Odradek Plays In The Snow
A winterlude post
Hello everyone,
I intend to return to regular posting sometime in the new year when a book has been written. Meanwhile, I thought I’d greet you seasonally and wish you very well. I’m going to share here a thing I wrote a while ago in pandemic times about one of my favourite films, Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria. It’s really just a description of the film with a peculiar swerve into zen philosophy in the middle which I hope will make sense. Ultimately its about affirmation in adversity and the happiness of being together, as we are right now while you read. An appropriate posting, I thought, for this time of year, for this time in the world.
After that, a couple of other things - another face, some Christmas music.
The Face Of Cabiria
The beginning of a Federico Fellini film from 1957: We are in open ground on the edge of town. There are new high rises and cranes in the distance. A couple in high spirits run through the sparse dry grass, pause to embrace, and run on down to a river’s edge. The woman is short, with short blonde hair, and wears a cheap dress of broad horizontal black and white stripes that is very striking in the monochrome of the film and she draws our attention more than the man in his dark trousers and dark shirt. In her happiness she swings her purse in exuberant circles. But then as she stands on the high bank of the river singing under her breath and still swinging her bag, a crime: the man grabs the woman’s purse, shoves her into the river and runs away. A drop, a splash. The woman cries out as she is swept away by the current. Fortunately, there are other people around. A child hears her and runs along the river bank calling for help. A man in a suit, some sort of property developer maybe, is reluctant to go in after her, possibly because of that suit, but tries to attract others’ attention. The child implores, ‘Jump! If she goes into the sewer she won’t get out again.’ Three boys resting after a swim dive back into the water and save her. Carried out unconscious, she is revived by an increasing number of passers by with methods that become comically undignified, culminating when she is held by her ankles and bounced upside down to shake the water out of her lungs. As soon as she is awake she dispels the crowd’s moment of relief and triumph by asking after her lover, Giorgio, and being furiously ungrateful to her rescuers. She stamps around in one shoe – the other was lost in the river – and announces that she’s going home. Startled by this transformation from apparent death to angry animation, one of the small crowd comments ‘She’s got seven souls, like a cat.’ A child rides up on a bicycle and recognises her. ‘Hello, Cabiria!’ As she marches, the child is asked who she is. ‘That’s Cabiria … She lives the life.’ which is to say, she’s a prostitute.
We follow Cabiria to her home, a single storey box of breeze blocks set in a kind of moonscape: waste ground, the occasional grazing animal, empty frames of scaffolding, children playing, and other similar homes dotted around. This is la periferia, the periphery, neither inside nor outside the city but its spreading edge, a strange new terrain in growing post-war Italy that Michelangelo Antonioni also explores in his films. Where Cabiria lives is peripheral to Rome, a straggling sparse impoverished modernity set against the city’s rich and ancient centre.
Cabiria’s little box in a half-finished place is her daytime refuge. Her work is on the streets in the dark. When she returns to the pick up spot is along the via arceologica one of the other prostitutes calls out, ‘Here she comes, the psycho!’ Already to the viewer ‘psycho’ doesn’t seem right – Cabiria is too immediately appealing – but she does seem eccentric and different to the others we now meet calmly enduring the danger and degradation of ‘living the life.’ Partly this is down to Cabiria’s appearance. She is short. She wears a close fitting dress and childish bobby socks that show above her shoes. Her signature garment, though, is a ratty high-shouldered half-length fur jacket that bulks her out at the top and exaggerates the movement when she shrugs. Her hair is blond, tied back in a short pony tail that sticks out like a shaving brush. Her eyes are unusually large and round, infantile, vulnerable. Cuteness and pathos combine in her appearance and she has nothing of the vampish eroticism that the other working women display as they try to attract attention with their curves and languid movements. Contrasting with this is the defiantly dignified way that Cabiria carries herself. A typical gesture is a hoisting of those furred shoulders and a proud smile with the corners of her mouth pulled down, an Italian facial expression not unlike one of Robert De Niro’s. It comes as no surprise that unlike the others she refuses to have a pimp. Why should she work for anyone else? Inevitably she suffers as a result but however much time the film spends observing Cabiria’s trials her resilience seems like the real subject. She is a life force, a model of survival in precarious conditions. She seems very nearly inextinguishable and to have an unalterable core identity like a clown or a figure from the commedia dell’arte.
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Much of this is down to Giulietta Masina’s amazing performance. Cabiria is a great role, created for her by Fellini, her husband, and it allows her the fullest expression of her talent. Her performance has that quality of charisma and control that calls for some kind of technical superlative term, virtuoso, perhaps, or bravura. The transitions between moods, between laughter and tears, hope and disillusion, gentleness and rage, are rapid and always convincing, brief flashes of an immense skill of empathy and embodiment. And Masina makes Cabiria very funny and quick to laugh herself. At times, Cabiria resembles a great silent movie character. She has Chaplin’s Little Tramp’s resilience and emotional transparency and singular, droll, stylised appearance. Masina’s brilliance as an actor means that her performance of Cabiria is always visible to the audience in the best way – one wants to applaud – and this enhances the paradoxical sense of affirmation at the heart of this often very sad film. The comedy does this too: humour is always a kind of positive excess, a surplus of spirit and intelligence, like music.
