Revisiting Fellini's "Amarcord" (1973)

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.

---