In 1957, Federico Fellini's work "Night of Cabilla" was released and won the best foreign language film award at the 30th Academy Awards. This film represents the pinnacle of Fellini's early years, as well as a collection of literature, aesthetics and music.
"Kabylia's Night" uses a short story-style writing method to outline the three relationships of Kabylia, a flower street girl, and tells the story of a tear-jerking low-level woman.
At the beginning of the movie, Kabylia and her boyfriend George are strolling along the river, when suddenly, George pushes Kabylia into the river and snatches her wallet, and Kabylia, who fell into the water, almost died. By chance, she met a male celebrity who had a fight with his girlfriend on the street and was invited to spend the night at home. Just when she was full of joy, the boyfriend's girlfriend returned, and Kabylia hid in the closet for the night.
Soon after, she met a handsome man who was frantically pursuing her at the theater, and although she was a little unconfident, she accepted the man's marriage proposal. In order to live happily with her fiancé, Kabylia sold her property and prepared to start a new life. However, her fiancé cheated her money and nearly killed her.
Kabylia, who had nothing, wept madly, and she wandered the road in despair, and a group of lively men and women passed by her, singing happily. This joy seemed to infect Kabylia, and her face showed a signature smile again.
Regarding Fellini's film style, he himself has accurately summarized: "The film must be made like Picasso's sculpture, the story must be broken into small pieces, and then put back together according to our whims." "It is also true that there are always many elements in Fellini's role, grotesque dreams, brilliant colors, surrealism, clowns, circuses, wanderers... Each element is enough to be chewed on repeatedly, but in Fellini's films we can see these elements constantly appearing to form an artistic kingdom that belongs only to Fellini and his followers.
Fellini once gave his friend biographer Charlotte. Chandler said, "Everything about me is in the movie, and it's not so much fun to talk about it." Fellini dedicated everything he had to the film, including the joys and unhappiness of his childhood.
To get to know Fellini, we have to go to the Fargo Theater, which for Fellini was the home of his childhood, standing in the Italian town of Mini before Fellini was even born.
When Fellini was two years old, his mother took him to the theater to see a play, and although he couldn't understand it, he liked this feeling. When he was a child, Fellini was thin and taciturn, so he especially liked circus actors, so in his movies we can always see clowns and circus, which is the joy of his childhood.
Reality wasn't always satisfactory, his parents didn't have enough money to let Fellini watch a play, and the taciturn Fellini had no friends, so he learned to observe, observe different people, and then rely on painting and making dolls to release his imagination.
Childhood memories laid the foundation for Fellini's creation and created his imagination.
I paranoidly divide Fellini's film career into three phases, the early to mid-period, the fifties, which is early. The Night of Kabylia is arguably the pinnacle of Fellini's early film career. The film encapsulates all the themes and aesthetic features of his previous films.
For example, in The Night of Kabylia, we can see entanglements between different narrative characters, collages of everyday dreams and reflections on reality, and Fellini-style tragic reflections on what makes happiness and unhappiness.
Fellini once explained the characters in The Night of Kabylia, which is based on the Dust Woman who lived in a cabin near the ruins of the Roman Waterway and the Dust Woman who drowned in a news report. Although they are all dusty women, they also have their own lives and dreams, just like Kabylia in the movie.
As the main narrative character in the film, Kabylia carries a dual attribute, both real and imaginary. Kabylia needs to push the film's story forward through a series of actual encounters and actions, and at the same time, she also needs to find the meaning and value of existence from real tragedies again and again through imagination.
In the first love, Kabylia is pushed into the water by George, and when Kabylia is rescued, she does not believe that George did it, and there is both real and imaginary elements. The real thing is the falling into the water that happened, and the imagination is that she does not believe that this is George's action.
In the second encounter, Kabylia is invited home by the male star and wants to spend the spring supper together, but the girlfriend of the male star returns, and Kabylia can only hide in the closet and imagine her own love. It is also an interweaving of the real and the imaginary.
