The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Federico Fellini · a film · 1957 · about 110 minutes · written with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli · in Italian, much of it in Roman speech
Mode
Episodic fable of a Roman prostitute; street comedy, devotion and near tragedy in one film
Mythos
The holy fool robbed again and again and not made wise by it; a mock baptism, a plea for grace refused, a public confession, a resurrection without a miracle
Phase
A run of nights and days in Rome and its outskirts, from a shove into the Tiber to a cliff above a lake at sunset and a road out of a wood
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono, about 110 minutes as released in 1957; Aldo Tonti’s photography, Nino Rota’s score; Giulietta Masina as Cabiria
Register
From slapstick on a riverbank to a plea to be killed; comedy and grief played in one physics, the camera always at her height
Scale
One woman and the margins of one city: her trade, her house and savings, a sanctuary, a stage, a film star’s night and the promise of marriage
Governing Proposition
A Roman prostitute who owns her little house and keeps her savings hopes again after every loss: in the man who shoves her into the river for her handbag, in a film star, in the Madonna, in a stranger who has watched her offer her girlhood to a laughing house. Each hope is raised and each is taken, until the last of them leads her to a cliff above a lake with everything she owns in her hands. The wager of the film is that a form of episodes held together only by one woman’s hope can show that hope to be neither stupidity nor virtue but a condition of being alive, which love, faith and spectacle all live on and sell back to her, and that a look at the lens can end the film without resolving it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at the river. Cabiria, played by Giulietta Masina, is at the edge of the Tiber with Giorgio, and he shoves her into the water for her handbag. She is fished out and held upside down to empty her, and she comes round cursing. The film’s pattern is stated in its first minutes at its crudest: a hope placed in a man, and the man taking what she has. It will be stated again, each time with more at stake, until it is stated at the edge of a second water at the end.
Federico Fellini made the film from a screenplay he wrote with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, and Dino De Laurentiis produced it. Aldo Tonti photographed it in black and white, and Nino Rota wrote the score. François Périer plays Oscar and Amedeo Nazzari the film star Alberto Lazzari. It was released in 1957 and runs about 110 minutes. Before release a sequence of about seven minutes was removed, in which Cabiria follows a man carrying a sack of food and blankets to the poor who sleep in caves and doorways; it was reinstated in a restoration of 1998, which runs about 117 minutes. The film judged here is the film as released, and the restored sequence is counted toward nothing.
Cabiria owns a little house of cinderblock with a lock she is proud of, and she keeps savings. At night she works the Passeggiata Archeologica, among ruins lit by fires, with the other women, their rivalries, their rates and their quarrels. The film refuses the account of her that its inheritance offered, prostitution as a social fact to be reformed. She is proud, she curses, and the camera stays at her height. What carries the film across its episodes is not a plot but her: each episode begins with her hope intact.
Movement II
One night the film star Alberto Lazzari takes Cabiria with him, first to a nightclub and then to his villa: a world of money and glamour, as far from the Passeggiata as the city allows. Masina carries the episode with the means she uses throughout, the stole, the walk and a face that registers every change in what she hopes for.
Then the star’s mistress returns, and Cabiria is kept in the bathroom while the two of them make up. The episode’s point is the film’s theme: she can enter the world of money and glamour only to hide in its bathroom. But it is the film’s longest excursion and its least necessary. The nightclub and the villa make the same point twice, and the glossy register of the star’s rooms is not the register of the rest of the film. In a form where no episode causes the next, this is the episode the form permits rather than requires.
Even here the law of the film holds in its essentials. Her hope is raised, the world takes what she offers, which this time is only her company and her silence, and the camera is with her in the bathroom and not with the lovers in the bedroom. The next hope she places is larger, and it is placed in the Madonna.
Movement III
The pilgrimage goes to the sanctuary of the Madonna del Divino Amore. The sanctuary is a fairground: candles, hawkers, a crowd. Fellini stages the crowd with exactness, and the litanies swell around it. In the middle of it Cabiria cries out aloud to be changed. It is the one place in the film where she names what she wants, and she names it to the Madonna.
Nothing happens. The miracle the film does show is a farce: a crippled man, Amleto, brought to the sanctuary by a pimp, throws down his crutches and falls. The scene is shot as farce and devotion together, and neither cancels the other: the hawkers and the pimp are real, and so is the woman crying out among them. The sanctuary lives on hope and sells it back, as every institution in the film does.
Afterwards there is a picnic. Cabiria is drunk and furious that nothing has changed: she is the same woman she was that morning. The pilgrimage is the formal plea for grace, and it is refused. The film has now offered her love, money and faith, and each has taken what she brought to it. What remains is the place where her inner life is first seen, and it is a stage.
Movement IV
At a variety theatre Cabiria is put under hypnosis on the stage. Under it, in the stage light, she becomes a girl again and is courted by a suitor who is not there, accepting flowers from him, offering her girlhood to the house. The audience laughs. The laughter breaks the trance, and she wakes on a stage in front of people who have been laughing at her. The sequence moves from comedy to exposure to humiliation in one continuous space, and it is the film’s confession, made in public.
