Federico Fellini | Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) / 1957

circling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Pier Palo Pasolini (screenplay), Federico Fellini (director) Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) / 1957

 

Almost all of Federico Fellini’s films are episodic, and many—as critics have noted—are structured circularly. But none is more circular in form than his Nights of Cabiria. Its central character, Cabiria Ceccarelli (Giulietta Masina)—who, one might argue is not just at the movie’s center but is the film itself, its raison d’etre—travels through vast spaces of post-war Rome without going anywhere. Her life, filled with dreams and aspirations, remains in stasis, and, accordingly, one might almost describe Fellini’s early masterwork as a comic study in duration.

 

     Part of the problem with the delightful Cabiria, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his 1998 review of the film, is that this character moves against the rhythms of life itself. “On his sets [Fellini] played music during almost every scene, and you can sense in most Fellini movies a certain sway in the way the characters walk: Even the background extras seem to hearing the same rhythm. Cabiria hears it, but often walks in counterpoint, as if to her own melody.”

      Like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton walking against the storm, the ridiculously dressed, pixyish Cabiria uses this and the character’s other eccentricities to great comic effect, swaying, shrugging, even physically wrestling with others around her to maintain her personal defenses again their cynicism. While her fellow prostitutes dress to reveal their buxomly shapes, Cabiria, in stripes and a matted faux-fur top-coat, emphasizes her skinny impishness, looking, at times, like a young boy in drag instead of a grown and ageing woman. Wherever she goes, an argument is sure to follow, even if nothing is said as when she becomes determined to move from her usual stopping grounds of the Archeological Passage to the posh Via Veneto, where the tall and well-dressed women of the night look down disapprovingly upon her. Any man choosing to go home with Cabiria might almost be seen to be making a personal joke.

 

     Indeed, in the very first scene of the film, Cabiria’s current boyfriend-pimp steals her purse and tosses her into the river. Unable to swim, the character almost drowns, saved only at the last moment by children and a local worker. Later, she is picked up by a well-known movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari), after a fight between him and his girlfriend. Just to punish his girlfriend, Lazzari takes Cabiria to a swank nightclub, where she immediately becomes entangled in a bead curtain.

     Later, at his lovely estate, before she can even take a sip of champagne or bite of duck, he orders her to hide in the bathroom when his angry girlfriend returns. As the couple make up their spat, Cabiria spends the night in the bathroom with the dog, sneaking out of the mansion early in the next morning, only to go crashing into the glass doors. In short, this off-kilter figure has difficulty with both entering and exiting; movement either forward or backward is difficult for a figure who moves in circles. At least she has received the actor’s signature to prove her “luck” to her friends.

     After revealing her belief in joy and love under the spell of a cabaret hypnotist, another man, Oscar (François Périer) courts her, claiming that he desires the same things in life. Finally, it appears, that Cabiria has found the love she has been seeking; but he too, taking her to a cliff in the woods, robs her and would toss her over the cliff were she not to beg him to let her live.    

     Although she bought and, later sells a ramshackle shack in an industrial field at the edge of the city—a house of which she is very proud—she seems never, at least as we observe her, to actually have even a one-night-stand, let alone a romantic success.

     Cabiria’s belief also extends to all things religious, despite her avocation. But a trip, with other fellow prostitutes, to what purports to be an appearance of the Virgin Mary (a similar situation is played out in La dolce vita) ends with a claustrophobic rush of bodies, terrifying the plucky sinner. A far more spiritual encounter is Cabria’s late-night observation of a saintly good Samaritan, who, with his own money, brings food to the desperate cave-dwellers outside Rome. It is there, also, where Cabiria sees what might someday soon be herself, as she encounters a former prostitute, now a haggard and wizened being, living in the dark of these caverns.

      But even these more spiritual revelations do not truly alter Cabiria’s thinking. Like a dancer moving against the beat, she remains locked in a pattern of refusing to believe the very realities Fellini presents her with. If there was ever evidence that Fellini was not a neorealist at heart, it is in this film; Cabiria, portrayed by his own wife, is the fantasist that the director would soon become, particularly in the film presumably about Massina, Juliet of the Spirits.

     Although Nights of Cabiria ends, oddly enough, with a procession of young and beautiful boys moving forward through the forest, and catching up the forlorn waif in their march, we know that that movement forward will not last long. Surely Cabiria will at some point turn back, retrace her steps, and end up very near to the place where she has begun.

     In her constant circling, finally, Cabiria is a kind of female Pierrot or Pierrette who in her circles imitates the rounded hat, skull cap, or dunce hat and the circular and crimped collar worn traditionally by the figure; and in her circling Cabiria also parallels the movements of the moon and the tides with whom both Pierrot and Pierrette are always connected.

      By the late 19th and 20th centuries, in part because of Pierrot’s and Pierrette’s endless inabilities to ever achieve the love of their Columbines or Harlequins, the characters, male and female, also come to be seen as outsider dreamers who are unable to attain normative love.

 

      Hence in cinematic works as various as Victor Saville’s The Good Companions (1933), Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945), and Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1950/1979), as the Pierrots are tricked, mocked, and threatened by their would-be normative lovers, they are represented in the heteronormative context not only as fools, dreamers, and dunces, but are generally associated with the queer, homosexual worlds which, given their being seen as societal outsiders, associated them with the godless worlds of the angels banned from heaven, those individuals devoted to the worship the moon, witchcraft, vampirism, the occult, and cabalistic visions, as well as to worshipers of idols of sacrifice such as Moloch (homosexuals and lesbians, obviously, had themselves, in their same-sex activities, sacrificed the possibility of bearing children), and a people later committed illusions of reality, specifically the magick lantern and film itself.

      Moloch is particularly important in this context because of Giovanni Pastrone's grand 2 ½ hour silent epic film 1914 film Cabiria, named after the young girl at the center of his film who survived the volcanic eruption of Mount Aetna and later came close to being sacrificed to Moloch in Carthage before finally becoming united with her Roman savior Fulvius Axilla. The film was based, in part, on Gustave Flaubert's 1862 novel Salammbô which was a great favorite of Anger’s.* Fellini, it is presumed, named his central character Cabiria in honor of the 1914 movie character.

 

*Kenneth Anger is particularly interesting in this context because as a gay artist he embraced in his second cycle of filmmaking precisely these outsider spiritual activities, influenced as he was by English occult writer and philosopher Aleister Crowley. Some of these elements are quite apparent in Rabbit’s Moon, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), and Lucifer Rising (1972-80), all of which I discuss elsewhere in the My Queer Cinema volumes.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2013, revised June 11, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2013) and My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).