Home

“I’m a liar, but an honest one. People reproach me for not always telling the same story in the same way. But this happens because I’ve invented the whole tale from the start and it seems boring to me and unkind to other people to repeat myself.”

Amarcord Theatrical Poster

Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), the fourteenth of his twenty-one films and arguably the last of his great films1 is about adolescence, memory and story. Many of Fellini’s films draw on memory and they all depict or enact stories (some clear and linear; some, like Amarcord, episodic), but this is the only film in which the work of memory and the variety of stories it contains are themselves subjects of the film itself. It is the only one of his films composed of remembered stories, fanciful stories, and stories within recited stories that are themselves remembered stories.

That is perhaps why Fellini titled this film Amarcord (“A m’arcôrd”, “I remember” in Romagnol) rather than Lesuzest (“L’è suzëst”, “It happened” in the same language). He makes no objective truth claims here. Several times he visually reminds us of that, most notably in a long scene when the entire town goes into the Adriatic in a variety of boats to see the ocean liner Rex: the ship looks like it is made of cardboard with little lights behind the windows and the water looks like plastic sheeting – which they are. He wanted it to look unreal.2. “Many even said, ‘I was there. I went out in the boat. I saw the Rex.’ Because the imagination of a man like Fellini is so extraordinary that it immediately seems more real than reality itself.” In Fellini’s Homecoming (Criterion, 2006), produced by Issa Clubb.]

Amarcord

Behind the Scenes of Amarcord

The apparent central character in Amarcord is an adolescent boy named “Titta,” not “Federico.” He doesn’t appear in every scene or sketch. Some of the film’s many stories are based on things Federico Fellini remembered from his teen-age years in Rimini; some are stories he heard, or imagined. The experiences of the film’s Titta are in large part a mixture of Fellini’s and those of his lifelong friend, Luigi “Titta” Benzi. The family depicted is Benzi’s, not Fellini’s. Fellini even asked the real Titta to play his own father in the film. 3

The events depicted in Amarcord occur over the course of a single year: the film begins and ends with the air full of just-released poplar seeds. The only shot in the film full of poplars is late in the film, when Titta’s mother is being taken to the graveyard. Fellini dates Amarcord with banners for an endurance road race that is the setting for an important segment in the film, the “VII Mille Miglia,” a race that had its first running in 1927.

Amarcord contains annual events, singular events, seasonal events, rituals and characters who come and go: a freak week-long July snowstorm; the whole town taking part in burning La Vecchia, the old Witch of Winter in the piazza on the evening on mid-Lent Thursday; the funeral of Titta’s mother; an imagined marriage and the real marriage of Gradisca (object of Titta’s adolescent erotic imagination and the town sexpot); an ill-tempered blind accordionist; a priest more concerned with floral arrangements than confession; a huge tobacconist with massive breasts; a motorcyclist who never lifts his goggles and who zooms through the piazza again and again (probably the source for Jeff Goldblum’s motorcyclist in Robert Altman’s Nashville [1975]); an algebra teacher, almost always in a tight wool sweater; a photographer with a view camera on a tripod; and the town nymphomaniac, Volpina, always in green.

The Tobacconist Amarcord

Volpina Amarcord

We see some stories happen, as in other films, but some are told: people look straight into the lens, breaking the fourth wall and address us directly: a lawyer who purports to give historical facts, a nut who sometimes loses his train of thought; Biscein, a vegetable-seller who not only addresses us but figures in one of the lawyer’s stories and who, at the end, sends us on our way (much like Matthew Broderick’s character at the end of John Hughes’ Ferris Buelller’s Day Off [1986]). We see stories told by others which may or may not have happened but which are, in and of themselves, facts: that story was told. 

And we see depicted memories, such as the day Titta’s family takes mad Uncle Teo for an outing from the sanitorium. Teo climbs a fig tree and throws stones at anyone who comes near, yelling for five hours, “Voglio una donna!”: “I want a woman.” He gets one: a dwarf nun, who tells him to get out of the tree. He does, smiling, as she leads him into an ambulance for a ride back to the sanitorium. It is the second-longest segment of the film (15 minutes).

Voglio una donna Amarcord

If the film has a structural model, it is the circus, which Fellini adored. Most scenes don’t result from and lead into the scenes preceding and following them (as in most narrative film). They simply occur before the scenes preceding and following them: there is a fade to black and, like the circus, something entirely different happens next; some of the scenes are big complex acts; some are sketches. What ties it all together are the individuals we encounter, many of whom turn up in several of the acts, and many of whom sometimes appear in the same act, as when a regional fascist official visits the town, the flotilla goes to see the Rex, and when Gradisca gets married.

