PARTISAN REVIEW
585
the witch of winter, where we meet most of the characters of the piece.
Gradisca, the town's tacky local beauty, is presented to us as the spirit of
spring. A man passing in the street offers himself as narrator, talking into
the camera, a risky self-conscious device brought offby the film's physical
beauty and energy.
At a certain point in his career, a director may achieve an authority that
makes anything he does, no matter how apparently whimsical, seem inevitable
and right. Bunuel's absurdist
The Phantom of Liberty
is informed by that
kind of authority and so is
Amarcord.
Fellini's characteristic obsessions
appear here in recognizable variation. Old themes and characters recur as
if all of the director's films were merely extensions of the same work. They
pass before us like the figures in the dance at the end of
8lh:
the restless
horny schoolboys, the fat mama who offers sexual initiation, failed com–
munications between fathers and sons, the dying saintly mother, the gallery
of grotesques, midget nuns, men dressed as women, golden-hearted
whores, comic priests, the playoff of sacred and profane.
Amarcord
is made up of a number of loosely related comic and lyrical
fragments, held together by the authority of Fellini's craft. In the most
memorable scene of the film, a gentle loony, taken on a Sunday picnic by his
family, climbs unnoticed to the top of a tree and refuses to come down,
shouting from his perch, "I want a woman." This assertion of selfhood, the
desperate human need of a creature perceived as less than human is both
comic and affecting-a piece of Fellini's vision at its most eloquent.
I don't know
ifAmarcord
is a major film in Fellini's canon, but at the very
least it is a lovely minor one and a reminder that grandiose projects are not
necessarily more subst;mtial than modest ones. Fellini is an autobiographi–
cal director who reveals himself not through confession but like Bergman
and Bunuel through authorial signature and obsession.
Amarcord
rides
closer to the source of Fellini's gifts and vision than anything he has done
since
Nights of Cabiria.
