Due to a personal scheduling conflict, I am forced to cancel the announced formal MeetUp for this film. You are certainly free to express your interest on the message board or email fellow members and possibly meet ahead of time at Cinematheque.

Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Le notti di Cabiria
at Cinematheque Friday, November 13 at 9 p.m. and Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 5 p.m.
USA:117 min (restored version)
Director: Federico Fellini
Black & White
Italian with Subtitles
Significant historical importance

Le notti di Cabiria (1957)
Cabiria is a wide-eyed waif, a streetwalker living in a poor section of Rome where she owns her little house, has a bank account, and dreams of a miracle. We follow her nights (and days): a boyfriend steals 40,000 lire from her and nearly drowns her, a movie star on the Via Veneto takes her home with him, at a local shrine she seeks the Madonna's intercession, then she meets an accountant who's seen her, hypnotized on a vaudeville stage, acting out her heart's longings. He courts her. Is it fate that led to their meeting? Is this finally a man who appreciates her for who she is?
Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, plays Cabiria Ceccarelli, a feisty but naive prostitute in Ostia, then a seedy section of Rome. Masina also starred in La Strada (1954) and Ginger e Fred (1986)
The name Cabiria is borrowed from the 1914 Italian film Cabiria, while the character of Cabiria herself is taken from a brief scene in Fellini's earlier film The White Sheik. The American musical and movie Sweet Charity is based on Fellini's screenplay.
The film follows Cabiria as she searches for love but encounters frequent heartbreak. Mistreated and taken advantage of by almost everybody she encounters, Cabiria eventually meets a man who promises her a respectable future and falls head over heels in love with him. What follows is a series of humiliating episodes, in which the defiantly positive Cabiria is hurt, but never broken.
Fellini's filming is as beautiful as anything in 50s cinema, that decade mirabilis: more restrained and grounded than later, with less obvious flourish, but the mixture of realism and dream is made all the more convincing with the gentle, coaxing camera movements, beguiling us as well as the heroine, but with the strange editing, and sometimes disruptive composition giving us a distance she can never have.

Giuletta Masina gives the most sublime performance by an actress in Italian cinema- an exuberant mixture of hope and resignation; her gorgeous big eyes not quite ready to give up yet, even at the end, although the submitting to the youthful racket seems as hopelessly bleak as 8½. Her seemingly unprepossessing body is actually an instrument of unparalleled grace, and the comparisons with Chaplin are not unwarranted - when you see this performance, you'll realize how unexpressive most actors' bodies are.

The Chaplin model is not always helpful - there is a mawkishness and emotional manipulation towards the climax that almost grates, but by then you so adore Cabiria, and so hate everybody else that thought doesn't really come into it (although doesn't it seem that many male viewers seem to prefer her as helpless). Throw in a lovely, playful Nino Rota score and you're in movie heaven.
The film enjoys a 97-percent Fresh rating (37 out of 38 reviews) on Rotten Tomatoes being positive. Janet Maslin of The New York Times described it as, "A deep, wrenching and eloquent filmgoing experience."