Films within the Film

Fellini loves movies as much as the circus, and so do the residents of his remembered Rimini. Characters in the film address and refer to the owner of the town’s movie theater, Cinema Fulgor, as “Ronald Coleman”; he wears a trench coat and hat similar to the one that British actor often wore in films. (In “Rimini, My Home Town,” Fellini describes him the same way.) 

Amarcord

Gradisca appears beside a Gary Cooper poster at Cinema Fulgor. In another scene, someone says, “You’re the greatest, Gradisca. Greta Garbo’s got nothing on you!” At her wedding, someone toasts, “Our Gradisca is leaving us. She found her Gary Cooper. Though Gary Cooper is a cowboy, while Matteo is a carabiniere. But love is love all the same. Good luck, Gradisca.”4 In confession, Titta refers to a belt buckle “Like the detectives in the Dick Powell-Myrna Loy pictures.” One of the silent (to the priest, not to us) memories Titta has during that confession is about him putting his hand on Gradisca’s thigh while they are the only two people watching Gary Cooper in Lives of a Bengal Lancer at Cinema Fulgor.

The day after Titta sees a western film, his father, Aurelio, berates him for pissing from the balcony on the hat of someone below. In later scenes within the theater, we see no balcony: memory is no prisoner to consistency.

We see a poster for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers outside Cinema Fulgor. The lead-in to an epic summer snowfall shows the theater full, everybody bouncing around in response to what seems to be happening in Africa. In another scene, a carriage arrives in the piazza with the town’s madam and four new whores; while the town’s people ogle the whores, the madam talks to the carriage driver about film actor Wallace Beery. 

And in a scene where we see the town shutting down for the night, the primary image is the lights of Cinema Fulgor going out: the lobby, the posters, the theater’s sign itself.

The Narrative Line

Other than the seasons bracketed by the just-released puffy poplar seeds, there is only one linear action in the film: for most of it, Titta is a tall boy in short pants, often playing with his friends or being a kid in the family; just before his mother’s death he goes to knickerbockers. It would be common for boys to wear shorts in summer and knickerbockers in winter, but we see him wearing them at Gradisca’s summer wedding. In that entire final episode of the film we see him only once, from a distance, when he calls to some adults leaving in carriages that he’s going with them. He’s not yet an adult (no long pants), but he’s no longer one of the playing boys, either. 

The way the wedding dribbles off into fragmented movements of characters we don’t or hardly know and Titta’s nearly total absence from that final sequence isn’t simply Fellini winding his movie down. It’s also about the way memory works: there are the events and characters and stories you remember well, then there are the connections you do not have, a place you are no longer part of. The wedding scene is the edge of the adult Titta’s remembering. He doesn’t even enter the mock wedding enacted by his friends, one of whom wears falsies and a bridal headdress. He is outside of it and then he is gone, while they linger about, aimlessly. Biscein says to the lens, “Goodbye to you all. Go home.” Gradisca and her new husband leave. One of Titta’s playmates, his ragazzi, shouts, “Where’s Titta?” “He left a while ago,” another replies. Indeed he did. Shortly thereafter, to the sound of wind, it all fades to the final black.

Amarcord

Amarcord

The Visit of the Fascist Functionary

The longest sequence in the film – the arrival of the Fascist functionary and the rest of that day – begins 45 minutes into the film and runs 16 minutes; it ends a few minutes before the film’s midpoint. It is the film’s centerpiece. Even though it is comic and at moments absurd, it is a serious critique of Fascism and the ease with which ordinary Italians submitted to it. The sequence has three parts, the first of which involves more people doing more things than any other part of the film. 

It begins at the train station’s “Arrivi” portal. People are lined up, many of them characters we’ve seen before but now in uniform. There are three very old men in Garibaldi redshirts, like veterans of long-ago wars at patriotic parades everywhere. The photographer is there with his big camera on its tripod. A band plays. Smoke belches from the portal. 

