City of Women
Encyclopedia
City of Women is a 1980 film written and directed by Federico Fellini
. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni
plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes toward women and his wife.
, where his presence is rejected. A frightened Snàporaz retreats to the hotel lobby, but the exit is blocked; instead he seeks refuge with a girl who offers her assistance, Donatella (Donatella Damiani
), inside an elevator.
Donatella leads Snàporaz into a gymnasium and forces him to don roller skates
. He is yet again cornered and berated by a group of angry women who circle around him in roller skates and practice testicle-kicking with a dummy. Dazed, Snàporaz makes his exit down a flight of stairs, falling down and badly hurting himself, and into the domain of a burly woman (Jole Silvani) tending to the hotel's furnace. The woman showers and offers him a ride to the train station on her motorcycle, but stops by a farm and lures Snàporaz into a nursery, where she tries to rape him. The rape is cut short by the woman's mother, who steps in to chastise her daughter, and Snàporaz decides to follow instead a lonely woman through the country side. He joins her and her girlfriends on a car ride on the promise of being delivered to the station, but the ride goes on well into the night and all they do is hang out high on drugs and listen to techno
. A frustrated Snàporaz ditches them and is harassed by them and two more cars until he finds shelter in the off-limits private property of one Dr. Xavier Katzone (Ettore Manni
), who hails gunfire on his persecutors.
Dr. Katzone promises to deliver Snàporaz to the train station the following morning and invites him to stay on for a party. Snàporaz walks around Katzone's extravagant household, which is filled with sexual imagery and suggestive, phalic sculptures
. He is also fascinated by a collection of photographs hanging from the manor walls that become alight by pressing a button and whisper out arousing dialogue. Katzone takes pride on his many inventions and sets on to celebrate his 10,000th photograph with an eccentric party that involves the blowing of 10,000 candles and a performance
by his wife, in which she lures objects such as coins and pearls into her vagina
by means of telepathy
. It is in this party that Snàporaz comes across his ex wife, Elena (Anna Prucnal
), who has a drunken argument with him, and meets Donatella again.
The police (composed solely of women) arrives, interrupting Katzone mid-song, announcing the imminent demolition of his house. They also inform him that they've shot one of his dogs, Italo, his most beloved. A grieved Katzone gives burial to him. Meanwhile, Snàporaz dances to Fred Astaire
with Donatella and a friend of hers (who are both dressed in scant clothing), but fails to sleep with either of them, instead getting stuck with his ex on bed. Unable to sleep and hearing strange noises, he crawls under the bed, entering a dream-like world in which he slides down a toboggan
, along the way revisiting his childhood crushes (a sitter, a nurse, a prostitute). He is caged at the end of the slide and transported before a strange court, where he is judged for his masculinity. Although he is dismissed to go free, he decides to confront his tentative punishment, and escalates a towering ring before a feminine crowd. At the top of the ring he climbs up a ladder and into a hot air balloon in the shape of Donatella. Donatella herself fires at him from below with a machine-gun, bursting the balloon and sending Snàporaz plummeting to apparent death.
Snàporaz then wakes up on the very same train from the beginning of the film, showing the story to have been a mere nightmare. Just as he comes to this conclusion, he realizes his glasses are broken (as in his dream) and that the wagon is filled by the women that crowded his dream. The train then races into a tunnel and credits roll.
critic Giovanni Grazzini interpreted the film as "a catalogue of emotions, sometimes grotesque, sometimes farcical, which provides a few caustic jibes against the destruction of femininity by aggressive feminism... From a stylistic point of view, it's less homogeneous than usual but other parts of the film are delightful. For instance, when fantasy is used to create types of people rather than caricatures. In this sense Fellini, having abandoned his gallery of monsters, becomes more prosaic. Or when the ambiguity of certain characters - an excellent example is the soubrette played by the charming Donatella Damiani - provides a touch of grace and bitchiness; or when the film becomes almost a musical; or when paradox becomes surrealist, such as the party and the hurricane at the villa of Katzone who's in despair because his favourite dog has died".