The film seats its viewer in the laughing audience. That is its design, and its cost to the viewer: the film’s later tenderness toward her is earned against the viewer’s own laughter. Outside the theatre a man is waiting. Oscar, played by François Périer, has seen what the stage showed. A second viewing sees his tells from his first appearance; a first viewing sees, as Cabiria does, a man who has seen her as she is.
Oscar courts her with exactly what the stage showed him, and the courtship leads to the promise of marriage. Cabiria sells her little house, the one with the lock, and takes out her savings. The film gives her the happiness of the courtship fully, and the viewer, who has been one of the people she trusted, watches it knowing what the pattern is.
Movement V
Oscar takes her walking in a wood at sunset, to a cliff above a lake. The viewer understands before she does. When she understands, she hands him the money, everything she owns, and begs him to kill her. He takes the money and goes. The cliff over water returns the film to its opening, and the farce of the Tiber has become nearly a death. She has lost the house, the money and the man.
She comes out of the wood onto a road. Young people are coming through the trees with a guitar and an accordion, and they are playing Rota’s theme. A girl wishes her good evening. They do not know her. Masina’s face, tears and mascara and a smile, turns almost to the lens, and the film ends on it. Nothing is resolved: what she recovers is the capacity for hope that the whole film has shown to be both her life and her danger, and the look hands the last judgment to the person watching.
At Cannes in 1957 Masina was named best actress, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the ceremony of 1958. André Bazin wrote of it as the voyage to the end of neorealism. In 1966 the story went to Broadway as Sweet Charity, staged by Bob Fosse, who filmed it in 1969. The turn it completed had begun in La strada, with the same actress and the same composer, and the turn that followed came three years later, in La dolce vita.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The design is a sequence of hopes, each raised and each taken, and the spine resists subtraction. The Tiber at the opening states the pattern at its crudest and the cliff above the lake repeats it with everything at stake; the pilgrimage is where she asks aloud to be changed and nothing happens, which makes the hypnotist’s stage the place her inner life is first seen, and Oscar the man who has seen it. What gives is a real share of the running time. Lazzari’s night is a self-contained excursion, long, its nightclub and villa making one point twice, and the friends’ quarrels on the Passeggiata repeat themselves. The parts are required in kind more than in length.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: hope in a person who has every reason to give it up is neither stupidity nor virtue but a condition of being alive, and love, faith and spectacle all live on it and sell it back to her. The trade is shown without sermon: the sanctuary is a fairground of candles and hawkers, the hypnotist’s audience laughs, Oscar courts her with what the stage showed him. The film refuses the account of prostitution as a social fact to be reformed. What holds it is weighed heavily: the order that makes the trade, the borgata, the police and the clients, is shown in passing and never opened, and the condition disclosed is one person’s.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The elevation is real and comes from a low place. Cabiria under hypnosis in the stage light, until the laughter breaks the trance; the pilgrimage, the litanies swelling while she cries out to the Madonna; the walk to the cliff at sunset, where the viewer understands before she does. Then the road: the young people coming through the trees with guitar and accordion, Rota’s theme taken up by them, and Masina’s face, tears, mascara and a smile, turned almost to the lens. That ending is among the great endings of its decade. Frequency counts against the height: between these few peaks the film moves through comic business at street level, by design, and Lazzari’s night is glossy rather than high.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The myth is built and load-bearing: the holy fool, the innocent whom the world robs again and again and who is not made wise by it, carried through stations. The opening is a drowning and a revival, a mock baptism from which she wakes cursing; the pilgrimage is the formal plea for grace, refused; the stage is a confession made in public; the cliff over water returns her to the opening, and the road is a resurrection without a miracle. Her name is borrowed, ironically and exactly, from the heroine of the silent epic Cabiria (1914). Held below the gate because the pattern is one pattern, repeated rather than deepened, and much of the archetype is carried by Masina’s mime, a Chaplin figure, as much as by the structure.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is Italian neorealism, which Fellini knew from inside as a writer on Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946), and the silent clown, Chaplin above all. The departures are real: a prostitute as heroine without moral or sociology; episodes held together only by one consciousness; a miracle shot as farce and devotion together; a stage hypnosis as the film’s confession; an ending handed to the viewer through a look at the lens. The subject drew the Church’s objection. But the larger turn had been made in La strada (1954): the same actress, the same waif, the same composer, the same road from neorealism toward fable. By 1957 the path was Fellini’s own and proven, and a wager on a proven path is charged as such.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The episodes are the knowledge: each begins with her hope intact, so the form enacts the renewal the film is about, and a continuous melodrama would make her a victim learning a lesson, which is what she is not. The two waters make the cycle visible. The hypnotist sequence seats the viewer in the laughing audience, so that the film’s later tenderness is earned against the viewer’s own laughter, and the look at the lens turns the last judgment over to the person watching. The costs are counted in full: the episodic form permits Lazzari’s night, whose length is the form’s indulgence, and realism and fable sit side by side without fusing.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Evidence over promise, across sixty-nine years. André Bazin’s essay on the film as the voyage to the end of neorealism framed the first reading; the Catholic reading, grace refused and grace given on the road, and the reading of a credulity exploited are not compatible, and both have held. The film yields on return in performance and design: a second viewing sees Oscar’s tells from his first appearance, Masina’s walk, the stole and the umbrella become a vocabulary, and Rota’s theme is placed rather than spread. What limits it weighs heavily: the meaning converges once the cycle is seen, more than in Fellini’s later films, whose structures keep their questions open, and much of the commentary is folded into writing on Fellini or Masina rather than on this film.