AS I SIT DOWN to write this article, I have no idea what kind of reception Fellini’s latest film will have. I hope it is as enthusiastic as I think it should be, but I do not conceal from myself the fact that there are two categories of viewers who may have reservations about the film. The first is that segment of the general public likely to be put off by the way the story mixes the strange with what seems to be an almost melodramatic naïvete. These people can accept the theme of the whore with a heart of gold only if it is spiced with crime. The second belongs, albeit reluctantly, to that part of the “elite” which supports Fellini almost in spite of itself. Constrained to admire La Strada and under even more constraint from its austerity and its “outcast” status to admire Il Bidone, I expect these viewers now to criticize Le Notti di Cabiria for being “too well made”—a film in which practically nothing is left to chance, a film that is clever—artful. even. Let’s forget the first objection; it is important only in the effect it may have at the box office. The second, however, is worth refuting.
The least surprising thing about Le Notti di Cabiria is not that this is the first time Fellini has succeeded in putting together a masterly script, with an action that cannot be faulted—unmarred by clichés or missing links, one in which there could be no place for the unhappy cuts and the corrections in editing from which La Strada and Il Bidone suffered.a Of course, Lo Sceicco bianco and even I Vitelloni were not clumsy in their construction, but chiefly because, though their themes were specifically Fellinian, they were still being expressed within a framework provided by relatively traditional scenarios. Fellini has finally cast these crutches aside with La Strada: theme and character alone are the final determinants in the story now, to the exclusion of all else; story has nothing now to do with what one calls plot; I even have doubts that it is proper here to speak of “action.” The same is true of Il Bidone.
It is not that Fellini would like to return to the excuses which drama affords him in his earlier films. Quite the contrary. Le Notti di Cabiria goes even beyond Il Bidone, but here the contradictions between what I will call the “verticality” of its author’s themes and the “horizontality” of the requirements of narrative have been reconciled. It is within the Fellinian system that he now finds his solutions. This does not prevent the viewer from possibly mistaking brilliant perfection for mere facility, if not indeed for betrayal. All the same, on one score at least Fellini has deceived himself a little: is he not counting on the character played by François Perier (who to me seems miscast) to have a surprise effect? Now it is clear that any effect of “suspense” or even of “drama” is essentially alien to the Fellinian system, in which it is impossible for time ever to serve as an abstract or dynamic support—as an a priori framework for narrative structure. In La Strada as in Il Bidone, time is nothing more than the shapeless framework modified by fortuitous events which affect the fate of his heroes, though never in consequence of external necessity. Events do not “happen” in Fellini’s world; they “befall” its inhabitants; that is to say, they occur as an effect of “vertical” gravity, not in conformity to the laws of “horizontal” causality. As for the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to a purely internal kind of time—which I cannot qualify even as Bergsonian, in so far as Bergson’s theory of the Données immédiates de la conscience contains a strong element of psychologism. Let us avoid the vague terms of a “spiritualizing” vocabulary. Let us not say that the transformation of the characters takes place at the level of the “soul.” But it has at least to occur at that depth of their being into which consciousness only occasionally reaches down. This does not mean at the level of the unconscious or the subconscious but rather the level on which what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the “basic project” obtains, the level of ontology. Thus the Fellinian character does not evolve; he ripens or at the most becomes transformed (whence the metaphor of the angel’s wings, to which I will shortly return).
But let us confine ourselves, for the moment, to the structure of the script. I totally reject, then, the coup de théâtre in Le Notti di Cabiria which belatedly reveals Oscar a swindler. Fellini must have been aware of what he was doing because, as if to compound his sin, he makes François Perier wear dark glasses when he is about to turn “wicked.” What of it? This is a minor concession indeed and I find it easy to pardon in view of the care Fellini now takes to avoid in this film the grave danger to which a complicated and much too facile shooting script exposed him in Il Bidone.
