Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Le notti di Cabiria, Italy / France, 117 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Photography: Aldo Tonti
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Catozzo
Cast: Giulietta Masina, Francois Perier, Amedeo Nazzari, Franca Marzi, Dorian Gray, Dominique Delouche

It's possible that Giulietta Masina's greatest turn was as the lifelong partner of director and cowriter Federico Fellini. Her face is wonderfully expressive and she has a natural rapport with the camera, a trait common to all the greatest stars. But as an actress her range is limited. In her best roles—here and in Fellini's La Strada—she plays characters so simple and unaffected it sent me to check status of the term "mentally retarded" (the preference now appears to be "intellectually disabled"). She's not that, but the prostitute Cabiria (Masina), in spite of believing herself in the know, is almost pathologically trusting, innocent, easily fooled, always wearing her heart on her sleeve. The role in other hands (and/or written differently, like maybe think Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver) could call for a lot of skill to balance someone as apparently guileless with someone who nonetheless manages to survive—without a pimp, in fact, because the whole idea of one outrages Cabiria's sense of her own independence. It's admirable, but more naïve than anything. You might find yourself wondering how she gets away with it, but watch.

Fellini finds another way to tell the story of such extremities of the life. He torques up the movie magic glitter, even inside the neorealism frame he hadn't abandoned yet, with full support by Nino Rota's perfect score, and focuses on making a clown movie, which can also be seen as a variation on Chaplin's City Lights (with lots of elements from Modern Times as well, such as an evocative reverse shot at a key moment down the long roadway the Tramp and his girl walked, saying, "Buck up, never say die," etc.). Here's Wikipedia's groupthought: "The comedy that clowns perform is usually in the role of a fool whose everyday actions and tasks become extraordinary—and for whom the ridiculous, for a short while, becomes ordinary." Masina's face and manner are custom-built for it, with a dopy infectious grin and tilt of head and a love of physical motion for its own sake that is completely endearing. Like City Lights, like freaking Jerry Lewis once in a while, Nights of Cabiria is episodic, surprisingly gritty, playful and slapstick silly yet capturing indelible emotional moments, and in the end delivers up one of the great movie finishes. It's like a slice of three-layer chocolate cake it's so sweet and well done.

Amarcord (1973)

"I Remember," Italy / France, 123 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Gene Luotto
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Cast: Luigi Rossi, Bruno Zanin, Pupella Maggio, Armando Brancia, Magali Noel, Stefano Proietti, Ciccio Ingrassia, Giuseppe Ianigro, Josiane Tanzilli, Maria Antonietta Beluzzi, Gennaro Ombra

For the most part, director Federico Fellini's work after the 1950s is an acquired taste that I have not yet acquired. I've complained about and/or danced around this previously (see 8½, La Dolce Vita). I like specific scenes, sometimes very much, but the loose and instinctual way Fellini executes his pictures tends to leave me impatient for a more to hang onto. After a couple tries, I recently found more than usual to like in Amarcord. It's in his characteristic later style, but that somehow works better here. "Amarcord" is a phonetic spelling of a term in the relevant Italian dialect that translates as "I remember." It thus announces itself as a memoir film, episodic, random, and idealized by definition, built from the stuff of memories, and childhood memories at that, of a specific time and place.

That time and place, however, happens to be 1930s Fascist Italy. You can't help reacting when you first see whimsy and nostalgia slathered on an era so reviled now. But Fellini is not doing any kind of gloss job here, which helps make the picture work. Mussolini and his followers tend to be ridiculous, but they are also clearly menacing (think Donald Trump rallies), and more than one long scene is devoted to reckless depredations of Fascist Party authorities in the era. Il Duce himself even makes an appearance at one point, largely as a buffoon. Fellini's artistry is notably evident in his skillful use all through the movie of mists, fog, road dust, gas fumes, and other visual obscurities functioning like impaired memory, a subtly effective way to remind us that this is a film of memories and that memory is unreliable.

La Strada (1954)

La strada, Italy, 108 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Tulio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano
Photography: Otello Martelli, Carlo Carlini
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Cattozzo
Cast: Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard Basehart, Aldo Silvani, Marcella Rovere, Livia Venturini

"La strada" is Italian for "the road" and that is probably as good a way in as any to this great Fellini picture. Three years before Jack Kerouac and a decade past Bob Hope and Bing Crosby—and well in front of The Road Warrior—this steps in with yet another variation on the look, feel, and traditions, now well worn, of the road story. Some of its most powerful moments are set in motion by the simple expedient of transition shots showing the principals on the move again across the postwar landscape of Italy in their ramshackle transport of motorcycle, sidecar, and covered wagon.

