When I read of Claudia Cardinale’s death, I immediately recalled my most vivid recollection of her: Her role as an actress in Federico Fellini’s masterpiece film, 8 ½. I saw this movie shortly after it came out in 1963 when I was about 20 years old and, and at that age, most impressionable. Because my focus will be on Claudia Cardinale and her part in 8 ½, I will restrict my discussion of Fellini’s work to the way he employed Cardinale. The film had a clear autobiographic element insofar as its protagonist is Guido (played by Marcello Mastroiami), a movie director, who appears overwhelmed by all the demands made on him.
The beginning of the film shows Guido retreating to a health spa with the hope a stay there will provide him with the rest and recuperation that will free him from his writer’s block. Once there he hires a producer to both offer him suggestions and to critique his script. Unfortunately, his discontent and frustration with himself and those around him, namely his wife and his mistress, are not allayed when the producer criticizes what he has written.
The beauty of Fellini’s picture lies in the way it portrays the inner processes of Guido’s mind as he avoids his present difficulties. He is sodden with images of his past when he was a child. He sees himself dancing with a seaside prostitute, Saraghina, and later being admonished by a priest causing his guilt, as a Catholic, to subsume his thoughts. Guido’s escape into his childhood only appears to heighten his anxieties about what he can do in the immediate present and impending future as a film director.
The mental image that Guido draws of the prostitute, Saraghina, is that of a woman clad in black. In juxtaposition to Guido’s mind saturated with these images, comes, almost floating, an actress called Claudia, played by Ms. Cardinale. In contrast, to the prostitute, Claudia is dressed in white, Guido’s mental image of the pure woman. Through the eyes of Guido, throughout the film she is seen this way. Guido summons her to his side imploring her to have a role in his film as the Ideal Woman. In viewing Claudia as the Ideal Woman, Guido attempts to latch onto her and rid himself of his memories related to his carnal desires for the likes of Saraghina in the past and his mistress in the present, Carla, (played by Sandra Milo).
Guido sees Claudia as a Muse who he hopes can lead him out of his mental confusion. He perceives her as a child and yet already a woman whose radiant white light represents the opposite of his carnal desires. Perhaps she is Guido’s salvation. But she appears more like an intangible, more imagined than real, perhaps an invention of the director’s mind. Guido gropes helplessly at this ethereal figure embodied by Cardinale.
Shortly after seeing 8 ½ , I recall viewing Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting, The Birth of Venus, where the Roman goddess, Venus, coming from a seashell, arrives at the shore after her birth. I likened that image to that of Claudia emerging from Guido’s mind, floating, untouchable, not to be disturbed. Though she starred in many other films quite different from that of 8 ½, my memory of her always will relate to her role in this Fellini picture.
Claudia Cardinale would never be regarded as a cinematic sex queen such as the curvaceous Bridgette Bardot, Anita Ekberg or Sophia Loren. Rather, to the Italian public she was more like the “girl next door,” beautiful but not ostentatious. Any man lucky enough to present Claudia as a girlfriend to his mother, I am sure would have very much pleased that mother. Upon reading Ms. Cardinarle’s obituary, this image of her, that of the purity and innocence of the girl next door, remains etched in my mind.
Dr. Bernard F. Natelson 