Letterboxd — Your life in film

Ironic that a film so unwittingly indebted to the Kuleshov effect should be praised by the likes of Tarkovsky, though one would suppose he would say God was present more within these shots than between them. In this fashion, the film betrays most of the sublimity promised by the first 20 minutes, which are among the greatest in film history, for a finale which can only be painfully described as a set piece. Yours truly can never take very seriously…

Unsurprisingly, Nights of Cabiria is most powerful the more Fellini flirts with his poetic realist and latent surrealist tendencies, which he'd been grooming in La Strada and would fully embrace in his subsequent two features. The opening segment wherein Cabiria is ungratefully rescued from drowning, one later where she is passively seduced by a famous director, and one further where she is hypnotized into a childish reverie by a dark magician and briefly elopes with a romantic, all vividly showcase…