The Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Director/Writer: Federico Fellini
Cinematographer: Aldo Tonti
Music: Nino Rota
Actors: Giulietta Masina, François Périer, Franca Marzi
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
“” matthew arnold, Dover Beach
certain trios in cinema fit so well together that the product of their collaboration is hardly ever a miss; the first-rate contemporary example that comes to mind is that of paul thomas anderson (director), daniel day lewis (actor) and john greenwood (music composer) to make films like There Will Be Blood (2007) and Phantom Thread (2017). but at the top of that list you’ll find the mid-century italian masterpieces that were triangulated by the seminal talents of director federico fellini, his wife and actor giulietta masina, and composer nino rota. when a film by fellini leaves a devastating and lasting effect, it is either masina or rota that is real culprit, and in some precious instances, both. it’s manipulative, really, how seamlessly rota’s music blends with the complexities of the characters on screen. and to the extent that fellini’s films are an irresistible concoction of tragedy, comedy and existential dread, rota’s music is the vector through which we swallow the hard pill of post-war italian Neorealist cinema. of their collaborations, their best works were arguably in 1956 and 1957, wherein the trio made international splashes with La Strada and The Nights of Cabiria, respectively (spoilers ahead).
some of the best things i’ve found in the arts have come by way of blessed accidents, my introduction to the fellini’s filmography for example. the recommendation was made by a friend i made in a homeless shelter in the spring of 2011. it seemed as if his consolation prizes after he ‘escaped’ from cuba to canada was the unlimited wifi and unrestricted access to internet he found here, a freedom he spent watching every film on a list he compiled back in cuba. he wanted to start me slowly with the italian segment of his film list, so he recommended i begin with roberto benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997) before taking on the much more desolating experience of La Strada.
masina’s character in that film, Gelsomina, is in many ways a younger iteration of Cabiria; in both instances masina’s performance is an awesom thing to behold. she was a small woman, but the radius of her personality onscreen is towering, irresistible, one of the most compelling actors i’ve seen in the last century of cinema. i watched La Strada in the summer of 2013—the effect was disastrous——i was in state for days and all too bummed out to follow up with my friend’s third recommendation, The Nights of Cabiria. i’m grateful to him. i don’t think i’ve met someone since who loved cinema——and the history of cinema——as much as he does. he’s also a natural at designing task-specific software, he had built for me this simple program that could receive a film list and in turn generate random films on a weekly basis. i think i owe much of my cinematic routine now to him. The city’s big, and people disappear; nevertheless, never let a good recommendation go to waste.
As artificial as Cabiria's behavior sometimes seems, it always seems her own, and this little woman carries herself proudly through the gutters of Rome. “” roger ebert
the plot of Cabiria consists mostly of following the title character’s nocturnal wanderings through the streets of rome as a sex-worker. her services are never employed throughout the film, but her self-sufficiency and free-standing apartment (in the middle of an industrial wasteland) suggest she’s in some kind of post-retirement period after a long and lucrative career. instead, she spends her nights walking around, loitering with coworkers who sometimes pass as friends, all the while searching for something. love? perhaps, but that’s too simple an answer, for which she wouldn’t have gone looking at the foot of a statue of the virgin mary——pleading on her knees to ‘make me change my life’. redemption? Cabiria doesn’t seem to suffer at all from pangs of conscience in relation to her occupation. hope? yes, i think so, inasmuch as that is a combination of love and redemption. and so with every interaction, at the turn round the corner of every darkening street, she plunges headlong for a redeeming kind of love, a real tabula rasa for whose sake she can leave behind the apartment she brags about and the snide but well-meaning acquaintances she brags to. it is as this wandering particle of expectation, laced with a cantankerous temper, that the awesome power of masina’s command of the screen shines through the most: when her character gets mad she gets good and angry, her laughter is free of hesistation, her walk slow yet agile (taking a whole chapter from chaplin’s Little Tramp, but adding a little stank and bravado). her expressions are complex but unambiguous: merely a quickfire succession of emotional states that she occupies fervently and forgets about at the earliest opportunity. all this despite how her character is introduced at the top of the film: walking by a lakeside with a suitor she trusts beyond doubt——knowing that she can’t swim, he pushes her into the lake for the sake of the contents of her purse,and disappears to never return.
looking back at his filmography and at all of the characters he put on screen, Cabiria was the one fellini remained ‘worried about’. and for good reason. in the final scene of the film Cabiria is yet again by the lakeside, deserted by yet another suitor. but this one was different, she believed wholly in him in spite of herself, though she had hitherto been careful to not surpass her meagre allotment of hope. if you’ve been absolutely ruined by La Strada, then you know to brace yourself for the inevitable fatal blow that would be delivered after Cabiria is rescued from the river and begins again in her old ways, eyes wide open, headfirst in trust and in hope.
it takes a fool to return to trust and hope after an otherwise decisive decimation of their value, but the alternative is unbearable, unspeakable. in that sense is it better to be foolish than to be wrong. fellini knew this subtlest of distinctions, and his films were the better for that. in La Strada, Gelsomina’s only hope for love is a man referred to as ‘The Fool’, a tightrope walker in a circus who still believes in the magic of his profession. i can only handle that film right up until Gelsomina learns of The Fool’s death from a head injury and, with a broken voice, mutters over and over in a trance-like state: ‘Il matto é male’ (The fool, he’s not well). with Cabiria, she is the fool, searching endlessly for some incomprehensible magic in the night...
What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that’s why they’re so dead set against going to the end of the night.“” louis-ferdinand céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
despite bracing for the heartbreak that is a compulsory feature of italian Neorealism——a feature which fellini understood as a tool rather than a goal——and despite doing so well until the last 3 minutes of the film, i just couldn’t keep it together when a member of the travelling band turns to Cabiria, in a levitating moment of lucidity, to wish her ‘buona sera’. it’s the way she says it does me in: as if to say ‘well, it be like that sometimes’, or ‘these things happen, what are you gonna do?’, or ‘amor fati’. the last shot of Cabiria’s face is about the best ending to a film i’ve ever seen, everything thing a person in her shoes can say or want to hear seems to flicker through her face like a slideshow. and in this rapid sequence, she pauses for an imperceptibly brief moment to look directly at the camera. the effect really indescribable. two years later, in 1959, french director francois truffaut ended his 400 Hundred Blows in the same way, but the effect, though more famous, doesn’t hold a candle to fellini’s touch and masina’s delivery. getting up from her prostrated defeat by the lakeside, Cabiria finds herself again on the road, under the auspices of another blessed night, filled with laughter, and with music; and also with the thing that is always found in the music, which the music is always on its way to——the people...
A time comes when you’re all alone, when you’ve come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It’s the end of the world. Even grief, your own grief, doesn’t answer you anymore, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among the people, it makes no difference who. You’re not choosy at times like that, because even to weep you have to go back where everything starts all over, back among the people. “” louis-ferdinand céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)