I find it all the more easy to pardon when it is the only concession he makes in this film; for the rest Fellini communicates the tension and the rigor of tragedy to it without ever having to fall back on devices alien to his universe. Cabiria, the little prostitute whose simple soul is rooted in hope, is not a character out of melodrama, because her desire to “get out” is not motivated by the ideals of bourgeois morality or a strictly bourgeois sociology. She does not hold her trade in contempt. As a matter of fact, if there were such creatures as pure-hearted pimps capable of understanding her and of embodying not love indeed but just a belief in life, she would doubtless see no incompatibility between her secret hopes and her nighttime activities. Does she not owe one of her greatest moments of happiness—happiness followed consequently by an even more bitter deception—to her chance meeting with a famous film star who because he is drunk and feeling embittered against love proposes to take her home to his luxurious apartment. There was something to make the other girls just die of envy! But the incident is fated to come to a pitiful end, because after all a prostitute’s trade commonly destines her only to disappointments; this is why she longs, more or less consciously, to get out of it through the impossible love of some stalwart fellow who will make no demands of her. If we seem now to have reached an outcome typical of bourgeois melodrama, it is in any case by a very different route.
Le Notti di Cabiria—like La Strada, like Il Bidone, and, in the final analysis, like I Vitelloni—is the story of ascesis, of renunciation, and, (however you choose to interpret the term) of salvation. The beauty and the rigor of its construction proceed this time from the perfect economy of its constituent episodes. Each of them, as I have said earlier, exists by and for itself, unique and colorful as an event, but now each belongs to an order of things that never fails to reveal itself in retrospect as having been absolutely necessary. As she goes from hope to hope, plumbing enroute the depths of betrayal, contempt, and poverty, Cabiria follows a path on which every halt readies her for the stage ahead. When one stops and reflects, one realizes that there is nothing in the film, before the meeting with the benefactor of the tramps (whose irruption into the film seems at first sight to be no more than a characteristic piece of Fellinian bravura), which is not proved subsequently to be necessary to trick Cabiria into making an act of ill-placed faith; for if such men do exist, then every miracle is possible and we, too, will be without mistrust when Perier appears.
I do not intend to repeat what has been written about Fellini’s message. It has, anyway, been noticeably the same since I Vitelloni. This is not to be taken as a sign of sterility. On the contrary, while variety is the mark of a “director,” it is unity of inspiration that connotes the true “author.” But in the light of this new masterpiece maybe I can still attempt to throw a little more light on what in essence is Fellini’s style.
It is absurd, preposterous even, to deny him a place among the neorealists. Such a judgment could only be possible on ideological grounds. It is true that Fellini’s realism though social in origin is not social in intent. This remains as individual as it is in Chekhov or Dostoievsky. Realism, let me repeat, is to be defined not in terms of ends but of means, and neorealism by a specific kind of relationship of means to ends. What De Sica has in common with Rossellini and Fellini is obviously not the deep meaning of their films—even if, as it happens, these more or less coincide—but the pride of place they all give to the representation of reality at the expense of dramatic structures. To put it more precisely, the Italian cinema has replaced a “realism” deriving in point of content from the naturalism of novels and structurally from theater with what, for brevity’s sake, we shall call “phenomenological” realism which never “adjusts” reality to meet the needs imposed by psychology or drama. The relation between meaning and appearance having been in a sense inverted, appearance is always presented as a unique discovery, an almost documentary revelation that retains its full force of vividness and detail. Whence the director’s art lies in the skill with which he compels the event to reveal its meaning—or at least the meaning he lends it—without removing any of its ambiguity.b Thus defined, neorealism is not the exclusive property of any one ideology nor even of any one ideal, no more than it excludes any other ideal—no more, in point of fact, than reality excludes anything.
I even tend to view Fellini as the director who goes the farthest of any to date in this neorealist asethetic, who goes even so far that he goes all the way through it and finds himself on the other side.
