Tandem Creativity of Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerra: Amarcord

The paper analyzes the influence of the neorealist tradition in Italian post-war cinematography on the development of unique artistic methods and original directorial style of F. Fellini. The features of the artistic communication of director F. Fellini and screenwriter T. Guerra in the context of fruitful artistic cooperation were highlighted. The determining influence of the artistic “memory”-concept on the formation of F. Fellini’s aesthetic ideas, which were implemented within the framework of the joint creativity of the tandem of Fellini and Guerra on the example of the film Amarcord was studied. The artistic “memory”-concept sphere (which consists of concepts that are fundamental to F. Fellini’s work of childhood, memory, time, recollections, and nostalgia) forms the frame-mosaic dramaturgy of the film story of the Amarcord, as well as the episodic-kaleidoscopic structure of the director’s entire cinematic vocabulary. These semantic dominant images formed the characteristic stylistic “recognition” of Fellini’s film language. It can be stated that the above-mentioned artistic images constitute a certain psychological-temporal “memory”-concept of a single cinematic metatext of Fellini, which extends to his entire cinematic oeuvre. The creative logic of the internal unfolding of the “memory”-metaplot prompted F. Fellini to introduce the previously tested artistic mechanism of episodic stringing in Amarcord. In numerous interviews and autobiographical notes, Fellini consciously articulated the defining artistic issues of the phenomenon of childhood in the second half of the 20th century and the mechanisms of artistic embodiment of this symbolic phenomenon in innovative creative practices. This problematic field constantly guided the director along the artistic route of “eternal return” to “memory”-concept that prompted him to turn to the poetics of memory and nostalgia throughout his creative life. It was in this thematic-aesthetic context and psychological-artistic vector that Amarcord was created, which became a candidly real and poignantly penetrating poetic revelation of the temporal discreteness of the shaky self-awareness of the passage of time