Nights of Cabiria: What IS Cinema?

 

So here’s some light table talk … what is cinema? What is it for? 

    On the one hand, film is the perfect medium to capture life as it really is. With the roll of the camera, you can do what painters and sculptors had been trying to do for centuries and record the sights and sounds of a place exactly as they are. On the other hand, film is the perfect medium for dreaming. Is there any other place besides the movies where the human heart is so unfettered, so open to fantasy?

If you’ve studied film formally, this is probably one of the first discussions you had in your Intro to Film theory course, in a class that may have forced you to read about Dziga Vertov and his theory about film and the Kino-eye (another day, another day …)

    In some ways, we could use basically any of thousands of cinematic works to jumpstart this discussion, but I have a particular film in mind. The lens I want to explore this idea through today is not only a strong example of strong cinematic craftsmanship, but a film that itself reflects on why it is we even bother to lose ourselves in this thing called cinema, in this weird stage where our deepest desires are realized for a moment only to vanish once the credits roll, and it does so by taking these two opposite ends of a spectrum--fantasy vs reality--and bringing them together.

I am talking about Federico Fellini’s 1957 classic, Nights of Cabiria.

         The film follows a prostitute from the slums of Rome as she dreams for a better life. For the starring role of Cabiria, Fellini chose none other than his wife, Giulietta Masina, whom he had employed in his previous film, La Strada. The film received the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, with Masina herself accepting the Oscar on Fellini’s behalf. Her acceptance speech was short but genuine. “For Mr. Dino DeLaurentis [producer], for the director, Federico Fellini, for myself, thank you. Thank you very much." In the words of New York Times writer, Janet Maslin, 

“In the course of her eventful travels, Cabiria undergoes the profound spiritual evolution that gives the film its lingering grandeur. Anyone dismayed by the hyperkinetic emptiness of so much current film spectacle will find the antidote -- a deep, wrenching and eloquent filmgoing experience -- right here.”

              I’ve spoken at length about the various ways in which film can act as a sort of salve for the masses, a means of lulling the masses into a placid state through pleasant, transient fantasies. That is kind of the cornerstone of basically every musical, and certainly most of what constitutes popular cinema. But one of the things that makes Nights of Cabiria so compelling is the way that it has many of these same conversations using a voice and a style that is so deliberately counter to the designs of mainstream film.

    So, is film fantasy or reality? I’ll acknowledge it’s a bit of a copout for me to answer, “Well kids, it’s both!” But I also can’t deny a sort of grace to the interplay between these two viewpoints that is both fascinating and revelatory, which you see demonstrated in Nights of Cabiria.

There’s a lot about this film that touches on this conversation, both within the text itself as well as the context surrounding the film. To dig into what’s interesting about this movie, you need to have some knowledge of both the social context of post WWII Italy (and Europe as a whole) as well as the intricacies of Cabiria as a character. But lucky for you, these are things this author loves to talk about ...

Post-War Film

An important backdrop to this discussion is World War II, and as a baseline, let’s just take for granted that the war gave everyone a lot to think about. 

Top: On the Town; Bottom: Act of Violence
Both released in 1949

    Hollywood’s response to all that destruction, loss of life, and general devastation was to build up the cinema as the ultimate retreat for the beleaguered soul. Musicals had already been the place of respite for audiences not only during the war, but throughout the great depression, and many found their innate spectacularity a welcome distraction after the fact as well. You also had efforts to speak more directly to the angst, despair, and nihilism that America felt during this period, which is where you got things like noir film or even movies that incorporated the war and its effects directly into the text, something like The Best Years of Our Lives, which won the Oscar for best picture of 1946. 

But even these efforts to tap into the darker corners of the national psyche still leaned on things like stylization or melodrama, tethering our aimless disillusionment into something that could almost be represented through the conventions of general entertainment. It was perhaps easier for America to do this since, while there were significant U.S. casualties during the war, the majority of the violence took place overseas. This gave American audiences just enough distance from the atrocity of the war to spin it into something broadly but accurately described as "entertainment." Escapism through sensationalism. Nations overseas that saw the wreckage up close would process the war a little differently.