"Fellini appears as the Madame Bovary
of his adolescence", wrote Claudia Fava for Corriere Mercantile. "He revels in the enjoyment he feels at working with an experienced crew, side by side with faithful technicians who simulate trains on the move or the sea washing the shores of the inevitable Romagnol beaches as though they were working of the set of George Méliès. But then, again and again, Fellini has shown us that he is the greatest and most ingenious of Méliès' heirs. Only the magic does not always work, especially in the attempt to create a kind of astonished confession of amused impotence when faced with the new woman of today, together with a feeling of nostalgia for the old woman of the past... Despite Fellini's extraordinary virtuosity, the film rarely achieves harmony of inspiration, of order, of strip-cartoon fantasy, or of irony." Francesco Bolzoni of L'Avvenire insisted that Fellini was "only playing games. But then we would hardly expect from Fellini a deep analysis of the nature of women... It is a game with occasional gaps and, more often, inventions that rejuvenate an all too familiar, all too hackneyed subject. A surprising serenity predominates... It is a film with a tragic vein that in the end proves to be light-hearted and occasionally amusing". La Notte magazine's Giorgio Carbone felt the maestro had "finally reached a splendid maturity that permits him to lavish his treasures upon us for the simple pleasure of doing so. Behind the festival of images and colours we can feel his delight in making this film, a delight which, from the very first scene, becomes ours too, and it's something we haven't felt in a long time... If the film lacks suspense in its story (we care little what happens to Snàporaz or Katzone because we know that sooner or later Rimini
and those bosomy extras will appear on the scene), there's suspense in the images and in the scenic inventions".
Screened out of competition on 19 May 1980 at the 33rd Cannes Film Festival
, the film was panned by the majority of French critics, some of whom offered review titles such as "Zero for Fellini", "A Tiring Deception", "A Disaster", as well as "A Mountain of Tedious Pretention". Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky
, in Rome that year for the pre-production of Nostalghia
, noted in his diary that City of Women was a fiasco: "At the Cannes Festival the papers said that Fellini's last film was a total disaster, and that he himself had ceased to exist. It's terrible, but it's true, his film is worthless."
in the United States in April 1981, the film garnered generally favorable reviews but little box-office success. Daniel Talbot of New Yorker Films offered an explanation for the public's lack of interest: "Here, it played in less than fifty theatres, and of those, six provided 75 percent of the earnings. I don't know what Gaumont
or Fellini could have expected with that kind of personal film. He had lost most of his audience here by then. Which isn't to say that I don't think him one of the great filmmakers of the world." For Vincent Canby
of The New York Times
, however, the film was a success: "Though the film is overlong, even for a Fellini aficionado, it is spell-binding, a dazzling visual display that is part burlesque, part satire, part Folies-Bergère, and all cinema. As Snàporaz is haunted by the phantoms of all the women he has known, or wanted to know, from childhood on, Mr Fellini in City of Women is obsessed by his own feelings toward women, by his need for them, his treatment (mostly poor) of them, his continued fascination by them and his awareness that (thank heavens) they'll always be different... Though City of Women is about a libertine, it's anything but licentious. Mr Fellini's licentiousness suggests a profound longing for some kind of protective discipline, if not complete chastity. As such discipline would destroy Snàporaz, it would make impossible the conception and production of a film as wonderfully uninhibited as City of Women."
John Gould Boyum of the Wall Street Journal observed that "the film's entire thrust has little or nothing to do with the striking of attitudes, the analyzing of ideas. What Fellini seems after here is the recording and communicating of a set of feelings: those complex, contradictory ones experienced by a middle-aged Italian male suddenly faced with a cataclysmic upheaval in social and sexual mores... We do not go to Fellini to immerse ourselves in story and character or to encounter ideas. What we want from the maestro and what he gives us are fabulous adventures in feeling - a decidedly original mixture of nostalgia, poignancy, and joy that is unmistakably Fellini's own."
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
. Amid Fellini's characteristic combination of dreamlike, outrageous, and artistic imagery, Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Mastroianni
Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross was an Italian film actor. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.- Personal life :...
plays Snàporaz, a man who voyages through male and female spaces toward a confrontation with his own attitudes toward women and his wife.
Plot
Snàporaz (Marcello Mastroianni) wakes up during a train ride and has a brief fling with a woman in the bathroom, but it's cut short when the train suddenly stops and the woman gets off. Snàporaz follows her into the woods, through the wilderness and into a Grand Hotel overrun with women in attendance for a surrealistic feminist convention. He winds up in a conference about polyandryPolyandry
Polyandry refers to a form of marriage in which a woman has two or more husbands at the same time. The form of polyandry in which a woman is married to two or more brothers is known as "fraternal polyandry", and it is believed by many anthropologists to be the most frequently encountered...