“There he is!” Gradisca shouts. She is seeing nothing: no one is there yet. The area fills with darker smoke, then a short man in sashed uniform, bracketed by others without sashes, emerges, barely visible in the smoke. He makes a speech: “Comrades! Hail Il Duce! We hail Il Duce with grateful hearts and the Fascist salute. The greeting of Imperial Rome that shows us the path of destiny that Fascist Italy must follow.” The crowd cheers. He and his group jog absurdly through the town. “Let me touch him! I want to touch him! Long live Il Duce!” cries an ecstatic Gradisca. More and more townsfolk join the jogging group.

Several characters address the lens directly, as characters might in a propaganda film. The local Fascist leader says, “Ninety-nine per cent of the population are party members. We have 1,200 Young Fascist boys and 3,000 Young Fascist girls.” The algebra teacher, in demure dark uniform suit, cap and tie and white shirt, says, “This marvelous enthusiasm makes us young and yet so old at the same time. Young, because Fascism has rejuvenated our blood with glowing ideals from ancient times.” A man in uniform says, “All I can say is Mussolini’s got two balls THIS big!” His hands reach to the edges of the screen. The tobacconist (a very large woman who, in another scene, almost suffocates Titta by pulling his head between her huge breasts), dressed exactly as the math teacher, is in the parade, with the priest behind her. The lawyer, who throughout the film directly addresses the lens with historical facts and local legends, tells us, “Today, April 21st, we celebrate the birth of Rome, the Eternal City. What does that mean? That we must respect the monuments, the ruins that Rome has left us, which is what I’ve done all along, despite being razzed at night.” 

The joggers climb a flight of steps, stop, and turn. The visiting official says “Do we not see, on this glorious, sun-filled day [the crowd cheers and does the Fascist salute] that the Italian sun, forever free, [they salute and cheer again] is a divine sign that the heavens are on our side?” [they salute and cheer again].

Cut to Titta’s house. His father, Aurelio, is at the front gate, which is locked. He calls out to his wife: “Miranda. Who locked the gate?” “I did,” she says. It is, she says, to keep him away from the event. “Why is it whenever there’s a rally I have to stay home?” he pouts.

Back to the rally. An official speaks from a high podium, surrounded by banners. He yells numbers and children do exercises with rifles. The bannered visitor, the local Fascist leader and others are in a grandstand, looking on approvingly. “These youths are as sturdy as rock,” the bannered visitor says. Girls do exercises with hoops. A huge disembodied face of Mussolini is pulled erect. They salute it. The boys raise their rifles and the girls raise their hoops; they chant “Duce! Duce!” 

Then we see the smiling face of Ciccio, the plumpest member of Titta’s group of friends. Throughout the film, we see him mooning at or trying to get the attention of a girl named Aldina Cortini, who always responds with disdain. A voice says “Young Fascist Ciccio Marconi, [he bows his head, smiling] do you wish to marry Young Fascist Aldina Cortini?” He nods, smiles, straightens up. Cut to the huge face of Mussolini, made of red and white flowers. The lips move. “And you, Young Fascist Aldina Cordini, do you wish to marry Young Fascist Ciccio Marconi?” Now they are side by side, Ciccio in his T-shirt, rifle at his shoulder, Aldina in a veiled wedding dress, his friends behind them with raised rifles. She nods “Yes” smiles and turns to him. They kiss. The friends yell “Bravo Ciccio!” With boys on one side raising their rifles and girls on the other raising their hoops (all dressed in white shirts, the boys in black shorts, the girls in black skirts), Ciccio and Aldina stand on a red carpet, facing the floral face of Il Duce. Papers fly and church bells ring. Then the camera returns to him in the “real” remembered world, out of his fantasy now, still beaming in delight.

Amarcord

A cut to the piazza at night, people still in uniform, then the café, with the visiting official, the local fascist official and some others, including Lallo (Titta’s mother’s brother) in uniform. The official is about to make a difficult pool shot. The lights go out. Someone has placed a phonograph in the bell tower. It is playing a recording of the “Internationale.” Someone says, “What’s that?” Another voice responds: “The anthem of subversives.” 

The officials tell everyone to go home. Lallo, now in the street, yells, “Titta!” He spots the gramophone in the bell tower. The Fascists start shooting at it. Some of their shots hit the bell. One finally hits the gramophone, which crashes to the ground. Torches light the floral face of Il Duce. They sing: “To arms. We are Fascists. We fight the Communists. GOD – COUNTRY – FAMILY.”