Let us consider how free Fellini’s direction is from the encumbrances of psychological after-effects. His characters are never defined by their “character” but exclusively by their appearance. I deliberately avoid the world “behavior” because its meaning has become too restricted; the way people behave is only one element in the knowledge we have of them. We know them by many other signs, not only their faces, of course, but by the way they move, by everything that makes the body the outer shell of the inner man—even more, perhaps, by things still more external than these, things on the frontier between the individual and the world, things such as haircut, moustache, clothing, eye glasses (the one prop that Fellini has used to a point where it has become a gimmick). Then, beyond that again, setting, too, has a role to play—not, of course, in an expressionistic sense but rather as establishing a harmony or a disharmony between setting and character. I am thinking in particular of the extraordinary relationship established between Cabiria and the unaccustomed settings into which Nazzari inveigles her, the nightclub and the luxurious apartment.
But it is here that we reach the boundaries of realism, here, too, that Fellini, who drives on further still, takes us beyond them. It is a little as if, having been led to this degree of interest in appearances, we were now to see the characters no longer among the objects but, as if these had become transparent, through them. I mean by this that without our noticing the world has moved from meaning to analogy, then from analogy to identification with the supernatural. I apologize for this equivocal word; the reader may replace it with whatever he will—“poetry” or “surrealism” or “magic”—whatever the term that expresses the hidden accord which things maintain with an invisible counterpart of which they are, so to speak, merely the adumbration.
Let us take one example from among many others of this process of “supernaturalization,” which is to be found in the metaphor of the angel. From his first films, Fellini has been haunted by the angelizing of his characters, as if the angelic state were the ultimate referent in his universe, the final measure of being. One can trace this tendency in its explicit development at least from I Vitelloni on: Sordi dresses up for the carnival as a guardian angel; a little later on what Fabrizi steals, as if by chance, is the carved wooden statue of an angel. But these allusions are direct and concrete. Subtler still, and all the more interesting because it seems unconscious, is the shot in which the monk who has come down from working in a tree loads a long string of little branches on his back. This detail is nothing more than a nice “realistic” touch for us, perhaps even for Fellini himself, until at the end of Il Bidone we see Antonio dying at the side of the road: in the white light of dawn he sees a procession of children and women bearing bundles of sticks on their backs: angels pass! I must note, too, how in the same film Picasso races down a street and the tails of his raincoat spread out behind him like little wings. It is that same Richard Basehart again who appears before Gelsomina as if he were weightless, a dazzling sight on his high wire under the spotlights.
There is no end to Fellini’s symbolism. Certainly, it would be possible to study the whole body of his work from this one angle.c What needed to be done was simply to place it within the context of the logic of neorealism, for it is evident that these associations of objects and characters which constitute Fellini’s universe derive their value and their importance from realism alone—or, to put it a better way, perhaps, from the objectivity with which they are recorded. It is not in order to look like an angel that the friar carries his bundles of sticks on his back, but it is enough to see the wing in the twigs for the old monk to be transformed into one. One might say that Fellini is not opposed to realism, any more than he is to neorealism, but rather that he achieves it surpassingly in a poetic reordering of the world.