, where his presence is rejected. A frightened Snàporaz retreats to the hotel lobby, but the exit is blocked; instead he seeks refuge with a girl who offers her assistance, Donatella (Donatella Damiani
Donatella Damiani
Donatella Damiani is an Italian actress most known for her role in the 1980 film by Federico Fellini titled The City of Women...
), inside an elevator.
Donatella leads Snàporaz into a gymnasium and forces him to don roller skates
Roller skates
Roller skates are devices worn on the feet to enable the wearer to roll along on wheels. A first basic type of roller skate consists of a boot with four wheels with ball bearings, arranged in the same configuration as the wheels of a typical car.-History:...
. He is yet again cornered and berated by a group of angry women who circle around him in roller skates and practice testicle-kicking with a dummy. Dazed, Snàporaz makes his exit down a flight of stairs, falling down and badly hurting himself, and into the domain of a burly woman (Jole Silvani) tending to the hotel's furnace. The woman showers and offers him a ride to the train station on her motorcycle, but stops by a farm and lures Snàporaz into a nursery, where she tries to rape him. The rape is cut short by the woman's mother, who steps in to chastise her daughter, and Snàporaz decides to follow instead a lonely woman through the country side. He joins her and her girlfriends on a car ride on the promise of being delivered to the station, but the ride goes on well into the night and all they do is hang out high on drugs and listen to techno
Techno
Techno is a form of electronic dance music that emerged in Detroit, Michigan in the United States during the mid to late 1980s. The first recorded use of the word techno, in reference to a genre of music, was in 1988...
. A frustrated Snàporaz ditches them and is harassed by them and two more cars until he finds shelter in the off-limits private property of one Dr. Xavier Katzone (Ettore Manni
Ettore Manni
Ettore Manni was an Italian film actor. He appeared in 107 films between 1952 and 1979. He was born and died in Rome, Italy after accidentally shooting himself.-Selected filmography:* Two Nights with Cleopatra...
), who hails gunfire on his persecutors.
Dr. Katzone promises to deliver Snàporaz to the train station the following morning and invites him to stay on for a party. Snàporaz walks around Katzone's extravagant household, which is filled with sexual imagery and suggestive, phalic sculptures
Obelisk
An obelisk is a tall, four-sided, narrow tapering monument which ends in a pyramid-like shape at the top, and is said to resemble a petrified ray of the sun-disk. A pair of obelisks usually stood in front of a pylon...
. He is also fascinated by a collection of photographs hanging from the manor walls that become alight by pressing a button and whisper out arousing dialogue. Katzone takes pride on his many inventions and sets on to celebrate his 10,000th photograph with an eccentric party that involves the blowing of 10,000 candles and a performance
Performance
A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers behave in a particular way for another group of people, the audience. Choral music and ballet are examples. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience...
by his wife, in which she lures objects such as coins and pearls into her vagina
Vagina
The vagina is a fibromuscular tubular tract leading from the uterus to the exterior of the body in female placental mammals and marsupials, or to the cloaca in female birds, monotremes, and some reptiles. Female insects and other invertebrates also have a vagina, which is the terminal part of the...
by means of telepathy
Telepathy
Telepathy , is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and has remained more popular than the more-correct expression thought-transference...
. It is in this party that Snàporaz comes across his ex wife, Elena (Anna Prucnal
Anna Prucnal
Anna Prucnal is a Polish actress in both cinema and theatre, as well as a singer.Prucnal was born in Warsaw, Poland. After her father, a surgeon, was killed by the Nazis during World War II, Anna and her sister were raised by their mother, who was of noble descent and related to the 18th-century...
), who has a drunken argument with him, and meets Donatella again.
The police (composed solely of women) arrives, interrupting Katzone mid-song, announcing the imminent demolition of his house. They also inform him that they've shot one of his dogs, Italo, his most beloved. A grieved Katzone gives burial to him. Meanwhile, Snàporaz dances to Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute...
with Donatella and a friend of hers (who are both dressed in scant clothing), but fails to sleep with either of them, instead getting stuck with his ex on bed. Unable to sleep and hearing strange noises, he crawls under the bed, entering a dream-like world in which he slides down a toboggan
Toboggan
A toboggan is a simple sled which is a traditional form of transport used by the Innu and Cree of northern Canada. In modern times, it is used on snow to carry one or more people down a hill or other slope for recreation. Designs vary from simple, traditional models to modern engineered composites...
