Giulietta: I don’t understand. What do you want to retain from silent cinema?

 

Gelsomina: Hmm…Emotions. Passions. The body.

 

Giulietta: The spoken word is not good? How so?

 

Cabiria: Let me explain, since Gelsomina is not so good with words. The body, the face…they ‘speak’ through action. They do something. Kind of, action and response…You walk in a certain funny way, and people react. You smile, and people smile with you. You open your eyes and something opens. You can imagine what happens in the dark room, when people are not just reacting to what’s happening on the screen, but also next to them.  Words, on the other hand, are more intellectual. Sometimes they are the very sign of impotence. Don’t you think that when we are speaking loudly to each other in the square, almost shouting, this is where we are the weakest? The prostitutes are particularly loud, louder than the pimps. So streetwise and yet so fraught.  The bravado of the despondent.

 

Giulietta: Do you think I am a tame woman? Lost in thoughts and images… caught in a similar condition, but more polished, let’s say. I mean, things didn’t change that much for you.

 

Gelsomina: My affections certainly didn’t prevent violence towards me.  If anything, they caused scorn and laughter, even the occasional beating.

 

Cabiria: You are a bourgeois wife, caught in a double marriage, to your husband and the affections of your class. As Gelsomina says, our bodily antics did not solve anything in our lives; on the contrary. But they built an emotional map for those watching us.  Rather than a crude or childish reaction, mime, in face and body, is an affective response to two correlated universes: what is happening inside and what is happening outside. This is the stuff for expression.  

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Gelsomina: Is mime derived from mimesis?

 

Giulietta: I don’t know. That’s a good point.

 

Gelsomina: I guess my fear is that all this ‘expressiveness’ in a woman’s body can lead to some dodgy perceptions. It’s ok for Chaplin to be Charlot, but a woman…that’s another thing.

 

Giulietta: Hmmm… feminine over affectation as the by-product of too much emotion, irrationality. That stocky build of yours… The Charlotesque walking. Don’t you think you are much closer to male physicality than to feminine affectation? Even Cabiria. Isn’t she too much of a clown to fit the image of a prostitute?

 

Gelsomina: I don’t think so. Prostitutes are clowns of some sort. Probably, the ultimate buffoons, with their high heels, heavy make-up, so-called sexual mannerisms... Cabiria is just functioning in a different register.

 

Cabiria: I find you more theatrical, kind of, with your good manners and artificial images.  Don’t you realise you are caught in someone else’s dream, Giulietta? In a man’s fantasy? All those veils and whisperings... The smell of nylon and the seaside. They are not yours. You are wandering through the map of someone else’s desire.

Giulietta: But it is not just about gestures and the body. That full-moon face of yours… You as well, Cabiria.

 

Gelsomina: Oh, please, save me from the Kindchenschema trap! I wanted to be loved, not condescending compassion! With such a face…I must confess, I really wanted to go to the other side…to the side of abjection…or even worse, to be a wicked creature in a cheap horror movie. Turn against Zampano and all the others…kill them with my deadly look.

 

Giulietta: I think it’s important.  Those baby-like features. That luminous, round face. In a way, that face is in two different places. It is there before the gestures, the mannerisms, eliciting a caring, innate response.  But it is also at the end, so to speak, organising the petite frame, the clumsy moves, the mannerisms of innocence and adorability, into one full package. The face kind of kick-starts your body and completes it. Gelsomina, you couldn’t have had such a redemptive power without that, as you put it, child facial schema.

 

Gelsomina: If that is the case, Zampano must have been a cold-blooded snake! His “innate release” was quite something! And, also, your Giorgios, Oscars, Cabiria… These guys are cunning snakes! Yes, because you are not fully grown, but you are not an adult either. I see you as slightly older than me, with the moves and jerks of a young teenager, but still carrying that same face. Surely, there is a certain melancholy, a certain sadness in your look that points to something else…That mascara-tear is a point of departure from the mechanics of Kindchenschema. A coming of age of sorts.

 

Cabiria: Again, the idea of being too much of a clown to be a prostitute… Too much of a Pierrot to be a whore…But that allowed me to glide through the night as if caught by the wind, like a kid.

 

Giulietta: Sure, you’re adorable, but not in a sexy way. You certainly do not fall into the erotic-cuteness category, despite your occupation. What I find intriguing – but I totally understand it – is how you manage to resist the advances of a pimp but easily fall for that raw passion for a better life, a nice cosy marriage. So smart and yet so fragile. Don’t get me wrong, from an emotional point of view, I completely get it. I am also guilty of wanting reconciliation. I also have my Giorgio… Without that glimmer of naivety and desire, you would have been a lost soul…

 

Gelsomina: Cabiria, on the two occasions that you drop your mask, the religious confession and under hypnosis… You express your desire for a better, but quite normal, life.  Isn’t it extraordinary that under hypnosis, rather than showing your darker fears, lived traumas, or erotic desires, you strive to fit into an idealised life, but still a life of comfort and conformity? Unconscious desire for normal love, if we can say that.  So far away from the typical hysterical woman, not traumatized by having to care for loved ones, or by sexual abuse, but by a lack of love. And yet, as Giulietta says, this is your fragility.

 

Cabiria: Yeah. That’s the privilege of the pariah. I can have a ‘dark’ desire for socially accepted love, the pulsion to stability, safety, care, perhaps even the sweet comfort of vanilla sex! If we go back to the Kindchenschema. Both of us are a mixture of the mother and the child, the mother in the child. I don’t want to get into cheap psychoanalysis, but we are the ideal of the mother in the image of the child. In that sense, we are more trapped in the fantasy of a man than Giulietta is. Our fragility, our weakness, is the result of a man’s guilt. Maybe, after all, Giulietta is the most liberated of all of us. Yeah, that makes sense.

 

Gelsomina: And you keep that dignified posture. So composed and polite. It is as if you are wandering through those images but at the same time observing them, like an outsider. Manners keep you at bay…

 

Giulietta: I think we are all wanderers of some sort. We go with the flow and yet we are standing by; a bit like ethnographers of a reality that is, and it isn’t our own. Being inside a man’s fantasy, as you say, makes that wandering possible, don’t you think?  

 

Gelsomina: We are gliders of a demi-monde that goes from the middle-class malaise of a lost woman to the wanderings of the destitute. That’s our agency.

 

Cabiria: That’s because there’s an inner strength in that fragility. I wouldn’t say resilience – God, I hate that word! – but a certain desire that is ours.  

 

Giulietta: Released from sentimentality, something else happens. The gestures, poses, and movements convey a unique force. And it doesn’t really matter if it is of a child, a woman, or even a man. It’s a kind of universal vital force detached from the character.  

 

Gelsomina: Don’t get too mystical. I guess the vulnerability is also a strength. What you were saying before about Cabiria’s deep desire to have a ‘normal, good’ life. Hmm… More than social approval, I see a desire for love, to love and be loved. Oscar and Giorgio are misfires, Cabiria, and so is your Giorgio, Giulletta. Sure, that is our strength and weakness. For all of us. So maybe Cabiria’s hypnotic drift was not so conformist after all; maybe it showed love as a fissure that cannot be stitched back. A crack that oozes desire and takes us to the abyss, or maybe, just to the endless ennui of betrayal, as in your case, Giulietta. Once the redemptive power of sentimentality goes away, it is not that bad to die from innocence. We went to hell and back, and there is an awakening in that journey.

 

Giulietta: Oh, yes. These are the wanderings of a Wife, a Prostitute and a Waif…