Juliet of the Spirits (Italy, 1965): Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen

Film - Feature | July 14 | 6 p.m. |  PFA Theater

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

(Giulietta degli spiriti). Juliet (Giulietta Masina), trying on who she will be for her husband tonight, discovers she is nothing. Thus begins, for this diminutive bourgeois housewife, a psychic journey into freedom and the magic of experience, magnificently concretized into cinema by Fellini. Fragmented (literally, by the camera), Juliet is receptive to the seers and Dionysian revelers she never knew inhabited her neighborhood, and to the bareback riders and flaming angels of her childhood. After all the ghosts, the voices, and the circus of desire pass by, “Juliet is concerned with the daily miracle of simple reality” (Fellini). Juliet of the Spirits is masterful in its picture of a married woman’s evolution toward apperception, made with profound sensitivity to the material, even tactile nuances of this progression; and in its contrasting portrait of male privilege and nonchalance. 


—Judy Bloch

• Written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi. Photographed by Gianni di Venanzo. With Giulietta Masina, Mario Pisù, Sandra Milo, Lou Gilbert. (148 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Rialto Pictures)

Tickets: $5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students,  $6.50 Non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 & over), disabled persons, and young adults (13-17),  $9.50 General admission

Event Contact: 510-642-0808