Cut to Titta’s father, Aurelio, being interrogated by the local Fascist leader about his belief in Fascism and knowledge of the phonograph. They force him to drink castor oil. An older man in a wheel chair wearing a scarf and several medals says, “This is what saddens us. The utter refusal to understand. Why? Why?” They force more castor oil down Aurelio’s throat. 

At the house, Titta’s mother is anxiously waiting outside. Aurelio staggers along the outside wall of the property. She gets him inside and gives him a bath. Titta comes to the door and says “God, he stinks,” then runs off laughing. Aurelio says “If the person who squealed is who I think it was [cutaway shot of Lallo in bed in his hairnet, eyes open], he better move to another continent or I’ll eat his guts out! I’ll have his balls for dinner! Traitorous son of a bitch!” Aurelio goes into the bedroom and slams the door. Lallo turns over in bed; we see his uniform jacket and boots next to it. Cut to Miranda sobbing. Fade to black.

In that 16-minute segment, Fellini has not only presented a powerful satire of the rhetoric of the Fascist government and the town’s slavish response to it, but betrayal within a family and Ciccio’s fantasy wedding. Titta hasn’t a clue about what is going on; Fellini was very much aware of it. There is a real component to all of this: a regional fascist official did arrive in Rimini to much fanfare and one of the boys did have a maddening crush on Aldina (whose real name was Bianchina). But that boy was not plump Ciccio; it was Federico Fellini.5

Fellini

That three-part sequence is, for Fellini, the heart of the film. All the fascinating, amusing, whimsical, simple, complex, comical and sad events in the film’s sketches and acts occurred against a background of Mussolini’s fascism. “Fascism and adolescence,” Fellini said,

continue to be, in a certain measure, permanent historical seasons of our lives: adolescence of our individual life, fascism of our national life. That is, this remaining children for eternity, this leaving responsibilities for others, this living with the comforting sensation that there is someone who thinks for you (and one time it’s mother, then it’s father, then the mayor, another Il Duce, another time the Madonna, another time the Bishop, in short other people): and in the meanwhile, you have this limited, time-wasting freedom which permits you only to cultivate absurd dreams – the dream of the American cinema, or the Oriental dream concerning woman, in conclusion, the same old monstrous, out-of-date myths that even today seem to me to form the most important conditioning of the average Italian.6

Fantasies 

Ciccio’s is not the only fantasy in Amarcord.

When the cars of the VII Mille Miglia roar through the piazza at night, the town’s people cheer on the drivers, some of whose names they know and call out; they hold up encouraging placards. The camera zooms in on Titta and his friends; Titta is lighted more brightly than the others. There is a cut to a crowd of adoring women greeting the winner: Titta, in a white suit, red car, goggles up, waving and smiling. Gradisca, dressed in white, blows him kisses. He waves her into the car. She jumps in, wiggles her hips (there are many shots in the film of Gradisca from behind), he puts the goggles over his eyes, and off they go while people applaud. 

Ciccio sees Aldina on a balcony with a boy he knows she likes. He looks miserable. Then, in imaginative time, he is driving a blue racer, calling her name. She rises and smiles. He puts a fist on a forearm and crooks his elbow in the universal “Fuck you” sign. He smiles and drives on, white scarf billowing behind him. 

That scene ends with something bizarre and unexplained: some men are at a café, watching the race. One jumps up, runs into the road and picks up a human ear.7

Gradisca and the Grand Hotel

Many of the memorable characters in the film – the motorcyclist, the nymphomaniac Volpina, the foul-tempered blind accordionist, the photographer with his tripod – appear often but are never fully developed as characters; we don’t enter their stories; they are simply vital parts of the ostensibly remembered world of Rimini in 1933. They were around when other things were happening.

The most important of these is Gradisca, who was a real person.

Fellini said

Outside the café Commercio Gradisca used to walk. Dressed in black satin that flashed in a steely, glittery way, she was one of the first to wear false eyelashes. Even in winter, Gradisca looked as if she had just stepped out of a band-box, with curls, the first permanent wave. She was known as Gradisca (her real name was quite different) because it seems that once, when a Prince of the blood royal had stopped in Rimini, she had been suggested to him as a woman who knew how to behave respectfully when the occasion demanded it. When she was naked before the Prince, careful of what she had been told she offered herself with the words [sic] ‘Gradisca!’ [May it please you!]8

In the film, we get that legend from the lawyer. It is one of two stories he tells us about The Grand Hotel: “They say Gradisca was here once and it was because of that highly improbable adventure that she came to be called Gradisca. Her real name is Ninola. But one winter night three years ago…” As he speaks, an old man behind him in a robe and straw hat looks toward the camera, smiling; a nurse catches a running baby; a butler in black tails and tie stands, arms behind his back; gentle piano music plays. After his last sentence, the Gradisca story takes over the screen. We are seeing and hearing a legend told and that  legend enacted. We are three layers deep in narrative location, plus Fellini directorial creative re-creation of all that.

