Amarcord (The Criterion Collection)
List Price:
Our Price: $21.00
You Save: $18.95 (47%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $15.99 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD releases
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: Armando Brancia, Ciccio Ingrassia, Magali Noël, Nando Orfei, Pupella MaggioBrand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Italian (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
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
Movie Reviews of Amarcord (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Irresistible and highly entertaining "art house flick"
Summary: 5 Stars
On a sheer entertainment basis, AMARCORD is probably about the most amiable and engaging "art house flick" we'll ever get. At the time of the film's release in 1973, director Federico Fellini claimed that the movie represented one year's worth of actual events drawn from his youth in 1930s Rimini. Actually, a lot of the story elements were brought in from other years, and some were simply made up. AMARCORD is almost entirely a studio movie, filmed inside Rome's gigantic Cinecitta complex. And Fellini's claim that the word "amarcord" meant "I remember" in the local dialect is not quite the case, though it's a near-anagram of a similar phrase.
But who cares? AMARCORD was a huge international hit, and for Fellini a return to form following the unpopular SATYRICON and the lackluster ROMA. Fellini fans will notice certain trademark effects in this film that echo successful earlier films like LA STRADA, LA DOLCE VITA and JULIET OF THE SPIRITS in the 1950s and 1960s: the eternal sea, the moaning wind, the deserted nighttime town square, the gigantic prostitute, and the trashy allure of pop culture all are celebrated here. His customary composer, Nino Rota, is in fine form, skilfully blending his unforgettable main theme for the movie with pop music from the 1930s like "Stormy Weather." The color in this film is not overblown and if anything is a trifle understated, as befits a memory piece (compare Woody Allen's RADIO DAYS).
AMARCORD does not consist of one unified plot so much as an interrleated cycle of vignettes, most of them humorous, that run chronologically from one spring to the next. Here Fellini makes no particular claim to Neo-Realism of the kind that dominated Italian films from the late 1940s to about 1960 (ncluding his own). A well-dressed, obviously erudite strolling narrator comes onscreen from time to time to introduce characters, historical data and incidents, OUR TOWN-style, but in a typical Fellinian touch gets heckled by unseen "hooligans," or pelted with snowballs that originated off-screen. This encourages a sense of not-quite-realism, reminding us that we are watching a "movie-movie" much more than a documentary. It's also quite funny. The narrator's charm and his walking tempo, gently buoyed by the swing of Rota's music, render the audience quite unaware that it is cleverly being led by the nose from one improbability to another (not at first viewing, anyway). And when that realization hits: well I, for one, forgive Fellini.
Most, but not all, of the vignettes center around a Fellini surrogate, red-headed Titta Biondi (Bruno Zanin) and his friends and family. The exploits and school hijinks among Titta's gang of horny Thirties teens provide a great deal of the irresistible humor that propels this warmly atmospheric film. But not everything is funny. A sequence showing the town's adult leaders in thrall to "fascinating Fascism" is ethically neutral, but balanced soon afterward by another scene that shows how brutally the local *Fascisti* could be when they encounter someone who isn't one hundred percent with them -- grim but yet a little funny in a typically Fellinian way. Nonetheless the point about the dangers of authoritarianism is well made, and the film takes on a little greater purpose than just consisting of a string of comic sketches.
While I realize the Criterion version is not cheap, there are numerous bells-and-whistles. Of special interest is a longish essay in book form written by Fellini while recuperating from heart surgery (a couple of years after AMARCORD), and in which he reveals many of the inspirations for AMARCORD's comic vignettes, as well as the origin of his love for all things theatrical. Fellini fans should certainly go for this one. DVD viewers who are new to the master and expect more of an existential, less essentially comic tone to their art-house classics might want to go instead for the heartrending LA STRADA (1954) or the often witty, but essentially serious critique of modern society in LA DOLCE VITA (1960).
Summary of Amarcord (The 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
Beauty and The Beast (The Criterion Collection)MARAIS,JEAN; Release date: 2003-02-11; DVD
Best price: $24.47
Price in other shops:
Fanny and Alexander (The Criterion Collecton Theatrical & Television Version)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2004-11-16; DVD
Best price: $35.99
Price in other shops:
Breathless (The Criterion Collection)IMG; Release date: 2007-10-23; DVD
Best price: $24.47
Price in other shops:
The Lady Vanishes (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2007-11-20; DVD
Best price: $21.49
Price in other shops:
The Seventh Seal (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2009-06-16; DVD
Best price: $18.71
Price in other shops:
The Rules of the Game (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2004-01-20; DVD
Best price: $20.49
Price in other shops:
The Leopard (The Criterion Collection)IMG; Release date: 2004-06-08; DVD
Best price: $28.20
Price in other shops:
The 400 Blows (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2006-05-09; DVD
Best price: $17.63
Price in other shops:
La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition)Koch International; Release date: 2004-09-21; DVD
Best price: $11.99
Price in other shops:
8 1/ 2 (The Criterion Collection)HVC; Release date: 2001-12-04; DVD
Best price: $17.20
Price in other shops: