What we see [in Amarcord] is not a year from the lives of several citizens of Rimini during the Fascist period, but Fellini's poetically stylized remembrance of things past. Like Proust, Fellini organizes his experiences subjectively, as in a dream, where "insignificant" details loom overwhelmingly, and "important" facts are either ignored, or casually noted then cast aside as emotionally irrelevant…. In keeping with the impure nature of the film, Fellini the documentarist fuses with Fellini the lyrical poet….

Like many of the director's later films, Amarcord is unified by a dense substructure of leitmotifs. Perhaps the most obvious of these are seasonal. The film opens and closes with the coming of spring. Each season is typified by a characteristic sky element, which is related to the themes of aspiration and transience….

Related to this seasonal structure is a sense of progression in the episodes in terms of the age of the protagonists. Roughly speaking, the film moves from youth to maturity to death to rebirth. (p. 156)

Most of the characters feel trapped by their mundane lives in this provincial town (hence, the "bitter" implications of the title). Despite their almost universal earthiness, they aspire to a more spiritual state. They yearn for escape and grasp at any symbol, however flimsy, of release from their prosaic existence. In addition to the sky elements, an important leitmotif of escape deals with vehicles. Throughout the movie, a mysterious motorcyclist whips in and out of the town square, an image of excitement, glamor, and liberation….

Perhaps the most moving episode dealing with this motif is the arrival of the "Rex," a mammoth luxury ship which briefly passes through the ocean waters a few miles beyond the town's beaches. Like many of the sequences in the movie, this one begins comically and ends in poignance; it commences as a public spectacle and concludes on a note of private anguish. The opening takes place in the daytime, which Fellini characteristically associates with comedy and earthy vulgarity, and ends late at night, which is generally associated with solitude, spirituality, and aspiration. (p. 157)

Like many of Fellini's films, Amarcord is dialectic, and contrasts boisterous public events with poignant private dreams. A prominent motif in the film deals with community rituals, where the loneliness and isolation of individuals are temporarily assuaged: the opening bonfire to banish winter and welcome the spring, the Fascist rally, the meeting of the "Rex," the funeral service and procession, Gradisca's wedding. The private dreams in the film are generally associated with romantic fantasies, usually in some sexual form. But like most of the characters' aspirations, these fantasies are essentially masturbatory….

[Reality], with its cruel impurities, reduces these romantic fantasies to mockeries. It inflicts humiliating compromises on the dreamers. (p. 158)

Just as Fellini seems incapable of offering us a picture of spirituality uncorrupted by vulgarity, so is he temperamentally incapable of showing us a portrait of evil "uncorrupted" by humanity. The episodes dealing with the Fascists are a good example of Fellini's "impure" vision. The Fascists are not the terrifying and inexorable figures portrayed in De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, but clowns and buffoonish bullies. They too aspire to some "higher state," with their banners proclaiming the mystical fusion of "God, Country, and Family," and their ludicrous Cult of the Athlete. We may shudder at their hollow clichés about the "Glorious Empire," their simpleminded rhetoric about being "immortal," yet at the same time, we smile a little at their ragged pageants, their strutting, their childish theatricality. Even the sinister scene at Fascist Headquarters is "corrupted" by a certain clownish humanity. (p. 159)

The tone shifts in the film are audacious, a perfect demonstration, in fact, of Fellini's dialectical sensibility at work. The concluding scene of the Fascist sequence is a good case in point. At Party Headquarters, Aurelio is forced to drink two glasses of castor oil, the traditional form of humiliation employed by the bullies of the Party…. The scene shifts to [Miranda's and Aurelio's] kitchen, where Miranda is gently washing Aurelio in a large tub of water. His naked back to the camera, he hangs his head in shame while the haggard and sweat-soaked Miranda quietly gives vent to her fears. We can almost feel the steam and smell the excrement, yet the tone of the scene is one of exquisite tenderness. It is, in fact, the purest example of love in the film…. What an extraordinary poet this Fellini is: a fuser of images, one who's outrageous enough to portray a Fascist chieftain as a whining, mock-martyred Jewish Mother, and to offer his most moving love scene amidst the smell and smear of shit!

Fellini's use of multiple narration is another example of his ability to fuse apparently contradictory elements. Of course multiple narration is hardly new in the cinema—one thinks immediately of Citizen Kane and Rashomon. But Fellini's use of the technique is characteristically impure. It's not used as a schematic device whereby the filmmaker is able to reveal information that would otherwise be awkward to convey, as in the films of Welles and Kurosawa. In Amarcord a limited point of view is not so rigorously maintained…. Fellini relates events from various isolated points of view, but the form of the narration isn't dictated by any rigorous sense of inevitability. There's an element of arbitrariness, of randomness even, in Fellini's use of multiple narration.

In keeping with the mosaic structure of the movie, Fellini demonstrates rather than states the theme of the film: that despite the isolation and individual differences of the narrators, despite their solitary ruminations, they are all bound by a common romantic yearning. Superficially, the narrators in the film barely know each other socially, let alone spiritually, yet like isolated pieces of glass in a mosaic, they are part of a larger unity, a unity that is not apparent except to Fellini from a distance. Just as we can perceive the overall design of a mosaic by stepping back, so Fellini steps back in time and sees a similar coherence in what was once merely an undifferentiated jumble of isolated events, feelings, characters, and images.

Most narrators are used as endistancing devices: we are at one remove from a given event. The storyteller is a kind of filter, often a distorting filter, which prevents us from observing an event directly or objectively. In Amarcord, Fellini uses a kind of multiple filtration, a characteristically impure technique which totally obliterates the "objectivity" of an event, yet paradoxically fuses the fragments into a higher imaginative unity. (pp. 159-61)

[Movie] allusions abound in Amarcord. The theatre owner is called "Ronald Coleman" because of his presumed resemblance to that "elegant" actor. We see film posters announcing coming attractions, which include not only the romantic Norma Shearer, but also the clowns, Laurel and Hardy. Gradisca is teased about her great love for Gary Cooper, and is jokingly called "Greta Garbo" by one of the boys. These movie allusions represent another example of the escape motif in the film: the townspeople love the cinema, which provides them with romantic fantasies that permit them to escape their everyday existence…. Fellini believes that life often imitates art. But the differences between the two are too complex to be glibly separated: like life itself, Amarcord is an amalgam of both life and art. (p. 161)

Like all dialectics, Fellini's is ultimately concerned with a synthesis, with a fusion of opposites. In their everyday lives, Titta, Pinwheel, Gradisca, the lawyer, and the others lived isolated existences, yet they shared a common yearning, a unity that Fellini was able to perceive only with the endistancement of time. Perhaps this is the ultimate triumph of Amarcord: that it recognizes and dramatizes the bitter isolation of its characters, while cherishing their spiritual unity. Fellini manages to portray himself through his characters, and, in retrospect, he is able to see his characters in himself. And it's no small measure of his genius that he also succeeds in permitting us to see ourselves in him/them, and him/them in ourselves. (p. 162)