Amarcord (DVD)
Federico Fellini returned to the provincial landscape of his childhood with this carnivalesque reminiscence, recreating his hometown of Rimini in Cinecittà’s studios and rendering its daily life as a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political subterfuge. Sketching a gallery of warmly observed comic caricatures, Fellini affectionately evokes a vanished world haloed with the glow of memory, even as he sends up authority figures representing church and state, satirizing a country stultified by Fascism. Winner of Fellini’s fourth Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Amarcord remains one of the director’s best-loved creations, beautifully weaving together Giuseppe Rottuno’s colorful cinematography, Danilo Donati’s extravagant costumes and sets, and Nino Rota’s nostalgia-tinged score.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Audio commentary by film scholars Peter Brunette and Frank Burke
- American release trailer
- Deleted scene
- Fellini’s Homecoming, a forty-five-minute documentary on the complicated relationship between the celebrated director, his hometown, and his past
- Interview with star Magali Noël
- Fellini’s drawings of characters in the film
- Felliniana, a presentation of ephemera devoted to Amarcord, from the collection of Don Young
- Archival audio interviews of Fellini and his friends and family, by critic Gideon Bachmann
- Restoration demonstration
- Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
- PLUS: An essay by scholar Sam Rohdie, author of Fellini Lexicon, and, for the Blu-ray edition, Fellini’s 1967 essay “My Rimini”
- Cover illustration by Caitlin Kuhwald, design by Eric Skillman