Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973)[i] offers unique historical insight well before its time. Made in an
autobiographical mode - the title literally means “I remember” - the film
recounts the memories of growing up in the small Italian sea-town of Rimini in
the backdrop of 1930s Fascist Italy. Following an episodic narrative structure (like most films of Fellini), the
film teems with colourful characters, most of them being ordinary people, each
with a story of its own to tell but the film is significantly without any
single protagonist. While the characters live out their love, desire and
fantasies in Rimini, one character stands out – a lawyer posing as the official
historian of the municipality. Others are casually dressed but he is always
impeccably, formally dressed and always addresses the camera (unlike others),
eager to narrate the history of the small town by locating it in the grand tradition of the Roman Empire:
…The origins of this town
are lost in the mists of time. In the Municipal Museum, there are stone
implements…that date back to prehistoric times. I myself have found some
graffiti of the Great Age on the walls of caves in Count Lovignano’s estate. Be
that as it may, the first certain date is 268 BC, when this became a Roman
colony… [Someone farts offscreen.] …The divine poets Dante, Pascoli and
D’Annunzio and many others have sung praises to this land while numerous of its
citizens have contributed greatly to the arts, science, religion and politics.
[Someone farts again.]
Not only is there a popular
irreverence (expressed through scatological humour) towards the pompousness and
absurdity of ‘official history’, the myriad lives affirm their existence, as it
were, all of whom are part of that inclusive, utopian space of Fellini’s Rimini, far from the ramparts
of Roman History. Fellini is here,
unselfconsciously and intuitively, doing postmodern history, displacing and
subverting grander versions of History through sarcasm and irony and opening up
the floodgates to innumerable micro-histories: his-story, her-story, histories.
This is also the agenda at the heart of postcolonial historical practice.
When Rimini is enveloped by snow, the
town historian in Amarcord, still
under the spell of “monumental history”,
rises to tell the ‘story’ again in grandiose terms:
This will go down as the
Year of the Big Snow. Since the Ice Age, it never snowed so heavily in our
town. It snowed in 1541, then in 1694...
By now, we know, the ‘historian’ is
talking ‘baloney’. It is interesting that the only two characters in the film
who talk directly to the camera are the town-idiot and the historian. The boys
have to stop the historian by throwing snowballs at him.
