Fellini s own boyhood in prewar Italy had seen extremes. In a single year, he had gone from the rigid, authoritarian absurdities of a boarding school, where he had been forced to kneel on grains of maize for hours in silence as punishment, to lovely anarchic days ranging the Italian peninsula in a vaudeville troupe. Out of the vast space between fascism and freedom, Fellini fashioned a career as one of the cinema s great philosophers of the human spirit. Compelled to understand the long militaristic nightmare through which his country had passed, he set countless everyman protagonists to work within and against the bonds of social control in his films. Here, Fellini happily skewers some of his favorite game, Family, School and Church.
Teachers babble on, oblivious to student mayhem.
In Fellini s universe, true freedom carries a profound and heavy weight. Fascism intrudes on Titta s tango with the adult world. The boy is drawn into the seductive world of easy answers and pageantry and power, which Mussolini promises. It is a deft and daring change of tone. But amidst political tumult, life goes on, and Titta becomes changed and chilled by the winds of winter, a boy beginning to live the more private life of a man.