directed by Federico Fellini
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
additional dialogue by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Criterion #49. Nights of Cabiria.

This has all the hallmarks of “great film” status (“Great film” in the snooty international Cahiers du Film Studies sense, not the Academy Awards montage “Oh, Toto! Attaboy Clarence! I’m the king of the world! You’re a wizard, Harry!” sense):

1) auteurism, this being Fellini’s own script for a movie showcasing his wife, plus did I mention “Fellini”
2) intra-cinematic reference (to e.g. Charlie Chaplin)
3) meta-cinematic reference (a movie star and a magic show figure in Cabiria’s adventures)
4) opportunity to say “breaks the fourth wall”
5) black-and-white
6) not American
7) slow pace
8) centrist approach to satisfy partisans of naturalism (unglamorous people and places + an impression of unmanaged humanity) and romanticism (touches of magic realism + fabulist contrivances in the plotting)
9) already established as a “great film”
10) (is good)

I may sound cynical about this, but I’m not. I enjoyed the movie and wouldn’t want to strip it of its fame at all. I do sometimes want to strip halls of fame of their fame, though. And their halls.

Advocates of relatively marginalized art are usually too preoccupied by their marginalization to think straight. They want to do the public culture a service by trying to return good and worthwhile things to the light — as well they might, seeing as how much of what’s in the light at any given time is terrible. But they tend to go about it naively and ineffectually. They wish everyone else shared their tastes, but they don’t actually believe in manipulating people to bring that about — so they devote themselves to building shrines and halls of fame, and then polishing them brighter and brighter, rather than simply buying advertising space and insinuating themselves into people’s regular lives, which might actually do some good. Shrines and halls of fame are essentially defensive.

The people at The Criterion Collection, however — to their immense credit — actually do something quite genuinely constructive to rehabilitating great films with their Trojan Horse approach. They package! package! package! until their vacantly sexy product can attract the design-lust of the living, and then lo and behold some people are, they know not why, watching Nights of Cabiria again. Or, equally, something else. Obviously Trojan Horseplay places great responsibility on the curator. And thus by extension on the viewer. I could go on about Criterion and packaging and authenticity and my mixed feelings. Someday I will but it won’t be for a while.

Nights of Cabiria is about a good soul and whether she will be able to find kindness in the world. It is exactly a Charlie Chaplin movie, except that Chaplin was a very pure egomaniac and did not differentiate between the world being saved and the world learning to love him sufficiently. Fellini tries to work outside such illusions. Both this movie and nearly every Chaplin movie pose the same sentimental question: “Will this person be loved sufficiently?” But the philosophical extension of the question is different in the two cases. Chaplin egomaniacally implies that his film is asking “will the world ever be good and pure?” Fellini’s generalization is the more reasonable “will any person ever be loved sufficiently?” He is a less complete egomaniac and has at least some inkling that his audience is made up of individuals with their own problems.

This may sound dubiously psychoanalytic of me, but it’s explicitly what the second half of the movie is about. The pivot of the plot (such as it is) is that in a moment of spooky transcendence, Cabiria — outwardly already a lovable Little Tramp figure — is magically made to reveal her true purity and simplicity of soul in its complete nakedness. And after this moment of uncannily intense vulnerability, the audience is held in suspense about it for a very long time: has this been a good or a bad thing?

Well, to spoil the famous ending — I’m going to try not to be specific, but if you haven’t seen it you might want to do that rather than read this and the next paragraph — it is, of course, a mixed bag. The question left poignantly open at the end is how much the proportions of that mix matter.

The strength of art is to draw compelling philosophical equations where the rational mind would refuse them, and this is where the film earns its greatness, in my book. Fellini’s ultimate cinematic proposal is that there is a sense in which the proportions of pain and joy simply do not matter. There is kindness in life, and that is good; there is cruelty in life and that is bad. And he can put his finger on the bad side of the scale as heavily as he wants, and it is still in some sense balanced. In the art-sense of the film we feel the truth of this point of view, and the tears it draws are, I think, tears of recognition. Then the lights are immediately turned back on so that we can’t argue against any optimism but our own, because Fellini has already removed himself. This is a very sophisticated manipulation of the audience and a very generous one.

