NIGHTS OF CABIRIA

introduced by Ali Smith
a screening as part of the Swedenborg Film Festival 2017 with Ali Smith

Nights of Cabiria 
(dir. Federico Fellini, 1957)

‘The star’s prize-winning, heartbreaking performance, the story’s allegorical resonance and Fellini’s sweeping, soulful vision of a Roman prostitute’s resilient humanity mark Nights of Cabiria as a cinematic masterpiece.

As an outgrowth of characters played by Miss Masina in her husband’s earlier films, The White Sheik, Il Bidone and La Strada, the unforgettable Cabiria is a tiny, scrappy survivor who drifts almost magically among the film’s varied realms. In three astonishing long sequences here, she is taken under the wing of a movie star, disillusioned by a religious pilgrimage with carnival overtones and cruelly tricked by a hypnotist who exposes her once-secret dreams. In the course of her eventful travels, Cabiria undergoes the profound spiritual evolution that gives the film its lingering grandeur. Anyone dismayed by the hyperkinetic emptiness of so much current film spectacle will find the antidote—a deep, wrenching and eloquent filmgoing experience—right here.’ (The New York Times)