born in a fog
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Federico
Fellini and Tonino Guerra (story and screenplay), Federico Fellini (director) Amarcord / 1973, USA 1974
Nature
is very busy in the small Italian town of Borgo San Giuliano where the action of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord takes place. The film begins
with manine or “puffballs” brought in by the wind, presaging Spring, while
exciting nearly all the towns inhabitants whom we soon meet. Later, the hot
winds and rains dominate, followed by a deep fog in which one of the minor
characters, the central figure Titta’s grandfather (Giuseppe Ianigro) gets lost
directly in front of the gate to his son’s house. For several days, as winter
returns, it heavily snows. The film ends, once more, with the puffballs flying
across space.
Indeed, in a town committed to and
dominated by the Fascists, including his disobedient son, only Aurelio speaks
out against Mussolini, who, with great, unintentionally comic, fanfare visits Borgo
San Giuliano and, with great pomp and circumstance, determines to display his
prowess at the billiards table at the very moment when the city goes dark, while
a recording of the Internationale plays
unheeded in the town’s bell tower. Aurelio, the prime suspect, is punished by
being forced to swallow a bottle of castor oil, producing the expected results,
while his back is lashed.
Yet even this incident of true violence
and humiliation seems to impress no one in the world of adolescent group jerks,
fart sounds, snow-ball fights, and bellicose pronuciamentos. To comprehend just
how forgiving Fellini is of the emotionally unstable and politically blind fellow
citizens of his memory, one need only compare Amarcord with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló which also depicts a group of school children “abducted” by
adults taking advantage of the Fascist creed, or Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, which begins with the
rape of a wealthy young boy by his chauffeur, to realize that instead of
presenting the character’s absurd childishness as part and parcel of the
voyeuristic, masochistic and sadist extensions of the government’s political
values, Fellini himself “remembers” as if observing the past of his childhood
through a near-impenetrable fog.
Yet, these same men and women, Fellini
makes clear, are not only lost in their world, but are entrapped. Only two
citizens from Borgo San Giuliano escape, the loving Miranda, Titta’s mother,
who dies—consumed by the demands of her family—and the well-endowed, derriere-displaying
Grandisca, who joyfully marries a soldier—a man likely to be killed or, at the
very least, imprisoned during or after the war. Everyone else is trapped, not
only in the past time but in a space that, as Titta’s grandfather declares, nobody
can know where they are. Even if the memory in which they exist is a loving and
forgiving one, in terms of real time, these figures were damned by the very world
in which they came into existence, a world which was, after all, not a natural
world, despite the natural human behaviors and the conditions of nature around
them to which they so readily abandoned themselves. In 1944 the Rex was shot by
123 RAF aircraft rockets, the ship, rolling over onto its portside, sinking
into the waters below; the future was obliterated almost before it had begun.
Los Angeles, September 13, 2014.
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