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Le Notte di Cabiria, The Nights of Cabiria. As its title suggests the film is a sequence of episodes reflecting, in part, the consecutive, unpredictable, sometimes near fatal, encounters that make up a sex worker’s life. After her rescue from the river, the first of these adventures is the most exuberant and light-hearted. Cabiria is picked up by a handsome and famous actor after he has argued with his girlfriend and is looking for distraction. He takes her into a nightclub. Her entrance is a classic bit of comic business: she can’t find her way through the curtain that partitions the main room and the cloth billows violently with her struggle. Waiters help her through and she regains her dignity. In fact she insists on it, demanding to be treated as well as anyone else. Perhaps she loses it again on the dancefloor, another excellent bit of comedy as she executes absurd moves with grave seriousness. After the club, they go back to his house which is large and luxurious. Cabiria is delighted and bewildered by its long corridors and vivariums of plants and exotic pets. She can’t believe how the wealthy live
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They talk. H orders his butler to bring food. He plays a record of the slow movements of Beethoven’s seventh symphony and asks her if she likes it. ‘It’s not my taste but yes.’ Soon after she bursts into tears infuriated that no one will believe her when she tells them that she spent the night with Alberto Lazzari. She has an idea and brightens immediately; he must sign a photo for her and write on it that she was his guest at his house. At this point, the adventure is cut short. Lazzari’s girlfriend has returned and the butler has let her in. A denial of fulfilment worthy of a Chaplin film: the feast that the butler has delivered on a trolley– ‘What’s this?’ she asks, holding up a whole lobster. ‘I saw it once in a movie’ – is whisked away from the little tramp and she’s hidden in the bathroom where she’s forced to wait until Lazzari releases her in the early hours. She tiptoes out and glimpses the sleeping girlfriend, a vision of golden hair and satin sheets, of wealth and perfect rest.
*
After money and fame, Cabiria’s next adventure is with God. Firstly, she is captivated by the acts of charity performed by a man who offers her a lift back to town; she has been picked up by a lorry driver customer and driven a long way from the pick up. The scene is unbelievable, allegorical, and so strange it has the ring of truth: the people this man visits with parcels of food and clothing live in holes in the ground. Cabiria recognises one of them, a former prostitute who boasts about how beautiful she used to be. Later, a barefoot procession of devout Christians along the via arceologico inspires Cabiria and the other prostitutes and pimps to go on a day-long pilgrimage to the Madonna of Divine Love. The pilgrimage sequence is Fellini at his most abrasively neorealist, recording the oppressive crush of the crowd, frightening at times as it threatens to get out of control, the heat, the jostling bodies and pleading faces. In front of a large and slightly spooky statue of the Madonna, Cabiria prays for herself, ‘Bestow your grace on me. Make me change my life, make me change my life!’
In classic realist style, the film lingers in the aftermath of this dramatic climax and watches the heightened state of desperate fervour gives way to the ordinary once more, as Chekhov does, for example, in his short story ‘The Kiss’, with its night of passion degrading into a prosaic dawn. Cabiria and her group sit down for a picnic on litter-strewn ground. Music plays. People playing football nearby keep kicking their ball over and annoying Cabiria’s friends one of whom gets up and shout at them, kicking their ball away. Eventually Cabiria bursts into tears. ‘We haven’t changed!’ she cries. ‘Nobody’s changed! We’re the same as before.’ In a way we now see is typical of her, her sadness flashes into anger and defiance. She declares she’s going to sell her home and leave. ‘Goodbye, you guys. I’m through with all this. You think I am like you?’
*
In his hymn in praise of seated meditation, zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769) writes of achieving a state in when in ‘going and returning we never leave home.’ Other translations have it as ‘whether going or returning, they remain forever unmoved’ or ‘whether one goes on or returns there is no ‘elsewhere.’’ This occurs with the realisation of emptiness of the self, that ‘true self is no self.’ Emptiness here doesn’t mean emptiness in the ordinary sense of vacancy or void. Zen language is, at least in translation, liable to mislead and is particularly likely to ensnare western intellectuals who may automatically equate ‘emptiness’ with the void of Existentialism, the universal grey emptiness in which Samuel Beckett’s characters persist, or the vacant cosmic background in which Camus’s characters make their choices. Emptiness in zen is rather the absence of a primary essence. In the case of the self, for example, there is no self-subsisting and unchanging essence. One’s self is a complex composition of thought and experience, parental influence, one’s body, climate, relationships, DNA, personal history, language, habits and on and on, and each of these similarly empty – the cells in our bodies, for example, made of chemical elements from our food and the air, from plants, other animals, rain, minerals, and these cells living and dying, these elements persisting on in changing combinations after we die. This is not to say the self is not real; it is a plainly robust feature of our minds that we recognise ourselves as distinct individuals continuous over time. The recognition of emptiness is of our infinitely complex contingency, temporariness, and connection to everything. We are braided together out of the stuff of the world, we are no different from it, and we are here in the middle of it for a short while. It is this realisation, I think, that according to Hakuin banishes the idea of elsewhere. We are of the world and flowing through it.