Incidentally: I want to be clear that my calling Chaplin a “very pure egomaniac” is not intended as a criticism. I think his movies (at least the famous Little Tramp ones — I haven’t seen any of the more transparently self-indulgent later ones) are wonderful as gifts to the ego in everyone, the part that says “I am pure, and all my problems arise from the world being impure.” As far as it goes, this is true and healthy and the movies let us experience the joy of that. The difficulty comes when we stop watching intuitively and emotionally, and start thinking critically about the man behind the curtain, as it were, the real guy wearing the fake moustache. Then we might realize that we aren’t so sure we like his self-aggrandizing manipulations. But that’s the fall from grace. In actuality we did like the manipulations. They are not harmful to us until we observe them.

A few minutes ago, I intended for this train of thought to stop at several further stations that I had in mind, but my mental slate just got wiped and one of those end-of-the-line barriers got set up. And something I’m learning is that straining to recall thoughts that have untimely vanished is about the most destructive thing I can do to my flow, so let’s just go on to the next thing.

(“Untimely” as adverb: some dictionaries say “archaic” but OED, and more surprisingly, Merriam-Webster, do not. Take that, readers.)

During viewing I thought: “perhaps the title Nights of Cabiria is meant to suggest that the successive episodes are her different dreams, reflecting and embodying her various fears and hopes and ambivalences, as real dreams do.” In part I thought this because I wasn’t yet clear on what level of realism vs. clown-show I was seeing. Later on, when I had grown comfortable with the style of the movie, I no longer needed this conceit to get me through, but it still worked. And afterward it still does. Maybe it only does because all movies are like dreams, or all art is like dreams, or all life is like dreams. But maybe it specifically does because Fellini had that in mind at some level, though I can’t find that documented anywhere. Anyway I’m putting it out there.

Nights of Cabiria seemed to me to be one of those works by male artists that says “women (my wife/girlfriend especially) and their souls and feelings are so wonderful and deep, which is to say that my eye for women and my awareness that they have souls and feelings is wonderful and deep, are you getting this, ladies? Check out my massive throbbing sensitivity to what you really are.” As Molly Bloom says: “yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is”. She says this because a man made her say it, in the course of his very flashy attempt to demonstrate that he could understand or feel what a woman is better than anyone.

This genre is of course generally associated with Woody Allen… but I personally think of Steve Martin as its most embarrassing practitioner, with screenplay after book after play showcasing his sensitive understanding of the real literature-worthy feelings of women who, y’know, happen to be his type. Am I the only person who thought of this as horribly transparently no more than the output of an ingrained denialist compulsion to convert idle sex fantasies about hot girls into “real” “consideration” of their “particular inner lives”? I mean, look at the damn cover! And of course Steve Martin played the “guy in the me-Steve-Martin role in this sex fantasy” in the movie. (I admit, I didn’t read it or see the movie. I did read one of his later books. As I recall it too had a hot girl with a lot of inner sadness in it.)

I’m not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person, but I don’t want to be like that: let me try to think more fully and empathetically about them” can’t ever yield fruit. I’m also not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person and I love what I’m seeing and I’m going to write it down as art” is problematic. But I do squirm at the bad faith of “I agree that objectifying someone is insufficient but don’t worry, this can’t possibly be objectification because it has feelings in it. Look where I say that ‘she sighed with loneliness when men would ogle her long, toned legs.’ Look where I say that ‘her tasteful miniskirt kept riding up uncomfortably over her girlish, too-skinny thighs!'” If we’re reading about people as people and not people as bodies, why the obsession with appearances?

Though Steve Martin has walked the walk, in that particular respect, by descending into some kind of sad facelift spiral, so what do I know.