It is all dream-like. The music is romantic. There are subalterns, who go away. The prince is in white. Gradisca tries various poses and attitudes, wearing fewer and fewer clothes. The prince is now in a robe, pouring himself champagne. Her clothes are strewn about. He advances to the bed, sipping from a wide champagne glass. She is in the bed, wearing her red beret and pearls, says, “Mr. Prince, sir, gradisca!” She looks down to her breasts, under the sheet, looks up and seems to go, “Ahhh.”

The lawyer narrator reappears, the barren hotel of the previous scene now with a carpeted stairway with matching sofas and flowering plans; “And that’s how Ninola came to be called Gradisca. Mind you, I don’t attribute much truth to that story, nor to the one that Biscein tells.” Now he’s on one of the couches, two bellmen by the elevators behind him.

“He’s a born liar. He makes up a new one every day. A couple of years back, an emir arrived with his thirty concubines. I saw him arrive.” Once again, as he tells the story, we see it happening. As the story begins, the lawyer is in the lobby, dressed as earlier, both nodding to the emir and talking to us, in two time zones at once. “The emir locked all thirty rooms up tight every night. That much is true. It’s the rest of Biscein’s story that leaks like a sieve.”

Cut to Biscein, on his bicycle cart, the women (everything covered but their eyes) throw ropes made of sheets and towels down to him. He climbs up. He’s in a circular harem, each woman on a bed in a different color, a huge window with palm trees outside. “Sweet Jesus,” he says, “the pussy!” He plays his flute. They rise. A wonderful dance ensues, in the pool and surrounding it: golden bras, feathered headdresses, one of them festooned with lights. As he plays his flute an orchestra joins: it’s movie-exotic-Middle-Eastern music, cliché music, grandly done. Biscein turns to the camera and says “One, two, three, four….”

Then it goes to the lawyer’s voice: “He claims that, between the beautiful girls and the ugly ones, he polished off twenty-eight of them that night.”

Amarcord

Biscein Amarcord

The Grand Hotel appears later in the film, after a night of fog in which Titta’s grandfather gets lost only steps from the house and his brother, on the way to school, encounters an enormous phantasmagoric white bull. The hotel is padlocked and boarded-up for the off season. Titta and his friends try to peer inside, then the music picks up and they dance with imaginary women and airplay imaginary instruments. “Where are you, my love?” asks Titta. The music plays, the wind howls, the fog swirls, they dance on.

That, too, is derived from a specific memory: “We would roam around it like mice,” Fellini said,

trying to get a glimpse of the inside; but it was impossible. Then we would peer into the big yard behind (always well shaded by its palm trees, which reached the fifth floor), full of cars with indecipherable number plates. An Isetta Fraschini: Titta would whistle with admiration. A Mercedes Benz: another soft whistle… The chauffeurs, in their gleaming boots, smoked as they paced up and down, holding tiny fierce dogs on their leads…. Only in winter, in the damp and darkness and fog, did we manage to gain admission to the grand terraces of the Grand Hotel. But it was like coming to a camp where everyone had left a long time ago and the fire was out… The Grand Hotel… stood for riches, luxury, and oriental opulence. When I read descriptions in novels that did not quite raise my imagination to the heights I thought they should, I would pull out the Grand Hotel, like a scene shifter in the theatre using the same backcloth for every situation. Crimes, rape, mad nights of love, blackmail, suicide, torture, the goddess Kali: everything had to be set in the Grand Hotel.9

Who’s the “I” in “I Remember?”

The “I” of any autobiography is not the same person that the autobiography is about, if for no other reason than the subject of the autobiography had not a clue, anywhere along the line, of what was coming next, let alone where the story was heading. Fellini’s title acknowledges that temporal perspective: we cannot help but see the past but through the lens of who we are now. The narrator owns all the stories.

After making the film, he had things to say about it, wonderful, illuminating things. But they were said by a man explaining his film, not the man making it, not a man coalescing fragments of memory and polishing them with conscious and unconscious acts of imagination.

