Amarcord

Fellini on Memory

Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened.

We need to distinguish between recollection and memory. There are two kinds of memory, one Proustian, the other Platonic. Recollection or remembrance of things past is banal: events can be recalled or they can be invented, as I’ve done in the majority of my films. Memory on the other hand, is like the soul: it lives before birth. Take Plato’s Phaedo and the slave boy for example. Socrates demonstrates that the untaught child knows Euclid and Pythagoras. In that sense, I too was a slave boy: my Socrates was Rossellini and what I knew intuitively was cinema. Child Federico was father to the man. Memory doesn’t express itself through recollection. It’s a mysterious indefinable component urging us to enter into contact with dimensions, events, sensations we can’t name but that we know, however confusedly, existed before us.

An Artist lives in his memory, constantly remembering people, places and situations that never have existed in the context of his life. The obligation to express in focused on the invention of memories/.

I don’t have a memory of personal recollections. It’s simply more natural for me to invent my own, inspired by the memory of lives and events that never existed, but which feeds on them or calls them into existence. I invented everything including my birth. And this invented self is the only true self I see reflected in the mirror of my films. I invented my youth, my family, relationship with women and with life. I have always invented. The irrepressible urge to invent is because I don’t want anything autobiographical in my films.

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I am a born liar. For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented

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When I was a teenager, I fell in love with movies by falling in love with the movies of Federico Fellini. This week, I noticed that the Cinema du Parc intended to screen La Strada and Amarcord, two of Fellini's best, later this month. So I couldn't resist drawing them to movie mavens attention.

La Strada (1954) was Fellini's first great film, filled with the kind of stuff he used in movie after movie: the circus, the parade, the Jesus figure suspended against the sky, the trumpet (Nino Rota, borrowing Donizetti), the Chaplinesque waif, the carney figures, the seashore. All of them recur again in Amarcord, made 20 years later. So here are two movies that bookend Fellini at the top of his game, his first great one and his last.

Martin Scorsese, who is behind the La Strada's re-release, recalls in a recent article for the New York Times,

"I was enthralled by the film's resolution, where the power of the spirit overwhelms brute force... essentially a story of redemption rooted in the religious aesthetic. The simplicity of the plot harks back to the medieval morality play and, as Marcus points out, to the tradition of commedia dell'arte, with its stock roles and clownish costumes.

The NYT's Vincent Canby once wrote of Amarcord:

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.

Roger Ebert:

"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.

I also attach a short excerpt, remember my own first encounter with La Strada, from my unpublished memoir. Plus some notes I prepared for the McGill MILR session I moderated on Amarcord this winter

Thank goodness movies can distract us from this soggy summer,

peter

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From My Life the Movie

I explain to my son these days, ‘I’m a refugee from the 40s.’
‘When was that, Dad?’
‘Shortly after the Shakespearean Age... just before television...’
“OH, right... no TELEVISION when you were a kid?... got it, Dad. Back then, what was that like?’
‘Back when we used sundials…’

So nutty was I about Federico Fellini’s La Strada, I watched it unsubtitled in Toronto's Little Italy, understanding not a word of Italian. Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina seeking redemption, a saint working as sinner, a sentimentalist who’s one tough cookie. My bar crowd reminded me of her. She reminded me of them: funny, courageous, sassy low-life, with spunk to thwart the righteous.

Fellini converted me into a movie buff. I became an habitué of a lowlife demi-monde at a time when the drinking age was 21. I greased my hair into a Duck Butt. I wore drapes. I smoked Buckinghams. While pals were clambering after private school fairy princesses, I was falling in love with love, my hormones jouncing like olive oil on a hot skittle. I courted high-energy brainy cool-cat bar babes that got the joke. These wild things were hipsters with their untamed shag, their me-deep uninhibited, fantastical, oft-repeated hardscrabble anecdotes. One was the daughter of Holocaust survivors; another, the abandoned child of Polish Commies deported back to Poland stranding her alone in Canada at 15 years of age; a third, was half-Chinese, a runaway from her South African Baptist God-Squadders.

‘D’ya ever find God’, I once asked her.

‘Not yet, she said, but when I do, I’m plannin’ on givin’ Him a whuppin’ He won’t soon forget’.

Each trip to the York Theatre, a Toronto art house, was a pilgrimage involving elaborate faith, myth and ritual. I snoogled into eroticized screen worlds: South America (Black Orpheus, Wages of Fear), Japan (Woman in the Dunes), France (Lady Chatterley’s Lover), Sweden (Wild Strawberries). Movie parables mind-altered my Methodist values on life and death, female and male, good and evil, Heaven and Hell. Apostates warred against cowardice, avarice, ignorance: High Noon, On the Waterfront, Inherit the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird. As a consequence, I’ve adhered to the Gospel According to St. Cinema for, oh, the last sixty years.