Films › Production design
Amarcord
Directed by Federico Fellini, 1973
Fellini rebuilt his home town at Cinecitta rather than shoot on location, including a sea made of plastic sheeting. The artifice is deliberate because the film is memory rather than record. Danilo Donati's costumes and sets exaggerate scale and colour to match the exaggeration of recollection. The ocean liner sequence is unapologetically a set piece. Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography treats the studio-built town with the same warm, slightly overexposed glow used throughout Fellini's late period, flattening the difference between set and location so memory reads as continuous fabric. Nino Rota's score, as usual, is scored to match the film's parade-like blocking rather than individual scenes. Filmmakers should study how confidently the film abandons realism once the emotional register requires it. Even the seasonal changes, snow, fog and festival light, are staged as theatrical events on the Cinecitta backlot rather than chased on location, reinforcing the film's insistence on memory over documentation.
What to watch for
Watch the liner and the fog sequences and note that the film never pretends the sea is real.
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