Here is something worth thinking about. In Fellini's Nights of Cabiria (1957), Imamura's Insect Woman (1963), and Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), we find the same woman: She comes (and wants to rise) from poverty, she is a prostitute, and she lives in the ruins of a country that was one of the fascist powers during World War II. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, it's Germany; in Insect Woman, it's Japan. And in Nights of Cabiria, it's Italy. As works of art, all three films have an important place in their respective canons and also represent the peak (or highest achievement) of their respective directors.

The Marriage of Maria Braun initiates the end of its director's short (but very productive) career. Insect Woman sits near the center of its director's best works (around the mid-'60s). As for Nights of Cabiria, it is its director's transitional film. This claim, the most challenging of the three, deserves a little elaboration: Cabiria beautifully captures Federico Fellini moving from the neorealism that shaped him to the neosurrealism that he shaped. Because it is between these poles, it is almost perfect: 8 1/2 (1963) goes too far, and I Vitelloni (1953) does not go far enough.

The center of Fellini's masterpiece is a funny-walking and funny-talking prostitute named Cabiria (Giulietta Masina). The world that surrounds her is under construction. Modernist skyscrapers are in the distance, farm animals roam the industrial wasteland, and some people even live in caves. Like the worlds in Insect Woman and The Marriage of Maria Braun, the Italy of Cabiria is being Americanized, and this social process involves more soul-selling than soul-searching. "Cash payment" is fast becoming the sole "nexus between man and man." But because fascism is in the immediate past, there is no other direction to go but forward. This is how Nights of Cabiria ends, with the prostitute walking into a bitter wind blowing from a callous future. She neither laughs nor cries. recommended

Seattle Art Museum's series "Federico Fellini, Circus Master" includes Nights of Cabiria (Jan 22), Juliet of the Spirits (March 5), and Ginger and Fred (March 19).