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Released in 1957, so force and reach are scored together. The force: with La strada, the film carried Italian cinema from neorealism toward a cinema of the inner life told through a body and a face, and its ending made the look at the lens a final statement rather than a breach. Much of that force belongs to La strada, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award and Masina’s prize at Cannes; Sweet Charity on Broadway in 1966, staged by Bob Fosse, and his film of it in 1969, which borrowed the story without changing what the musical did; the ending studied as a model of the open close. It perfected a manner more than it redirected the field, and the redirection that followed came from Fellini’s next films and from Antonioni.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-nine years. Form: the release survives whole, and the sequence cut before release survives too, reinstated in a restoration of 1998; the restoration is repair, and nothing of the work is lost. Presence: continuous exhibition, the restoration’s re-release, home video, a place in teaching, and a second life through Sweet Charity; but its presence is narrower than that of Fellini’s most famous films, and it is not one of the films everyone has seen. The surface of Rome in 1957, the ruins, the borgata and the Via Veneto, ages as history rather than as fashion, and the condition it treats has not changed. Held a step short of the widest figure by presence, not by any loss.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, real and uneven. Masina carries the film: a performance built from walk, posture and a face that registers every change of hope, from the cursing woman pulled from the river to the last shot. The crowds are staged with exactness, the pilgrimage above all, and the nocturnal Passeggiata is lit by fires among ruins. Rota’s theme is given at the end to strangers to play. The hypnotist sequence moves from comedy to exposure to humiliation in one continuous stage, and the cliff holds its revelation in the gap between what the viewer knows and what she sees. The costs hold the figure: Lazzari’s episode is slack, some street comedy is broad, Masina’s clowning tips into mannerism, and the post-synchronised sound shows.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the opening, a woman fished out of the river and held upside down, and the cliff at sunset where she asks to die. One law governs both: her hope is renewed, the world takes what she offers, and the camera is with her and never above her. The same law holds the film star’s villa, where she is kept in the bathroom while the star makes up with his mistress, the sanctuary, where the miracle is a cripple falling, and the stage, where her girlhood is a turn on the bill. The range is wide. The strain is weighed: Lazzari’s episode keeps its own glossy register, and the fable of the last road arrives in a key the street scenes did not prepare.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The orders the film holds are held through one woman: her consciousness, given in full; labour, the trade of the Passeggiata with its rivalries and its rates; property and money, the little house, the savings, the sale; the sacred, in the pilgrimage and its commerce; spectacle and celebrity, in Lazzari and the stage; class, from the borgata to the Via Veneto; love and the promise of marriage. Each is reached through Cabiria and none is listed. What holds the axis lowest is absence. The family is missing, since she has none that the film shows; the state appears as a policeman at most; history is not entered; the natural order is a lake and a wood at the close. Charity and the poor, which the cut sequence would have added, the release lacks.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Made at 8.1, then The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 8.0. A film that survives whole, with the sequence cut before release preserved as well, its condition unchanged in sixty-nine years; a central performance that carries every scene, crowds staged with exactness and a hypnotist sequence played in one continuous space; a disclosure of hope as a condition that love, faith and spectacle live on and sell back; and one law, renewal and loss with the camera at her height, from the farce at the river to the cliff.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: labour, property, the sacred, spectacle, class and love are held through one woman, but the family is absent, the state is a policeman, history is not entered and the natural order is a lake and a wood. Then The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 7.3: a turn and a force whose larger part belongs to La strada, a path by 1957 Fellini’s own and proven; a meaning that converges once the cycle is seen, its commentary folded into writing on its maker and its star; and a manner perfected more than a field redirected.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.0, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.3 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.3, The Bottomless Well, 7.3, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.3, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Le notti di Cabiria as released in 1957, about 110 minutes, black and white, in the Academy ratio, with mono sound, in Italian with much Roman speech, from the shove into the Tiber to Cabiria’s face on the road: directed by Federico Fellini from a screenplay by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, photographed by Aldo Tonti, with music by Nino Rota. The release is the work judged. The sequence of the man with the sack, removed before release and reinstated in the restoration of 1998, which runs about 117 minutes, is described and counted toward no axis. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Italian original, and no subtitle or dub is charged to it; no line of dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so the dialogue is described rather than quoted. The division into movements is the desk’s own. Facts that could not be verified, among them further credits for the dialogue, the photography, the design and the editing, the partners in the production, the cause of the cut before release, the sums of money that change hands, the names of most minor characters, the place of the final lake, the order of short linking scenes, the shot count and the fate of the original negative, are not given.