From this ecosystem emerges a movement in filmmaking known as “neo-realism," a style that defied the popular model of Hollywood storytelling. Neo-realism passed on the soft lighting and makeup and documented its subjects in all their exhausting realness. The approach was almost documentary-like, seeking to use film to capture reality unflinchingly. Many neo-realist films did not use professional actors, simply casting people off the street to play people on the street, and they may or may not have followed a completed script. While not all of these films mentioned the war directly, you still felt its echo. These stories were very much coming from a space of trauma and despair, the kind you only get after living through such overwhelming violence and evil. 

    Many countries had their own specific neo-realist movements. The two biggest hot-spots were arguably India, with filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, and Italy with players like Roberto Rossellini and Vitorrio De Sica. The latter directed what is arguably the most famous item of neo-realist cinema, Bicycle Thieves, a movie following an impoverished father trying to hunt down his bicycle, or a suitable replacement, to qualify for work to feed his son in post-war Italy. His efforts continually lead to not only failure, but deep and cutting humiliation.

    These were not happy movies. But what else could we expect from a world that just learned it was capable of such devastation as World War II? This fixation on dour endings wasn’t just incidental–that was an extension of the movement’s spotlighting of the everyday and the mundane–of life as it really was, not as Hollywood felt like displaying it.

Touch of Evil (1958)

So in the wake of World War II, you saw the world using the medium of film for two vastly different purposes. Some wanted to use film as an escape from reality, some wanted to use film to confront it. And this is perhaps where we really start to see the divide between film as fantasy versus film as reality take hold. But it’s not just that this divide exists: the realism end of the continuum is generally seen as the higher art. Films that favor the more grounded aesthetic and sensibility are the more likely to be recognized by film critics at large: Barbie may get nominations, but Oppenheimer will walk away with the trophies.

    Decades after the wars, nations all around the world would find their way back to more conventional methods of filmmaking, but cinema as an artform learned a lot from the neo-realist movement. You see the influence of this movement today in films like Roma or The Florida Project. Nights of Cabiria came out in 1957, some ten years after Italian neo-realism entered the stage, but you see its influence in the movie’s setup, and you also see film asking if tragedy and futility is really all there is to the equation, if that’s all movies—even "realistic movies"—are good for.

Nights of Cabiria

         The start of the story sees Cabiria strolling by the river with her lover, Giorgio, when he suddenly steals her purse and then pushes her in the river (dumped in every possible sense). She is pulled out of the water by a group of strangers and returns back to her home, a flat she shares with her friend, Wanda, and finds that Giorgio has gone.

       One night, she witnesses famous movie star, Alberto Lazzari, getting into a heated argument with his girlfriend. When his girlfriend storms off, Lazzari takes interest in a starstruck Cabiria, and he takes her out dancing, and then to his shimmering apartment. They share a moment of tenderness, but when Lazzari’s girlfriend returns, Cabiria is told to hide in the bathroom, and she ends up spying on them through the keyhole as they reconcile. Cabiria shows herself out while they sleep.

         The next day, Cabiria sees a man from the slums sharing his food with the other poor and downtrodden of the city, which confounds her. She and her friends spy a church processional and follow it to a meetinghouse. Her friends initially approach the idea with amused skepticism, but by the end of mass, Cabiria and all of her friends are on their hands and knees pleading with the Virgin Mary for a better life. By the end of it all, Cabiria is frustrated that her life has not changed, and she concludes that her prayer was not answered.

        Cabiria later attends a magic show, where a stage magician hypnotizes her in front of the entire crowd. Under trance, she reveals her deepest desire, to be romanced by a man who will take care of her and make her his wife. He walks her through an imaginary scenario where a handsome stranger named Oscar offers to love and marry her. She awakens, furious at being turned into a spectacle. But when she leaves, a man in the audience tells her that he was moved at her performance and would like to get to know her. She is initially skeptical, but upon learning the man is named Oscar, she allows herself to believe her wish was granted after all.

