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Join us on July 14 at 1 p.m. for our weekly Sunday screening series, featuring director Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning “Nights of Cabiria” (1957) in digital projection.
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA | 1957 | DIRECTOR: Federico Fellini | WITH: Giuletta Masina, Francois Perier, Franca Marzi | RUNNING TIME: 1H 50M | UNRATED adult themes | DIGITAL PROJECTION
In the fifth of their immortal collaborations, Federico Fellini and the exquisitely expressive Giulietta Masina completed the creation of one of the most indelible characters in all of cinema: Cabiria, an irrepressible, fiercely independent sex worker who, as she moves through the sea of Rome’s humanity, through adversity and heartbreak, must rely on herself—and her own indomitable spirit—to stay standing.
Winner of the best actress prize at Cannes for Masina and the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Nights of Cabiria brought the early, neorealist-influenced phase of Fellini’s career to a transcendent close with its sublimely heartbreaking yet hopeful final image, which embodies, perhaps more than any other in the director’s body of work, the blend of the bitter and the sweet that define his vision of the world.
“Nights of Cabiria” plays like a plucky collaboration on an adult theme between Fellini and Chaplin. Masina deliberately based her Cabiria on the Little Tramp, I think–most obviously with some business with an umbrella, and a struggle with the curtains in a nightclub. But while Chaplin’s character inhabited a world of stock villains and happy endings, Cabiria survives at the low end of Rome’s prostitution trade.
“When she’s picked up by a famous actor and he asks her if she works the Via Veneto, the center of Rome’s glitz, she replies matter-of-factly that, no, she prefers the Archeological Passage, because she can commute there on the subway.
“Cabiria is a working girl. Not a sentimentalized one, as in “Sweet Charity,” the Broadway musical and movie based on this story, but a tough cookie who climbs into truck cabs, gets in fights and hides in the bushes during police raids.
“She’s proud to own her own house–a tiny shack in an industrial wasteland–and she dreams of sooner or later finding true romance, but her taste in men is dangerous, it’s so trusting; the movie opens with her current lover and pimp stealing her purse and shoving her into the river to drown.
“Of all his characters, Fellini once said, Cabiria was the only one he was still worried about. In 1992, when Fellini was given an honorary career Oscar, he looked down from the podium to Masina sitting in the front row and told her not to cry. The camera cut to her face, showing her smiling bravely through her tears, and there was Cabiria.” — Roger Ebert
The screening will be introduced by Bill Cosford Cinema manager Rene Rodriguez. Tickets are $5 and available at link above. Students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission. Cane card must be shown at the door.
