Le notti di Cabiria
Italy,
1957, 117 min
Shown in 1980/2009
CREDITS
- dir
-
Federico Fellini
- prod
-
Dino De Laurentiis
- scr
-
Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini
- cam
-
Aldo Tonti
- editor
-
Leo Cattozzo
- mus
-
Nino Rota
- cast
-
Giulietta Masina, François Périer, Franca Marzi, Dorian Gray
- source
-
Rialto Pictures
-
COMMENTS
First shown in 1980 as a tribute to Giulietta Masina, who attended in person. Screened in 2009 as part of An Afternoon with Bruce Goldstein. 2009 Mel Novikoff Award recipient Bruce Goldstein in attendance.
OTHER
The humorous and deeply affecting story of a spunky prostitute’s misfortunes in postwar Rome, Nights of Cabiria still resonates with the same transformative power audiences first encountered in 1957. The third film in Fellini’s so-called trilogy of loneliness, which includes La Strada and Il Bidone, Nights of Cabiria again stars Fellini’s wife and muse, Giulietta Masina, this time as the waiflike Cabiria, whose brassy, boisterous exterior masks a wistful yearning for love that makes her constantly vulnerable to heartache and exploitation. Even though she spends a lot of time bucking up and sticking her chin out to meet the bad luck that inevitably comes her way, underneath her survivor’s armor Cabiria is a woman of great compassion and feeling. If it is this capacity for love that inevitably proves Cabiria’s undoing, it is also what allows her to survive beyond the tragedy that befalls her. Masina won the best actress award at Cannes for her portrayal, and it is her brilliantly mannered and emotionally touching performance—recalling the expressive physicality of Charlie Chaplin—that is at the heart of the film’s success. The final sequence is a beautifully realized parable of hope and disillusionment that ends in a now famous coda, one of cinema’s greatest depictions of the resilient human spirit. It’s all there in Masina’s face, and in Fellini’s genius at capturing it.
–Beverly Berning
FACTOID #188
According to an item in the 1969 Halloween edition of the Hollywood Reporter, Swedish director Bo Widerberg cancelled a Festival tribute at the last minute with a cryptic telegram from Stockholm that read, ’Sorry impossible to come. Must stay in bed.’