         Oscar and Cabiria have a short but passionate courtship, and after only a few weeks, Oscar offers to marry her and sweep her off her feet, just as she wished. Preparing for her new life, she sells her house, withdraws all her funds from her bank, and says goodbye to Wanda. After they are married, Cabiria and Oscar walk through the woods until they stop at the edge of a cliff overlooking a lake. When Cabiria notices Oscar acting detached, she figures out that Oscar intends to throw her off the cliff so he can steal her money, just as Giorgio did at the start of the story. Distraught, she throws herself at his feet and begs him to kill her so she doesn’t have to go on living like this. Oscar takes her money but can’t bring himself to kill her.

         Hours later, Cabiria shows herself out of the woods when she wanders into the company of a band of young musicians parading down the road. This display of joy moves Cabiria to tears, and she goes on down the road with them, smiling amidst her sorrows.

Upon rewatch, the most interesting thing to me about the film is how for a film that so deliberately sidesteps the conventions of popular filmmaking, Nights of Cabiria employs a lot of metacommentary on the nature of film itself. I don’t mean “meta” in the way of something like Community or the Scream movies. Those entries feature a lot of fourth-wall breaks, or they overtly reference popular items of film within their text in order to shorthand communicate some an idea to an audience that is presumably as media savvy as they are, while also validating them for their pop culture literacy.

    There is not a camera or a screen to be seen in Nights of Cabiria, neither is there a lot of discernible homage within the film itself. But the experience puts both its title character and the audience in positions to reflect on this weird pastime that lets you participate in this alternate reality and imagine just for a moment that it is your reality.

    One of the best examples of this is the scene in which Cabiria is caught for a moment in the embrace of a movie star only to be hurried away once she flies too close to the sun. Cabiria then watches as this other woman is allowed to live through and act out the scenario she had dreamed for herself. It’s a particularly cruel moment when Cabiria is going through the motions of the life she has always wanted to live and then is suddenly forced to become a voyeur to the life that was almost in reach for her.

There’s something similar at work an hour later when Cabiria loses herself in the magician’s show and lives through a fantasy of being romanced. The magician walks her through an imaginary scenario in which she is having her deepest wish fulfilled. Of course, the moment she tries to consummate it with something real, asking her fantasy man if he loves her, she wakes up and the dream falls apart. The real-life equivalent of exiting the theater when the lights come up.

Avatar (2009)

         From a certain perspective, this is essentially what popular cinema is: vicarious wish-fulfillment, the kind that you only get in the halls of the theater. Film lets you indulge for a moment in the fantasy of being the only hero strong enough to save the day or else being desired by someone like a movie star, but when the artifice comes too close to reality, the spell is broken, and suddenly you’re back to being an onlooker to someone else’s paradise. These rituals are very much on display in the text of Nights of Cabiria, and this is where you start to see the film becoming this metatextual document on what cinema is even about.

But all this talk of historical context is all backdrop. The film’s most fascinating subject is the heroine at the center.

Cabiria

A part of what makes Cabiria engaging as a character is also what makes her realistic: she is full of contradictions. Cabiria is volatile, but very sentimental. Though she has been hardened by her station in life, a part of her remains very childlike. You see this reflected in the way Cabiria casts herself as a sort of Cinderella figure, an image she’s no doubt inherited from pop culture scripts.

Yet there’s a lot about Cabiria’s affect that defies a more dollish femininity. That is part of her charm. This is where the unique pieces of Cabiria shine through. We see her waltzing with a movie star only to start doing what I can only describe as voguing by way of Donald Duck. You also see in this scene how the onlookers in this café are instantly taken by her charm--these patrons will probably remember her a lot longer than the movie star ever will. This is a subtle reinforcement of something we already know, that Cabiria is a lively character and will naturally be endearing to all who interact with her.