Fellini creates a similar revolution at the narrative level. From this point of view, to be sure, neorealism is also a revolution in form which comes to bear on content. For example, the priority which they accord incident over plot has led De Sica and Zavattini to replace plot as such with a microaction based on an infinitely divisible attention to the complexities in even the most ordinary of events. This in itself rules out the slightest hierarchy, whether psychological, dramatic, or ideological, among the incidents that are portrayed. This does not mean, of course, that the director is obliged to renounce all choice over what he is to show us, but it does mean that he no longer makes the choice in reference to some pre-existing dramatic organization. In this new perspective, the important sequence can just as well be the long scene that “serves no purpose” by traditional screenplay standards.d
Nonetheless—this is true even of Umberto D, which perhaps represents the limits of experimentation in this new dramaturgy—the evolution of film follows an invisible thread. Fellini, I think, brings the neorealist revolution to its point of perfection when he introduces a new kind of script, the scenario lacking any dramatic linking, based as it is, to the exclusion of all else, on the phenomenological description of the characters. In the films of Fellini, the scenes that establish the logical relations, the significant changes of fortune, the major points of dramatic articulation, only provide the continuity links, while the long descriptive sequences, seeming to exercise no effect on the unfolding of the “action” proper, constitute the truly important and revealing scenes. In I Vitelloni, these are the nocturnal walks, the senseless strolls on the beach; in La Strada, the visit to the convent; in Il Bidone, the evening at the nightclub or the New Year’s celebration. It is not when they are doing something specific that Fellini’s characters best reveal themselves to the viewer but by their endless milling around.
If there are, still, tensions and climaxes in the films of Fellini which leave nothing to be desired as regards drama or tragedy, it is because, in the absence of traditional dramatic causality, the incidents in his films develop effects of analogy and echo. Fellini’s hero never reaches the final crisis (which destroys him and saves him) by a progressive dramatic linking but because the circumstances somehow or other affect him, build up inside him like the vibrant energy in a resonating body. He does not develop; he is transformed; overturning finally like an iceberg whose center of buoyancy has shifted unseen.
By way of conclusion, and to compress the disturbing perfection of Le Notti di Cabiria into a single phrase, I would like to analyze the final shot of the film, which strikes me, when everything else is taken into account, as the boldest and the most powerful shot in the whole of Fellini’s work. Cabiria, stripped of everything—her money, her love, her faith—emptied now of herself, stands on a road without hope. A group of boys and girls swarm into the scene singing and dancing as they go, and from the depths of her nothingness Cabiria slowly returns to life; she starts to smile again; soon she is dancing, too. It is easy to imagine how artificial and symbolic this ending would have been, casting aside as it does all the objections of verisimilitude, if Fellini had not succeeded in projecting his film onto a higher plane by a single detail of direction, a stroke of real genius that forces us suddenly to identify with his heroine. Chaplin’s name is often mentioned in conection with La Strada, but I have never thought the comparison between Gelsomina and Charlie (which I find hard to take in itself) very convincing. The first shot which is not only up to Chaplin’s level but the true equal of his best inventions is the final shot of Le Notti di Cabiria, when Giulietta Masina turns toward the camera and her glance crosses ours. As far as I know, Chaplin is the only man in the history of film who made successful systematic use of this gesture, which the books about film-making are unanimous in condemning. Nor would it be in place if when she looked us in the eye Cabiria seemed to come bearing some ultimate truth. But the finishing touch to this stroke of directorial genius is this, that Cabiria’s glance falls several times on the camera without ever quite coming to rest there. The lights go up on this marvel of ambiguity. Cabiria is doubtless still the heroine of the adventures which she has been living out before us, somewhere behind that screen, but here she is now inviting us, too, with her glance to follow her on the road to which she is about to return. The invitation is chaste, discreet, and indefinite enough that we can pretend to think that she means to be looking at somebody else. At the same time, though, it is definite and direct enough, too, to remove us quite finally from our role of spectator.
a Alas, the facts give me the lie: the original-language version shown in Paris reveals the deletion of at least one long scene that was still in the film when it was shown at Cannes, namely the scene of “the visitor of Saint Vincent de Paul” to which I allude below. But then we have seen how easy it has been in the past to convince Fellini—if it is indeed he who is responsible for this cut—that a truly remarkable sequence is “useless.” [The “visitor” is a member of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul founded in France in 1833 to care for the sick, the aged, the poor, and what were then known as “fallen women.”—TR.]
b For Bazin’s use of the term “ambiguity,” see the Introduction.
c See the article by Dominique Aubier in Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 49.
d This is true of the sequence that has been deleted from the film.