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This zen talk would make little sense to Cabiria most likely but the film delivers her to a kind realisation of emptiness that reminds me of Hakuin’s words. In the end, Cabiria offers her own exemplary way of being in the world, where she is both homeless and at home.
Having wandered off from her friends after the pilgrimage, Cabiria enters a small theatre on a whim. It’s a raucous variety theatre where a hypnotist is performing. When he calls for a volunteer from the audience, Cabiria is cajoled by those around her into going up. She does and despite her disbelief, and after some characteristically blunt argument with both the hypnotist and the audience, she is lulled by the hypnotist’s art into a fully suggestible state. He tells her that he knows a young man called Oscar who want to marry her and with this fantasy draws out of her her inmost desire: a pure wish for a true and reciprocal love. The hypnotist places a flower coronet on her head. She speaks to Oscar. She holds his invisible arm. She picks invisible flowers from the boards of the stage and makes a bouquet. Everything is innocent, dreamlike, and sincere
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She makes Oscar promise that he isn’t deceiving her. The moment the hypnotist brings Cabiria back to reality and the jeering the audience, it feels like a painful violation of her inmost privacy, a cruel trick played on a vulnerable woman. Hurt, again, she resumes her anger and defiance.
Outside the theatre she meets a member of the audience who she at first assumes is there to mock her. But no, he was moved by what she said and he speaks gently of understanding and higher values. ‘You seem like the refined type,’ she tells him. She tells him that he was particularly taken with what she said on stage because he too is named Oscar.
And so begins a long romance, or rather pursuit, in which he with persistence and small gifts of flowers and chocolates overcomes her repeated refusal to believe that he is not deceiving her, that he isn’t another Giorgio, that he could be serious about a woman like her, with her job. All this turns the screw of our anguish as we realise before Cabiria does that her fears are justified. By this point, she has sold her house, gathered all of her savings and is expecting to move to a new life with him on the coast. She holds all she possesses as one large brick of lira notes. ‘The beatings I had to take to earn this,’ she tells him. ‘I don’t know it started. I was only fifteen. My mother needed the money …’ But he isn’t really interested, unlike us who have come to love Cabiria by now and are all ears for this new information about her life.
They are on a cliff edge by the sea when she realises what is happening. It’s a recapitulation of the opening, a man about to steal from her, possibly about to throw her to her death by drowning. ‘Throw me in,’ she begs him. ‘Enough! I don’t want to live any more! Kill me. Throw me off the cliff.’ But he doesn’t. He grabs the bag containing the brick of cash and runs like Giorgio. When he’s gone, she rolls on the ground repeating, ‘Kill me. I don’t want to live anymore. Kill me.’
Time passes. She is quiet and calm. She walks back to the road and as she does so coincides with a group of young people who are setting out somewhere. They are in party hats. Some play instruments. Some ride on bicycles
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They surround her misery with their happiness and one of them playing a guitar makes an odd friendly gesture: he jokingly yaps at her like a little dog and she begins to smile.
She looks around. One beautiful young woman says ‘Good evening’ in a gentle voice and Cabiria nods back. Tears shine in her eyes. Her mascara has run in a stylised tear on one cheek but she is smiling. She can’t help it. She nods in greeting to all the young people and at one startling moment nods directly into the camera, smiling at us, and our relationship with Cabiria is acknowledged. Finally, Cabiria’s is a happiness beyond hope or hopelessness, that sees simply what’s in front of her:
We’re here together. There’s music.
Weihnachstmusik
The best piece of Christmas music is obviously Britten’s Ceremony of Carols but there is gorgeous thing too, Schoenberg’s mellow, heartfelt setting of a hymn, Lo, How A Rose Ee’er Blooming, that incorporates moments of Silent Night. More chamber arrangements should include a harmonium.
Future Face
Recently, I saw the R.B. Kitaj exhibition at the Piano Nobile Gallery in London, and was very drawn to this image, entitled Messiah (Boy).
Kitaj is known for his superb draftsmanship, often very visible in pictures that combine the drawn line with paint and pastel. Here, Kitaj paints more thickly, without the linear structure so visible at the surface, and generates a picture that feels mobile, momentary, energetic, full of the potential for change that the messiah brings. High colour and dark shadows. A face that is ordinary and extraordinary, resilient and ready, charged with the vibrant force of something about to happen, about to be spoken, about to change for the better - a face for the new year.
