Amarcord (1973)

In 1966, while convalescing from the illness that led him to suspend the project of Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, Fellini wrote a diary of memories of his hometown, Rimini.

Seven years later, it was the basis on which Tonino Guerra, the extraordinary screenwriter of Italian cinema, composed the text that would give rise to Amarcord.

Set in the metaphorical village of Borgo, a clear allusion to Rimini, built in Studio 5 of Cinecittá, it describes a year, from spring to spring, in that small micro-world, during the '30s, under the imprint of fascism prior to the second war.

To say that this is the most perfect synthesis of Fellini's cinema would not be fair to other films of his, but it does converge many of his ideas expressed in films such as I vitelloni, 8 y medio, E la nave va, among others: Because a consolidated author, with a deep literary base like Fellini's, who was a screenwriter for many years, obsessively pursues certain themes, renewing his gaze and his rhetoric.

Certain pedestrian critics have placed Fellini in the discourse of excess, of a certain surrealism, of grotesque humor, of the mocking wink, without realizing that the author's gaze far surpasses these clichés.

Fellini is a great tragic who smiles; who challenges the basic preconditions of society: desire, seduction, eroticism, power, imposture, loyalty, and never ceases to question the impossibility of love.

All this is in Fellini, and in Amarcord, with its small-town vignettes, its misery and its charm.

The sentimental initiation of Titta, the protagonist, in that sea of mediocrity and frustrations, trying to understand the world inhabited by his desired Gradisca (Magalí Noel, the only outstanding actress in the cast; the rest are provincial actors or untrained countrymen), the newsagent with the huge tits, the school teachers, his crazed family, the blind man and the whole court of miracles that surrounds him, underpin a perverse system of understanding the world and life, of which Fellini is a fierce critic, without spilling any slogans.

The extraordinary Amarcord, with its fabulous and distant transatlantic liner, the Grand Rex, or the visit of the fascist hierarch, accompanied by the unforgettable music of Nino Rota, among other details, has left images engraved in fire in a couple of generations.

The Oscar for best foreign film in 1974 was obvious; but as it happens with few works, Fellini's originality, and that very personal way of observing images, beings, situations, and listening to the voices of the Emilian-Romagno dialect (from which the title of the film derives), have made it eternal as Rome.