(Some spoilers below) This film is about illusions, and how everybody - individuals, governments, performers, religions, actors, prostitutes, film directors - exploits them for their own ends. Some do so in ways which are harmful to others. Some, like Cabiria, harm themselves.
Fellini's examination of illusion draws on a rich tradition, particularly in European theatre (the dominance of "seeming" over "being", illusion and deception over honesty, goes right back to Hamlet and beyond).
The film is structured around a series of expositions of illusion, involving a bogus lover, a famous actor, a pilgrimage, a variety show, and, finally, to close the circle...a bogus lover again. Add in the fact that the central character is a prostitute...I think you're starting to get the picture.
So if all is illusion, why watch the film? Because the central purveyor (and, more importantly, victim) of illusion (the prostitute Cabiria) is a convincingly-portrayed, complex character who exhibits a tough, life-affirming drive to take on the world (in the best Camusian, post-war existentialist sense). It is this that makes the film such an exhilarating experience. Millions of people in Italy and all over Europe in the 1940's and 1950's had to live in a world which had utterly collapsed. In this world, one did what one could to get by, and religion, love, sensual pleasure, and, of course, the cinema, offered only brief respite from the everyday realities.
The classic neo-realist edge-of-city building-site sets add the requisite touch of alienation and barrenness to the action. But this is not the kind of hardline neo-realist tract satirized by Nichetti in "The Icicle Thief". Fellini's natural sense of cinema as fantasy enables the viewer to feel good at the end of a film where no conventional feelgood factor is offered. And surely that's an achievement in itself.
Fellini's examination of illusion draws on a rich tradition, particularly in European theatre (the dominance of "seeming" over "being", illusion and deception over honesty, goes right back to Hamlet and beyond).
The film is structured around a series of expositions of illusion, involving a bogus lover, a famous actor, a pilgrimage, a variety show, and, finally, to close the circle...a bogus lover again. Add in the fact that the central character is a prostitute...I think you're starting to get the picture.
So if all is illusion, why watch the film? Because the central purveyor (and, more importantly, victim) of illusion (the prostitute Cabiria) is a convincingly-portrayed, complex character who exhibits a tough, life-affirming drive to take on the world (in the best Camusian, post-war existentialist sense). It is this that makes the film such an exhilarating experience. Millions of people in Italy and all over Europe in the 1940's and 1950's had to live in a world which had utterly collapsed. In this world, one did what one could to get by, and religion, love, sensual pleasure, and, of course, the cinema, offered only brief respite from the everyday realities.
The classic neo-realist edge-of-city building-site sets add the requisite touch of alienation and barrenness to the action. But this is not the kind of hardline neo-realist tract satirized by Nichetti in "The Icicle Thief". Fellini's natural sense of cinema as fantasy enables the viewer to feel good at the end of a film where no conventional feelgood factor is offered. And surely that's an achievement in itself.