisca (Magali Noel), the town hairdresser, a silly, pretty, immaculately groomed (she even wears her saucy red beret to bed) femme fatale who dreams of Gary Cooper but settles down with a stodgy policeman.

…The movie is awash in the kind of poetic artifice that Mr. Fellini loves and that has become increasingly rare these days when most directors insist on working in actual locations.

…AMARCORD is as full of tales as Scherherazade, some romantic, some slapstick, some elegiacal, some bawdy, some as mysterious as the unexpected sight of a peacock flying through a light snowfall. It’s a film of exhilarating beauty.” –New York Times

Part of the series Fellini, July 1-September 25

• Country Italy
• Year 1973
• Director Federico Fellini

IFC Center does not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, as sensitivities vary from person to person. In addition to the synopses, trailers and other links on our website, further information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media, IMDb and DoesTheDogDie.com as well as through general internet searches.