5 - Amarcord: Nostalgia and Politics

Summary

It is has long been a critical commonplace that Fellini has no interest in broader social questions or politics. Certainly, he has often expressed a distaste for ideology (which, as we have seen, he defines as a willful lie designed to befuddle common people): “Especially as regards passion for politics, I am more Eskimo than Roman. … I am not a political person, have never been one. Politics and sports leave me completely cold, indifferent.” Moreover, Fellini has frequently proclaimed his belief that he would have been best served to have lived as an artist during the great periods of papal patronage, when he could have found support for his art without regard to ideological considerations: “I believe a person with an artistic bent is naturally conservative and needs order around him. … I need order because I am a transgressor … to carry out my transgressions I need very strict order, with many taboos, obstacles at every step, moralizing, processions, alpine choruses filing along.” His early interest in the exploration of a private fantasy world of his own making, such as we have analyzed in La strada, obliged Fellini to move beyond the typical neorealist attention to critical social issues that was the favored thematic content of the films widely praised by the more ideologically oriented film critics of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Since Fellini's early works did not easily fit into this kind of programmatic realism with a social purpose, it became easy to pigeonhole Fellini's films as extravagant fantasies, baroque metaphors, or self-indulgent autobiographical recollections with little or no relevance to the current events of the times.