Amarcord/Am'l'arcord. Fascism, Memory, and the Visual in Federico Fellini and Renzo Renzi

This essay reflects on questions of visibility and invisibility in the representation of Fascism through a study of the visual memory of Fascism in Amarcord and the photo-essay 'Il Fascismo involontario,' which Renzo Renzi, Bolognese critic and longtime friend of Fellini, wrote in 1975 in direct response to the film. After retracing the roots of Amarcord to Fellini's collaboration with Renzi, the essay maps their contrasting stances toward memory: for Fellini, a delivery from the past; for Renzi, a practice of working-through. The essay explores the optics of Fascism in Amarcord through an analysis of the influence of photography and television on the filmic image and a reflection on the relation between visibility and invisibility in Fellini's cinematic spectacle. These visualities of Amarcord are then discussed in dialogue with the photographs accompanying Renzi's text, thus bringing to the fore the differing status of the trace in the two authors. While in Fellini's film the trace is an embodiment of cinematic pathos, in Renzi's critical reflection with photography, the trace becomes the site of what Roland Barthes defined as the 'mad' encounter with the past, the site where Fascism is confronted as the 'intractable,' a stubborn point of (in)visibility in Italy's past. Keywords: Federico Fellini, Renzo Renzi, memory, Fascism, Amarcord, photography, intermediality.
Memory looms large in Fellini. Critical studies have pointed out how memory for Fellini is more a revelation than a process, a posture toward time rather than a willful and [...]