Nights of Cabiria

Albert enjoyed many a plate of pasta with Fellini and his wife Giulietta Masina, and brought "La Masina" to the Bay Area for tributes at the Film Festival and at PFA. He wrote: "Fellini has acknowledged (Masina's) enormous creative intuition which defined the boundaries between talent and genius. In Nights of Cabiria no other performer could have perfected her work-it is the masterpiece of her collaboration with Fellini, and an exemplar of the actor-as-artist." In this film the prostitute who first comforted the hapless husband in Fellini's early film The White Sheik (1952) comes into her own, and holds her own though she is continually exploited, robbed, and physically abused by the very men she loves. Masina turns a film about prostitutes, pimps, and johns into an ironically radiant statement about the indestructibility of the human spirit.

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