I guess all I’m really saying is that “depth” can also be an object, “sincerity” can be a fashion, and “sensitivity” can be a ploy. I would never hurt you, girl. (Aw shit you’ve just been v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed!) And I get uncomfortable during “Girlfriends: so full of human depth!” movies because some part of me feels like I’m being very slowly v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed.

Related: I have always been very nervous about attempting to write fiction about fictional people — and not just the hot ones — because I fear that all my “imaginative empathy” will just sound like Steve Martin’s writing: like someone who desperately needs to believe that he is sensitive, far more than he actually is sensitive. What causes that effect? Overthinking, and if you’re asking about it, it’s already too late. Damn! Try again later.

ANYWAY, let’s go back to Woody Allen, who like I said is a more common point of reference for the “dig me digging my girlfriend” genre. Maybe I’ve just got Woody Allen on the brain because Nicholas Kristof recently ran this provocative piece asking everyone what their favorite Woody Allen movie is — it’s been a while but I think mine may still be Love and Death. Thanks, New York Times, this was fun! — but Nights of Cabiria seemed to me like the ideal “why my girlfriend is cool” movie Woody has been trying to make for years. When I saw Amarcord I also got a strong sense of the extent of Woody’s debt to Fellini. Confirmed: it is a large extent.

In Fellini’s defense on this count, if a defense is needed: what Giulietta Masina is doing here is real performance, not just a kind of relaxed self-exposure a la Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (which, to be clear, I like). But, as some pretentious clowning instructor (or for that matter Charlie Chaplin) might say: the essence of clowning is truth — real, if stylized, self-exposure — and of course what charms and endears us about Cabiria is her aura of humanity and spirit, not her specific “persona,” and that cannot be falsified out of whole cloth. (I know it is theoretically a big deal that this is a movie about a prostitute, but she’s only as much a prostitute as The Little Tramp is homeless, which is to say only slightly more than Donald Duck is a duck.) It is a movie meant to win Giulietta Masina awards for being lovably wonderful, as it did.

Again the train hits a barrier and wonders where it could possibly have been going. I swear it was somewhere else. But look at that beautiful expanse of uninhabited snow out there, with no tracks to be seen. Let’s get out of here.

Nino Rota is really very very good at what he does. His thing might seem limited and repetitive — if you listen to a “Best of Nino Rota’s Movie Music” album you might well feel that you’re just listening to a single cohesive album — but is actually exquisitely nuanced. The Amarcord theme and the Notti di Cabiria theme may sound like very similarly catchy little sentimental tunes in basically the same popular style, but if they swapped movies they wouldn’t work at all. The poignancy of one is not the same as the poignancy of the other: it’s a slightly different station at a slightly different volume at a slightly different time of day. In both cases the whole meaning of the film depends on the music, and he manages to get it exactly right.

Having on a few occasions been in or near the trenches when such musical choices are being hammered out, I know that this aspect of dramatic composing, getting the meaning exactly exactly right, is the subtlest and most important. John Williams used to say in interviews that the hardest part was getting the little motives on which the whole score was based to be exactly what they needed to be as signifiers, and that in more than one instance he had to work through many tens of almost-identical variants of the same few notes, trying to sniff out the right one. (Having them go on to be megafamous was surely vindicating. I think in the confidence of old age he may no longer spend quite as long as he might.) Nino Rota clearly had a special knack where he could get the dimension of meaning just right, and then execute it with such nonchalance that it would sound genuinely effortless, like it might just be a pre-existing track. I don’t know if he had to work at it or if it just came to him.

At the very end of this film, when the orchestra emerges in full force to bring down the curtain, we can’t help but notice that the score has known exactly what it was doing all along and has earned the feeling we’re feeling. It’s a very smart score that turns what might otherwise seem like a small and erratic movie into something cohesive and strong and moving. Here are the main titles: Track 49. (The themes that are “popular” here later appear arranged as “classical”; the themes that are “classical” here later appear arranged as “popular”.)