The Nights of Caberia

Cabiria, Heart of Italy

The landing of allied forces, on the beaches of Sicily in the south of Italy, on July 10, 1943, signaled the end of the reign of Benito Mussolini and his regime of Italian fascism. Prior to his capture, Italian cinema had been highly censored by the fascist authorities. Films produced under the regime portrayed a fairy tale view of Italian life showing only healthy and happy people under Mussolini’s rule. It was not until the end of 1943 that directors, like Roberto Rossellini (Italian), began to produce films that challenged the “perfect world” of the existing regime (Voigt).

Federico Fellini, film director and devoted Italian countryman, using his national gaze and the Italian neorealist film style, looks with concern, in The Nights of Cabiria, on his beloved country’s post-war state of deterioration. The ravages of World War II, the dictates of the Catholic church, and the corrupt dealings of the Italian government have taken their toll on Fellini’s Italy and its people, especially the poor, who have fallen into lifestyles of decadence and deceit. Fellini’s protagonist, the once innocent Cabiria turned prostitute, epitomizes everything that is both right and wrong with his country. Italy, like Cabiria is both virgin and whore. The war has left its countryside depleted of beauty. The Catholic church has imbued its people with plaster of paris models of how life should be lived. The government officials have robbed and plundered its occupants. Yet, Fellini’s gaze tells his viewers that both Cabiria and Italy have the strength, the spirit, and the soul to rise above whatever troubles and challenges lie ahead. Fellini, who ran away from home as a child to join the circus and who later in life worked as a cartoonist, caricaturist, and joke writer (Federico), cannot resist the pull of his passion for pasquinade and packages his neorealist production in an assortment of vaudevillian vignettes, adding a touch of clownish comedy to both combat and enhance the intensely emotional concern for humanity implicit in this black and white award-winning film.

Prior to 1943, Italian films were primarily studio productions similar to the melodramatic output of Hollywood in the same period…but neorealist filmmakers sought to see the world through a new set of eyes, narratively focusing on real-life experiences and social problems of Italy’s post-war society. To further maintain the “illusion of reality,” neorealist directors favored on-location shooting and used minimal editing (Leong). Fellini’s films of this period, combine an individual concern with neorealism with the tragic failure of the human condition (Film)

Fellini’s camera, using actual settings for visual authenticity, follows Cabiria on her excursions along the stark war-impacted landscapes of the countryside, through the cheerless streets, and into the seedy night spots of Rome. This style of filmmaking lends itself to thematic credibility by drawing on the reality of everyday life and Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria becomes a “found story” or flow-of-life film in which the flow of action seems so casual and spontaneous that it gives the impression that the filmmaker has simply discovered the story rather than inventing it (Beaver 256).

While most of the camera’s shadowed pursuits are placed in the darkening hours of evening and even darker hours of night, the film opens with an ill-fated Cabiria running—in a black and white striped shift reminiscent of a clown costume—in the open sunlight. Laughing, she teases her brute of a boyfriend, Georgio, with her purse which, in seconds, he has stolen, after pushing her into the dank waters of a polluted river and leaving her to sink or swim. Unable to swim, Cabiria cries for help but a man on shore refuses to take off his suit jacket in order to jump in to save her. She flounders, drowning, in the swirling water until a bevy of young boys dive in after her. One of the boys cries out, “If she gets to the sewer, she’ll never get out again.” Viewers are forewarned by Fellini that Italy, the fallen, and Cabiria, the prostitute, must be willing to change or they will never recover. Fellini calls upon a new generation of his compatriots to come save the country; in the film this new generation is represented by the young boys who are unafraid to jump in, grab Cabiria, and drag her to freedom.

Soon after the near drowning of Cabiria, Fellini takes us to her hovel of a cinder block home on the outskirts of Rome beyond the gas company. Here we enter a portion of Cabiria’s life in which we see that she has a place in the world to call her own, a site of safety, a space where she can rest and plan ahead for a future that does not include prostituting on the streets of Rome. It is here that we voyeuristically witness a moment or two of sensuality in her movements, her smile as her radio plays, and the flash of her eye as she pats her pillow. But back in the streets, where she plies her trade at the ruins of the Passeggiatta Archeologica, a magnificent monument on a busy street near the middle class neighborhoods of Rome (Axmaker), Cabiria, the working woman, shows no sexual desire toward men. Her work in the streets, catering to men’s need, selling herself for their pleasure has all but purged her of desire. If there is any desire left, it is not sexual, it is only a wish to leave the life she has somehow fallen into.

