As I was writing recently about the European version of physical comedy with a focus on the practices of Giulietta Masina’s “animistic” physical acting, I found myself, almost unconsciously, in a nexus of ethical and philosophical issues that belong to the hard core of Continental thought, to put it somewhat bluntly. And there, a dominant motif began to emerge—that of a nomadic life—as a fundamental condition of existence in the cinematic record of postwar Europe.
Soon, however, it became clear that this ceaseless wandering is not limited to its social dimension, but gradually transforms into an ontological condition. Yet when the condition of displacement is viewed through the lens of a Catholic visionary such as Simone Weil, as well as a mind trained in Catholic theology such as Martin Heidegger, it takes on the dimensions of a grand narrative both within and beyond Federico Fellini’s dramaturgy.
If Jewish-born Weil describes uprooting (déracinement) in terms of social and spiritual deprivation, and if Heidegger —the thinker of the forest paths that lead nowhere—sees in homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit) the realization of authentic “dwelling,” then Masina, who has nowhere to stand, prepares us to accept this “exile.” [1]
When I revisited Masina’s roles, I was left with a feeling that wouldn’t easily fade: that one can endure not having roots anywhere: from the desire of dwelling to an ethic of vulnerability through the acceptance of a suspended existence, devoid of meaning and purpose.
Masina familiarizes us with the idea that homelessness is our fundamental condition. That not belonging anywhere is perhaps the most honest way to exist, something that would resonate with the “bucolic” thinker Heidegger, the philosopher of dwelling.
In this context, a reference by Pope Francis takes on particular significance. In 2024, in a video message for the seventieth anniversary of Fellini’s La Strada (1954), he drew attention to the scene with the “useless” pebble. [2]
The acrobat-clown Il Matto tells Gelsomina that nothing in this world is useless; a pebble has a purpose too, even if we cannot know it. And if that isn’t true, then nothing has meaning—not the stars, nor even ourselves.
And, indeed, Il Matto, a figure reminiscent of the Christian “holy fool,” serves as a messenger in a precarious professional class of street performers. Gelsomina, in La Strada, is violently thrust into adulthood as a wandering entertainer in the paternalistic environment of the bandleader Zampanò, while Cabiria, as a sex worker in Le notti di Cabiria (1957), is a constant victim of human relationships. Both, through their frustrations, yearn for a meaning not attained as knowledge but as a faith that makes their lives bearable.
In Masina’s universe, everyone is on the losing side, even the miscreants and the exploiters. The world is in flux, and all the characters are, to a greater or lesser extent, adrift and uprooted.
However, Masina’s physical gestures, in their vulnerability, are transformed into manifestations of a deeper moral choice, becoming an expression, almost a stance. Her body is not merely another comic body among the countless film productions that define a farcical aesthetic, but a body whose poses, exaggerated movements, and facial expressions are connected to the traumatized European landscape. Just as this world, in its harshness, seeks to ostracize misery, in the same way Masina, through her comical postures, persists and resistw. Even if the world throws you out of the frame, there is a way to stay in.
The history of Europe is reflected in Masina’s deceived and misled body, exposing the very meaning of the Neorealismo movement in an Italy where the bodies on screen—no longer heroic but deceived —suffer from poverty, defeat, and the struggle to survive. [3]
What does it ultimately mean to represent political changes—from Mussolini’s regime to democratization—through bodies in Fellini’s dramatic comedies?
First, Fellini’s version of slapstick differs from the classic mechanical comedy of silent film because the cultural context has changed. It is the same timeless material of the visual gag—the body that stumbles, falls, and survives—but with a different spirit and in a different place. [4]
Guillieta Masina has something familiar about her, something reminiscent of Chaplin’s Little Tramp or Buster Keaton’s clownish innocence—and, indeed, in a context where physical movement is presented as a mechanism for survival.
However, the “plasticity” of the slapstick body—from Mack Sennett’s American comedy productions to the documentary-style tortured body of neorealism—shows us that it is not merely rubber that returns to its original state, but also a wound that endures. In this sense, Masina embodies a form of cinematic “other” that cannot be assimilated exclusively into a typical cinematic character on the sets of Cinecittà or Hollywood. Unlike the roles she embodies, she establishes a relationship of responsibility with us. Her physical flexibility does not merely elicit laughter, but exposes us to a politicized body—a victim that seeks some kind of response. We no longer laugh at her fall. Her roles establish a strange connection with us, which may be uncomfortable, because it seeks something that feels like a relationship of responsibility.
Masina, in Fellini’s universe, is under the influence of an aesthetic of deviation. Whether as a street clown or as a sex worker, she will never return to the conventionally virtuous path of normality; deviation is a method of perception, a way to understand the world beyond the illusion of straight lines, of the need for conformity and balance. Her oblique path does not seek reintegration into a straight line of life, but establishes a different way of being: an existence that is constantly exposed to a world that offers no place for her.
Feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed describes heteronormativity as a system of alignment, where “straight ahead” is not a neutral direction but a social imperative. And here Fellini, although he does not speak in the terms of contemporary gender studies, helps us read the body differently: as a queer body that deviates from the natural straight line, and reveals that the straight line was constructed from the very beginning. “The lines we follow are lines that have already been drawn by others.” [5]
Deviation does not concern personal clumsiness or eccentricity. but an embodied experience of exclusion. It is the proletarianized femininities—Gelsomina, Cabiria, Giulietta—who constantly stumble upon boundaries and turn toward a world that is not made for them and that does not await them. Even in Giulietta degli spiriti (1965), where she plays an urban woman caught in a state of unstable subjectivity, she is overwhelmed by imaginary figures, spirits, and desires that create a parallel universe to reality, but do not fully integrate into it.
Masina’s body constantly encounters surfaces that resist, relationships that veer off their course, promises that crumble—and yet, amidst this almost ritualistic failure to align, she persists.
Her face doesn’t fit anywhere. The world is unbearably sure of itself. She appears before us as an elf, tender and yet out of place. But her gestures, the subtle shifts of her gaze, her moments of awkwardness or carefree joy act as cracks. From there emerges a laugh in the form of a moral revelation.
Thus, Masina’s contribution to Fellini’s cinema allows the issue of uprooting to be reframed in different terms. If postwar Europe experiences a state of historical “homelessness,” Masina’s characters suggest something more demanding: that the loss of a place, of a permanent point on the map, does not necessarily entail the loss of morality. Amidst mobility, uncertainty, and physical exposure, a form of universal human experience emerges through our radical exposure to homelessness.
With her unique blend of childlike innocence, tenderness, and tragic vulnerability, Masina becomes a powerful cinematic figure through which one can contemplate the universal ethics of human dignity. In Giulietta degli spiriti, where, for the first time, she bears her own name, her character is transported to a different environment— urban, seemingly protected. Giulietta undergoes tribulations in the psychedelic delirium of her wanderings in a parallel universe that opens up alongside the “real” one without ever reconciling with it.
As she leaves the fenced-in house and heads toward the forest, Masina makes us wonder whether this is a choice of emancipation and liberation or of confinement and loneliness.
This ambiguity in the final scene of Giulietta’s exit into the forest— which sparked a disagreement between Fellini and Masina over its meaning—is the most honest conclusion. An exit with no guarantees. Another detour.
But there is another forest that Giulietta Masina traverses. In the final scene of Le notti di Cabiria, her walk through the forest does not lead to a gradual disappearance but to a hesitant, initially sorrowful stumble—of a body that does not know if it can bear to continue.
And here, inevitably, we cannot ignore her greatest fan, Charlie Chaplin, who in all his films walks away down the street and his silhouette, with its slightly bouncy gait, disappears into the horizon, while the camera remains behind him. It is, as Vladimir Jankélévitch observes, that “gait of someone who is going nowhere and who, in any case, is going somewhere further on, the gait of someone who does not know where they are going.” [6]
Cabiria continues to walk through the very world that has just crushed her. Weeping. The shock of seduction and betrayal by a loved one who has just robbed her has not yet faded. A crowd
passes by; a group of young people who walk past her and treat her with exuberance and a playful spirit as they dance and sing. Cabiria, however, does not leave; she continues to walk among them. Gradually, trust is restored.
Thus, where Chaplin justifiably embodies a poetics of escape, Cabiria shapes an ethics of perseverance. As she crosses the forest with the people around her, her gait signifies an adobe, without being a flight into the unknown. It is a gait that coexists with loss.
And then, for a moment, a few seconds before the film ends, something inexplicable happens. The shadow of her shattering and failure is illuminated by a paradoxical grace: a movement that continues obliquely, awkwardly, persistently to exist within the world that has just accepted her again, as she begins to smile through her tears.
Notes
[1] As examples, I have chosen the editions in their original languages: Simone Weil, L’Enracinement: Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); and Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken”, in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954).
[2] Here I quote the entire dialogue:
“Everything in this world is useful for something. Here, take this pebble, for example,” says the jester.
“What is it good for?” asks Gelsomina.
“It has a purpose... How should I know what it is? If I knew, do you know what I would be? The Almighty, the one who knows everything—when you’re born, when you die. And who can know those things? No, I don’t know what this stone is for, but it must be for something. Because if this is useless, then everything is useless— even the stars. And you, too, have a purpose, with that artichoke head of yours.”
Salvatore Cernuzio, “Pope Francis Celebrates 70th Anniversary of Fellini’s La Strada,” Vatican News, May 2, 2024, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2024-05/pope-francis- federico-fellini-la-strada-70th-anniversary.html.
[3] Karl Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures and Historical Representation: Masina’s Cabina, Bazin’s Chaplin, and Fellini’s Neorealism”, Cinema Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 93- 116, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43653570/
[4] For the concept of the animate tree in association with practices of physical humor, see Kostis Velonis, “Disguised as a Tree,” in Forest- Architecture. In Search of the (Post) Modern Wilderness (Milan: SYLVA/Mimesis Edizioni. 2024), http://mimesisbooks.com/index.php/mim/catalog/book/71. See also Kostis Velonis [in Greek], “Environmental Comedy and Animism. On the Animation of the Tree in Slapstick Practices”, in Here! Place – Landscape – Space – Time, ed. Theodoros Zafeiropoulos, (Athens: Tziola Publications, 2024).
[5] “Lines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created.” Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 16.
[6] Vladimir Jankélévitch, Béatrice Berlowitz. Somewhere in the Unfinished, Greek trans. Lizy Tsirimokou (Athens: Polis, 2021), p. 205.