Fellini

Fellini is fully aware of that. Even when he talks of how he made Amarcord, what he remembered, what he imagined, what he made up, he knows he’s telling us a story. “Amarcord is the look into the world of my memory,” he wrote. “I don’t like to go back to Rimini. Whenever I do go back, I am assailed by ghosts. The reality goes to war with the world of my imagination. For me, the real Rimini is the one in my head. I could have gone back there to film for Amarcord, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. The Rimini I could re-create was closer to the reality of my memory. What could I have had, if I had made the trip with all my troupe to the real place? Memory is not exact. I discovered that the life I’d told about has become more real for me than the life I really lived.”10

Which is to say: the stories he has told are now part of the stories he tells. 

A slightly different version of this article appears in Bruce Jackson, The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories, second edition, revised and expanded (New York: State University of New York Press, 2022).

We want to express our gratitude to the Istituto Friedrich Schürr for their guidance regarding the Romagnol expressions used at the beginning of this text.

Endnotes

  1. The others are I Vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria , 1957), La dolce vita (1960), (1963), Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Satyricon (1969), and Roma (1972).
  2. The Rex, pride of the Fascist government, never sailed the Adriatic: it sailed from Genoa to New York. The only time it ventured into the Adriatic was in 1944 – a trip that ended with it being bombed in Trieste. After Amarcord was released, however, many older residents of Rimini insisted they had been part of the flotilla that went out to greet it. Tullio Kezich, friend of Fellini and author of Federico Fellini: His Life and Work, said “When Amarcord was shown to the people of Rimini, they recognized everything, even this scene that never happened [the night in the boats to see the liner Rex
  3. Luigi “Titta” Benzi, in Fellini’s Homecoming: “He said, ‘Who knows better than you your father’s outbursts, his swearing? No one else could do it.’ Of course, the part of my father was played beautifully. But my second wife was afraid to let me go to Rome. Rome, and in particular the film environment, was like the hub of sexual delights. So she didn’t want me going to Rome for that. Federico came to my office for one last entreaty. When I said no, he told me, ‘All right, you bum. Stay in Rimini and defend chicken thieves.’ He was contemptuous.” Fellini frequently refers to Titta in his wonderful essay “Rimini, My Home Town,” in Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini, trans. Isabel Quigley (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 1–40.
  4. Gradisca marries a ranking officer of the Carabineri, the national police force, not, as many critics and reviewers have it, a Fascist official. The distinction is important: early on, the Carabineri assisted Mussolini; later, they helped destroy him. The boy Titta couldn’t know that; the filmmaker Fellini surely did.
  5. In Fellini’s Homecoming, Benzi says, “Bianchina was Federico’s sweetheart. He puts her in the film. He isn’t in the film as a character, like I was. He’s the one looking from outside.” Fellini made another important change: Titta Benzi’s father was not arrested for the gramophone incident. But, Titta Benzi said, when his father saw Amarcord, he was delighted that Fellini had given him credit for it.
  6. Peter Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 266.
  7. Characters with interior fantasies and memories are one of Fellini’s major narrative devices. , for example, is full of them, as is Juliet of the Spirits.
  8. Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini, p. 27. In Fellini’s Homecoming Titta Benzi says: “Gradisca was a beautiful girl from the neighborhood of San Giuliano, the separatist part of town. It was an antifascist neighborhood under Fascism. They were sailors who thought only about their own existence, without another thought in their heads, but they wanted to be respected for their principles. Gradisca lived in this neighborhood, a young girl who dressed in the tight clothes in style at the time. She’d start out there and cross the Tiberius Bridge to the main street in Rimini. The boys would yell out, ‘Gradisca’s coming!’ Everyone would clap their hands and kid about with her.”
  9. Fellini, “Rimini, My Home Town,” p. 20.
  10. Charlotte Chandler, I, Fellini (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), p. 179.

About The Author

Bruce Jackson is a photographer, filmmaker and writer. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He and Diane Christian have directed The Buffalo Film Seminars since spring 2000; they have also directed and produced several documentary films and books together. The French government has honored Jackson for his documentary and ethnographic work by naming him chevalier in The Order of Arts and Letters and in The National Order of Merit. His most recent books are Ways of the Hand: A Photographer’s Memoir and The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (revised and expanded edition), both State University of New York Press, 2022.

Related Posts