In the third love, Kabylia sells the house and prepares to marry her fiancé, only to be cheated out of her money by her fiancé. Wandering aimlessly on the road, I met a group of happy men and women, and the sadness was immediately blown away. True deception, imagined redemption, intertwined to form the tragic first half of Kabylia's life.
A very significant feature of Fellini's films is the attention to subtle feelings and details. This trait reaches its peak in "Eight and a Half Parts". In The Night of Kabylia, this feeling is incomplete, but it can also be seen as a mixture of complete dreams and broken dreams.
"Kabylia's Night" is based on time and a series of events that Kabylia experiences, and the whole movie is a big dream. "Kabylia Night", night itself is another way of saying dreams. Inside the film, Kabilia's feelings, lives, experiences, and choices are all shattered dreams that make the film more complete and fill Fellini's carefully constructed narrative framework.
The overall rhythm of the film changes with Kabiria's emotional life, which we can summarize as "real-imagined-real". What is real is Kabylia's experience, what is imagined is Kabylia's expectation of happiness, and what finally returns to the truth is Kabylia's redemption of himself.
"Night of Kabylia" is a particularly cruel film in my eyes, and this cruelty lies in the fact that Fellini uses the clues of reality to pull Kabylia out of the vortex of happiness every time when the dream atmosphere reaches its peak, and each time it makes Kabylia and death next to each other.
Every love of Kabylia tries to pull the film toward vulgarization, how can Fellini allow Kabylia to let it go, so each time he drags her back to reality, telling her that reality is like this, don't dream anymore. How could Kabylia be willing to be swallowed up by the misery of reality, so she dreamed again and again until she met the joyful team.
In The Night of Kabylia, we have an unavoidable question, or never find the answer to, which is who caused happiness and unhappiness. In this film, the question is even more acute.
We see Kabylia's misfortune under Fellini's lens, and it doesn't seem to be entirely because of reality. It is Kabylia's own choice, for example, she can choose to leave George, she can choose not to agree to an appointment with a male star, and she cannot sell her house.
However, in works from ancient times to the present, tragedy has always prevailed in the fate of women. For example, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Márquez's Allentila, their endings always make people feel helpless. There is also something hateful in the shadows.
On the surface, Kabylia's tragedy is self-inflicted, but in the final analysis, the underlying social causes are still due to the structure of a patriarchal society. In this social structure, women naturally become weak and subordinate. In the face of survival, they need to bear more constraints than men, so their pursuit and acquisition is often particularly difficult.
Judging from Kabylia's identity, she is a dusty woman, and this setting itself reveals an injustice, which is also the root of Kabylia's misfortune. So, George looked down on her and pushed her into the river, the male star looked down on her and let her hide in the closet, and the fiancé looked down on her and cheated her out of her property.
And Kabylia is a person who is full of yearning for happiness, and the contradictions and conflicts between the two make the role of Kabylia more deeply rooted in people's hearts. When Kabyria had lost everything, she was like an unworldly child, and on the day of the apparition of the Virgin Mary, she prayed fervently.
Fellini's last identity to Kabylia was that of a Kabylian woman who walked through the crowd with a childlike smile. Eventually, she met a miraculous moment, and in her world, it seemed that God had come and led her to the path of awakening.
The desire for happiness and the succession of misfortunes are the source of all tragedies, and in Kabylia we can see the concrete forms of happiness and unhappiness. In the same way, we can also be redeemed here in Kabylia, because life is really hard, it is better to smile.
The Night of Kabylia is a complete tragedy, but behind this personal tragedy there is a larger social framework. Fellini does not seem to criticize this injustice, but instead gives a religious answer — if we can't change everything around us, try to build a castle of meaning of our own.
Throughout the film, the most moving thing about "Night of Kabylia" is Julieta. In Massina's performance, she is like an elf who travels between dream and reality, she wanders in the human world, witnessing human suffering. At the same time, she is an absolute optimist, seeking hope and love, even if she has nothing.
Fellini probably meant to tell us that no matter how hard life is, love and hope are eternal truths.