         The supposition of Cabiria is that beneath every person’s hardened exterior, there is a child who can’t help but dream despite the state of the world. I guess the truthfulness of such a claim will vary from person to person, though I don’t think that that act of dreaming has to look the same for each person. There’s a lot about Cabiria herself that feels different from someone like Cinderella, even as she directly invokes her story, and I think this speaks to a quiet universality underlining her character.

         At least a part of Cabiria’s hard exterior is linked to the station she occupies living among the impoverished of the city. That is how she copes with the state of her life. But though she is from the slums, though she is prone to emotional explosion, Cabiria is still at heart a child wishing on a shooting star for a better life. There are some very specific moments in the film where you see this very sincere part of Cabiria on display. The magician’s show is one of them. The citywide confessional where Cabiria is pleading with God to change her life is another. It’s because of this innate childlikeness to Cabiria that our heart breaks for her every time she is punished for her vulnerability. We know what it costs for her to break out of her shell and let this little girl out.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Cabiria is also a prostitute, which isn’t super obvious watching the film if you don’t walk in with that information preloaded. The act of intercourse is never seen or referenced onscreen. The words “prostitute” or even “sex” never come up once in the film. The closest we get to onscreen depiction is one scene where we see Cabiria and her cohorts perched on the streets looking to attract customers.

This deliberate vagueness may have been a sort of reaction to the Hays Code which governed what was considered acceptable content to display onscreen and would have certainly not allowed overt references to prostitution. (I talk more in-depth about the Hays Code and how it influenced Hollywood in my essay on 1953’s From Here to Eternity.) International films were not necessarily subject to the Hays Code the same way Hollywood was, but since many films made overseas were still trying to reach an American audience, it was in their best interest to play to the code. So while Cabiria’s position as a prostitute is only alluded to, it does have implications for the context the audience develops for her.

        As a sex-worker, Cabiria is “living in sin,” so to speak. From a strictly puritanical perspective, this would disqualify her from the blessings of heaven. There’s even that brief visual with the confessional where the gates are closing on the congregation, suggesting that the golden gates won’t accommodate all, and certainly won’t accommodate someone like her. You see it again when Cabiria’s candle goes out, as though heaven is singling out her specifically. And this is where you see the grittiness of the neo-realism aesthetic carrying so much of the load. You see just how far the jump is between the heaven that Cabiria is reaching for and the unforgiving world she lives in.

              Now is probably as good a time as any to talk about Sweet Charity, a stage musical inspired by Nights of Cabiria, which was itself adapted into a film in 1969. On paper, this is a perfectly good idea. Fellini’s film does come with a lot of material ripe for musical adaptation, not just the emotional heartbeat at its center. But a lot of what makes "Cabiria" such a viable candidate is curiously lost in adaptation. Again, “Cabiria” comes built in with a lot of metatextual observations on the nature of cinema and storytelling, and in this way it has a lot in common with something like The Wizard of Oz.

    The musical hits most of the same story beats as “Cabiria” with a few noticeable differences. Instead of going to mass, Charity visits an alternative church helmed by new age preacher, “Big Daddy.” Also, instead of being a prostitute, Charity is a taxi dancer. To be clear, taxi dancers were sometimes stigmatized in a similar way to prostitutes—yes, I looked it up—but at the same time, I feel like in real life there are heavier consequences for someone who sells sex for a living than for someone who sells dances. And yet, Oscar breaks up with Charity in this version not because he was after her money but because he couldn’t get over what she did for a living. The magician show might have also been prime material for a fantasy sequence or something, but that scene didn't even make the jump when the story was adapted.

The thing I keep coming back to with Sweet Charity is that this is what happens when you remove the neo-realist elements from the story and try to refit it into more conventional Hollywood product, and the result winds up being rather toothless. The movie itself certainly had all the elements for a compelling musical, including the casting of the glowing Shirley McClaine as the star, but when translating a movie like Nights of Cabiria for musical storytelling, the end result should read more like Les Miserables than Hello, Dolly! More than anything, the film exemplifies how a film like Nights of Cabiria only hits when you allow it to be uncompromising: Cabiria has to be a prostitute, not a taxi dancer.