While Fellini asks his viewers to walk compassionately with the childlike, harlequinesque Cabiria, see what she sees, and feel what she feels, still he is a product of his male positioning in society. Through his male gaze, we see stereotypical female representations of the virgin and the whore, both which can be found in the single character of Cabiria. Stereotyping of women both expresses and normalizes patriarchal sexual inequality, says Christine Gledhill, in her essay on women’s image and voice. The “deadly combination of patriarchal fantasy and consumer capitalism turns woman as sex object into a marketing device” (110) and reflects male dominance in the media which simultaneously produces woman as object of male desire while inviting the female audience to consume (111). “If personal experience of oppression leads women to interrogate and resist aspects of our world, only the developing theoretical framework of feminism will enable us to analyze the historical forces of patriarchy and so formulate the means for change. In this sense the meaning of woman is not immanent in the world waiting to be revealed. ‘WOMAN’ is a social sexual dynamic being produced by history” (110).

In the patriarchal attitude of his culture, Fellini begs a forgiving view of a woman’s plight in the world without a man and calls upon his viewers to mourn with him the loss of a family structure so important to the protectorship of Cabiria and Italy. Separated by the losses of young men in World War II; intimidated through inescapable confession, sin, and guilt bestowed by the Catholic church; and pockets picked by greedy politicians; the family, with man as head of the household, has broken down. There are no family value systems in place to caution, care for, and prod people back to a responsible way of life. The only males in Fellini’s film are thieves, actors, priests, pimps, and men with no backbone who are easily hypnotized—none of whom can restore honor and decency to Cabiria or to Italy. Most of these men Fellini costumes in dark glasses to show they have lost sight of their roles in Italy as providers, protectors and heads of households. The only family, the viewer sees through Fellini’s economic gaze, is a painfully poor group, who—having purchased Cabiria’s tiny one-room dwelling—arrive with their meager belongings and many children.

Fellini, “a director concerned with moral and spiritual conditions of the human heart,” (Film) creates his own pseudo family in The Nights of Cabiria. And since there are no decent men around to fill the role of father, Fellini takes it on himself, along with that of teacher. If he can make the Italian people see how far they have fallen, perhaps he can lead them back to a more positive life and view of their future. He places Wanda, Cabiria’s neighboring prostitute friend in the role of mother. Despite Cabiria’s adolescent attitude toward her, Wanda remains the devoted nurturer. She is the all-knowing, been-around-the-block mom who warns, soothes, and plans ahead. Unlike Cabiria, who looks for love in all the wrong places, Wanda knows better. She does not find truth in lies—not from men, not from the church, and not from society. Nor does she believe in miracles. She depends on herself. Wanda’s world, like the film’s, is defined in black and white. She wears no rose-colored glasses as does the family’s child, Cabiria.

Cabiria, as child, is one who loves the game of riding in an open-topped car; eating chocolates; dancing in her bobby socks to any tune that happens to come her way, whether in the streets or anywhere she happens to be; a child who hasn’t really grown up but has become a prostitute (though she doesn’t remember how it all started); a child who was, in fact, brought up in a fatherless home and named Maria in favor of the Catholic Virgin Mary; and who Fellini renamed for the little slave-girl, Cabiria, so named as the title of a 1914 Italian popular costume film (Kauffmann).

But that is the child Cabiria’s plight in life…to be a slave to men. Her upbringing in the Catholic church has laid the groundwork for her belief in having the good life which translates into having a husband, home, and respectability. And she is a slave to her own way of life, her sins. She cannot escape it, or them, because she must make a living. Yet, she knows she cannot share in God’s grace—be happy—while she remains in her profession. She is therefore beset with guilt. She is damned if she does leave and damned if she doesn’t. “A contradictory combination of female independence (the willingness to confront social norms) and dependence (the need for male companionship) provides a common thread throughout the female oriented melodramas of the 1950’s” (Byars 104). The only way out for Cabiria is marriage yet that seems like an wish that cannot fulfill itself.

Fellini’s Cabiria, played by his real-life wife Giulietta Masina (Biography), is called upon again and again to show viewers that she is simultaneously independent and confined to her beliefs based on society’s demand for women to marry—a requirement for respectability. “Fellini’s women play many roles…Prominent among these is the primal sex object and/or the available whore” (Manasca). “With the indomitable demeanor of a Chaplinesque waif, she plays a shabby streetwalker who dreams of happier times” (Baumgarten). Her face in clown-white make-up, arched brows, and darting innocent eyes change quickly from sad to happy. “It’s as if she can waltz untouched through the horrors of her world, if she shields herself with a comic persona” (Ebert). “Devices such as the close-up or voice-over construct meaning less by what they show or say than by the way they organize the female image into a patriarchal position, or, conversely, offer textual opportunities for resistance. What this reveals is not the expression of immanent truths about women, but rather an aspect of how patriarchy works. It explains, for example, the recognizable reality of stereotypes that turn the effects of the specific conditions to women’s lives…into an explanation of female nature…” (Gledhill114).

