Memory and remembrance
by Paolo Valassi
Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973) is, right from the title, the classic example of a film inspired by memories, by memory (“a m'arcord” in the Romagna dialect means “I remember” and is an expression that has now entered common parlance as well as all dictionaries, not just Italian ones).
The film, whose screenplay is by Fellini himself and the great Tonino Guerra is made up of a series of episodes linked to the authors’ childhood: the transatlantic Rex, the passage of the Mille Miglia, the arrival of the fascist hierarch, the snowfall with snow 2 meters high.
The film is populated by immortal characters: the tobacconist, Gradisca, Volpina, the grandfather who gets lost in the fog, the crazy uncle who shouts from the top of a tree “I want a womaaaaan !!!”, the sheik who is just over a meter tall and arrives with his harem.
Fellini, as always, shoots the film almost entirely in the studio because to make memories universal and immortal it is necessary not so much to be “realistic” as to build the atmosphere, the feeling, to free oneself from reality and elevate oneself to poetry. So here is the Rex (which has never passed in front of the Romagna coast), the 2-meter high snow (never seen in those areas, but for a child even a few centimeters seem like an enormous amount), the immense tree that looks like an African baobab where the crazy uncle takes refuge, the magnificent peacock that magically appears out of nowhere during the snowball fight, etc.
Radio Days (1987), by Woody Allen is the Jewish-New York version of Amarcord. Like its “progenitor”, Radio Days is a film without a plot; Allen, a great admirer of Fellini, creates a series of episodes inspired by childhood, family and school memories, each linked to one of the important songs of his youth.
Fellini remembers (or thinks he remembers) the passage of the Rex in front of Rimini; Woody Allen remembers when he went in front of the ocean to try to spot the German U-Boots. Once he even thought he saw one. But maybe that was just a trick of memory.
But then, in the end, what does it matter?