City Lights (1931)

          It is a strong current in my observations about cinema that many of film history’s greatest champions of romanticism or idealism were themselves drawing from a place of personal pain (I am just coming off talking about Charlie Chaplin and The Kid). What you generally saw was artists using cinema to create a world that was better and kinder than the one they came from. They maybe believed in the illusion they were creating, or at least the ideas it connoted, but it was still an act of willful distortion. Seeing the world as it could or should be.

         But Nights of Cabiria doesn’t let its protagonist, or the audience watching her, pretend. That would betray the conceit of the hyper-grounded neo-realist viewpoint. And maybe that’s why the film can’t bring itself to give Cabiria a “real” happy ending.

Happiness, Love, Truth

The film always manages to tie Cabiria’s falls from happiness right with the moment she expresses gratitude for it. You see it when she tells Lazarrio that she just can’t believe someone like him would ever notice someone like her, which immediately spawns his reconciliation with his girlfriend. And you see it again in the final episode with Oscar. The finality with which Cabiria puts her life in order does set up for her to have another major fall. In that way, the movie has a really tight grip on the fear that accompanies saying out loud that you are happy. And this begs the question of whether Cabiria ever will find happiness that isn’t transitory or illusory. Erin Taylor of the Observer writes,

“This of course makes the loss of love at the end of Nights of Cabiria that much more devastating, and this is where Fellini is not brave enough … The movie rests on the balance of Cabiria’s shame and her self-acceptance. This is the beauty of Nights of Cabiria, though. Even if Cabiria does not find love, she walks in the woods with strangers who do not know her past and can know her anew. She is able to begin again, which in the 1950s might have been the closest a whore could have to a happy ending.”

         To the question of whether Cabiria will find her happily ever after, I think a part of that answer lies in whether the world in which she occupies is a good one, and the film has a complex answer to that. On the one hand, this is a world where lovers will rob their fiancés blind, but it’s also a world where complete strangers will offer flowers and kind smiles to wandering loners. It’s a world where even a poor man will share his food among the impoverished of the city. And that duality is a part of what makes life beautiful, that even a wandering waif like her can also behold true beauty and true goodness. Part of the beauty is also that even as Cabiria has endured heartbreak for her dreaming, that little girl still survives, still keeps dreaming, bringing light to all those who see her.

    I think this ending works in large part because it doesn’t really come out of nowhere. The kindness of the common man has been the quiet throughline through her story, right from that start when she is rescued from the river by a bunch of strangers. Even in Cabiria’s despair and humiliation, she is still carried by the goodness of humanity, and she always has been it’s just taken her this long to see it. That is the Virgin Mary’s answer to her prayer. That is the grace extended only to those like Cabiria who learn to hold their head up even as the world tells them to keep their eyes on down.

           What does a post WWII neo-realist film about a romantic prostitute have to say about happy endings? That happiness isn’t something you have to chase. You don’t have to wait for it to sweep you off your feet. You can find it walking down the road among total strangers.

 

Walking Down the Road

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

 If you’ve been following this blog for long at all and seen just how much I love to talk about musicals and animation, you can probably guess which side of this reality vs fantasy discussion excites me more. But what fascinates me just as much are films that remind us that these two functions of film do not have to compete. It is, after all, often when we are in the thick of hard and unforgiving reality that our imagination is awakened.

Part of the promise of cinema, the ultimate escapist destination, is that sort of sanctuary that comes with the willing suspension of disbelief, especially for those who cannot find it in the world offscreen. We go to the movies to dream. To imagine. To hope. And however far down the road that happy ending may be, when you allow yourself to look for that happy ending, your eyes will invariably catch sight of many other lovely things along the way.

--The Professor