While the films of Federico Fellini had their foundation in the neorealist movement, with their profoundly personal narratives and simple technical credits, Fellini also brought a surreal quality to his films, infusing some “magic escapism into the normally staid atmosphere of the period’s offerings” (Leong). The magic escapism, in The Nights of Cabiria, allows Fellini to take a serious look at the Catholic Church, its professions of faith, and its boisterous brainwashed followers, but to do so by employing a sense of burlesque-type comedy. He exposes his view of the Catholic church’s powerful indoctrination of its people to follow its dogma without question, to confess their sins, accept that guilt must follow sin, and believe that miracles will result from ritualistic prayers, practices and offerings.

With the air of a big top come to town, Fellini takes his viewers on a procession through the city of Rome—a parade in which Cabiria cannot resist participating. Their goal is to make a pilgrimage to the Church of the Blessed Lady, where they will pray for miracles. Fellini provides them with a carnival atmosphere, complete with all the spectacle of flashing lights, candles, pennants, and games. Here the devotees, intent only on selves, elbow others to get through the gates, then push their way ahead to kiss the cement steps and icons and plead their personal petitions. Fellini’s anti-Catholic sentiments are clearly made known through this staged show as he asks, “Which is worse, the sins of Cabiria or the sins of the church who propagandizes the people of Italy?” It is up to the Italian people to make change. If they continue to prostitute themselves to the church they will be destroyed.

Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria, while dealing with weighty issues, concerns, and questions still “comes off as anything but ponderous” (Zacharek). Fellini uses a touch of satire as he poses the issue of class and compares Cabiria with a vaudevillian cast of characters found in a nightclub in Rome. The haughty whores in high heels and hats are no better than Cabiria…nor is Lazzario, the wealthy playboy actor who, while rich, is indifferent to Cabiria’s (and Italy’s) pain. He is not even a cut above the other johns, pimps, gigolos, or thieves who use women. His spoiled girlfriend, a Veronica Lake look-alike, falls into the same contemptible category as do the hypocritical women in the nightclub who peer, through their racial gazes, at the dark-skinned exotic dancers as if they were sideshow freaks or animals performing circus acts. Wealth does not raise one up among others, Fellini says.

But satire turns into sadness, when Fellini takes us to the Hollywood style home of the actor and we become, along with Cabiria—who is cast into a closet when Lazzario’s girlfriend unexpectedly arrives—voyeurs in a silent movie, a peep show. As we watch Cabiria watching the two lovers through the keyhole, we are struck by the loneliness of her life, her profession, and her seemingly empty future. As she leaves the actor’s home, she looks with such longing at the woman sleeping safely in his bed that it is almost too painful to watch.

That Cabiria’s life will become even more empty and painful seems hard to imagine but it does, when she is made the butt of a devilish joke by a hypnotist in a smoke-filled show. Tricked into telling the story of her life—including the fact that she owns a home of her own—Cabiria reverts to her youthful self and her plans for a future which did not come true. She waltzes in a whimsical trance, the sad music of an old song playing in the background. Alone on a barren stage, Cabiria (like Italy) is a study in innocence lost, as she smells her tiny bouquet of flowers and dreams, for one moment, of a future that will likely never happen.

It is then that Fellini introduces the government worker, Oscar, who—disguised as a good guy—appears to save Cabiria from her harsh isolated life as a prostitute. In doing so, Fellini highlights the final lie, the lie of the Italian government against a trusting people. Oscar offers Cabiria hope but delivers only false promises, robbing her finally of all her worldly goods—and nearly killing her in the process.

Bereft, Cabiria, picks herself up once again and moves on, gathering courage as she proceeds. In one bright and shining moment, she turns her eyes, glistening with tears, to the camera and to the viewers, telling us she will survive. She’s done it before and she’ll do it again. Cabiria’s betrayed heart, like Italy’s, remains capable and strong. She will rise again, no matter what evil, difficulties, or roadblocks she encounters. Italy, too, Fellini warns, must pick itself up and move on to a new life…but this time with experience, leaving childlike acceptance behind.

By Coralie Cederna Johnson

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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