La Strada is frequently classified as neorealism—as much as anything for its exteriors and the desolate postwar mise en scene, not to mention that it's Italian when neorealism ruled Italian cinema—but it proceeds much more like a dream. It plunges straightway into its disorienting narrative, introducing two-bit circus strongman Zampano (played by Anthony Quinn), who is in the process of buying the child-like and otherworldly Gelsomina (played by Giulietta Masina) from her mother. He has also just informed them that another daughter he had purchased previously, Gelsomina's sister Rosa, is now dead; evidently he can't even say where she is buried. Within minutes Zampano and Gelsomina are on the road. Possible spoilers on the other side of the jump.

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

#37: Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)

I first came to appreciate Fellini as a result of an incident when I was working as an advertising copywriter for a cruise line and had reason to be present at the launch of a ship departing Seattle for the Inside Passage. The sun was blazing, the day soft and warm. An eight-piece brass band was playing. The air was thick with confetti strewn far and wide. Jovial passengers laughed in groups and embarked the ship. People bustled everywhere. But even after the confetti had fallen to the ground, and the passengers had boarded the ship, the band kept playing. And playing. Finally an ambulance arrived and medics boarded the ship to remove someone on a stretcher who had suffered a heart attack, and through all of that, for a departure delayed by more than an hour, the brass band kept playing.

Thus was the connection made: fragmented elliptical human drama + eccentric soundtrack = Felliniesque.

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Italy/France, 174 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Photography: Otello Martelli
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Cattozzo
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noel, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Alain Dijon, Nico

I'm starting to feel like this whole thing with Fellini is just not going to work out for me. I do appreciate a handful of his pictures from the '50s, but David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film is there to tell me I'm wrong, warning that those movies need "to be put firmly in [their] place" as "slick, mechanical stories, feeding on superficial feelings and uncritical of sentimentality or grand effects." (They include I Vitelloni, La Strada, Il Bidone, and Le notti di Cabiria, the latter of which is one of my all-time favorites, although I believe I am coming to understand better all the time that that is probably more a matter of its lead player Giulietta Masina than her husband Fellini.)

On the other hand, La Dolce Vita and 8½ both occupy the top 25 of the critical consensus list of the best films of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (currently #25 and #6 respectively). For me, they are both overlong exercises in overweening indulgence that only occasionally redeem themselves with arresting sequences (the majority of which involve music) and momentary diversions of intriguing images. I'll go with the critics to the extent that 8½ is the better of the two—in fairness, Thomson is nearly as dubious about La Dolce Vita as he is of the '50s films—but I think I may be about done with the enterprise now.

8½ (1963)

Italy/France, 138 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Cattozzo
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, Madeleine Lebeau, Caterina Boratto, Eddra Gale, Guido Alberti, Jean Rougeul

Italian director Federico Fellini's 8.5th film (after seven features and a short, though IMDb would seem to count it a little differently) is a great big shaggy dog of a movie and arguably a critical point where consensus art film starts to lose any chance for a broader audience. I recall the first time I saw it finding myself completely impatient with it—it just seemed like so much meandering self-indulgent crap. More recently I'm more forgiving. I still think it's meandering self-indulgent crap, but observing it repeatedly and closely discloses how carefully crafted it is to be exactly that.

The story: an attempt in media res to make a film, a production bogged down in chaos. Director Guido Anselmi (played by a brooding, pained, masterfully controlled Marcello Mastroianni, by all appearances standing in for Fellini) has become increasingly lost in the details and his own messy personal life. A man generally introduced throughout as "the author" (played by Jean Rougeul), a writer brought in to help salvage the project and a kind of one-man Greek chorus, lays it out in the first 10 minutes: "You want to talk about the film?" he snidely says to Guido, above the pumping strains of Beethoven. "On first reading it's evident that the film lacks a problematic or philosophical premise, making the film a series of gratuitous episodes, perhaps amusing for their ambiguous realism. One wonders what the authors are trying to say. Are they trying to make us think? To scare us? From the start, the action reveals a poverty of poetic inspiration. Forgive me, but this might be the definitive proof that cinema is 50 years behind all the other arts. The subject doesn't even have the merits of an 'avant garde' film, but it has all the shortcomings."

Thus, you can't say you weren't warned.