, along the way revisiting his childhood crushes (a sitter, a nurse, a prostitute). He is caged at the end of the slide and transported before a strange court, where he is judged for his masculinity. Although he is dismissed to go free, he decides to confront his tentative punishment, and escalates a towering ring before a feminine crowd. At the top of the ring he climbs up a ladder and into a hot air balloon in the shape of Donatella. Donatella herself fires at him from below with a machine-gun, bursting the balloon and sending Snàporaz plummeting to apparent death.
Snàporaz then wakes up on the very same train from the beginning of the film, showing the story to have been a mere nightmare. Just as he comes to this conclusion, he realizes his glasses are broken (as in his dream) and that the wagon is filled by the women that crowded his dream. The train then races into a tunnel and credits roll.
Cast
- Marcello MastroianniMarcello MastroianniMarcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross was an Italian film actor. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.- Personal life :...
- Snàporaz - Anna PrucnalAnna PrucnalAnna Prucnal is a Polish actress in both cinema and theatre, as well as a singer.Prucnal was born in Warsaw, Poland. After her father, a surgeon, was killed by the Nazis during World War II, Anna and her sister were raised by their mother, who was of noble descent and related to the 18th-century...
- Elena - Bernice Stegers - Woman on train
- Donatella DamianiDonatella DamianiDonatella Damiani is an Italian actress most known for her role in the 1980 film by Federico Fellini titled The City of Women...
- Donatella (Woman on roller skates) - Jole Silvani - Motorcyclist (as Iole Silvani)
- Ettore ManniEttore ManniEttore Manni was an Italian film actor. He appeared in 107 films between 1952 and 1979. He was born and died in Rome, Italy after accidentally shooting himself.-Selected filmography:* Two Nights with Cleopatra...
- Dr. Xavier Katzone - Fiammetta Baralla - Onlio
- Hélène Calzarelli - Feminist (as Hélène G. Calzarelli)
- Isabelle Canto da Maya - (as Isabelle Canto de Maya)
- Catherine Carrel - Commandant
- Stéphane Emilfork - Feminist
- Marcello Di Falco - Slave
- Silvana Fusacchia - Skater
- Gabriella GiorgelliGabriella GiorgelliGabriella Giorgelli is an Italian film actress. She appeared in 70 films between 1962 and 1998. She also appeared in many photo comics including Sadistik and is interviewed in the new film The Diabolikal Super-Kriminal....
- Fishwoman of San Leo - Dominique LabourierDominique LabourierDominique Labourier is a French actress. She starred as Julie in Jacques Rivette's film Celine and Julie Go Boating. She has appeared in over 40 films since 1968...
- Feminist
Italy and France
City of Women opened in eighty Italian theaters in March 1980 and received generally favorable reviews bordering "on respect rather than praise". Corriere della SeraCorriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...
critic Giovanni Grazzini interpreted the film as "a catalogue of emotions, sometimes grotesque, sometimes farcical, which provides a few caustic jibes against the destruction of femininity by aggressive feminism... From a stylistic point of view, it's less homogeneous than usual but other parts of the film are delightful. For instance, when fantasy is used to create types of people rather than caricatures. In this sense Fellini, having abandoned his gallery of monsters, becomes more prosaic. Or when the ambiguity of certain characters - an excellent example is the soubrette played by the charming Donatella Damiani - provides a touch of grace and bitchiness; or when the film becomes almost a musical; or when paradox becomes surrealist, such as the party and the hurricane at the villa of Katzone who's in despair because his favourite dog has died".
"Fellini appears as the Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...
of his adolescence", wrote Claudia Fava for Corriere Mercantile. "He revels in the enjoyment he feels at working with an experienced crew, side by side with faithful technicians who simulate trains on the move or the sea washing the shores of the inevitable Romagnol beaches as though they were working of the set of George Méliès. But then, again and again, Fellini has shown us that he is the greatest and most ingenious of Méliès' heirs. Only the magic does not always work, especially in the attempt to create a kind of astonished confession of amused impotence when faced with the new woman of today, together with a feeling of nostalgia for the old woman of the past... Despite Fellini's extraordinary virtuosity, the film rarely achieves harmony of inspiration, of order, of strip-cartoon fantasy, or of irony." Francesco Bolzoni of L'Avvenire insisted that Fellini was "only playing games. But then we would hardly expect from Fellini a deep analysis of the nature of women... It is a game with occasional gaps and, more often, inventions that rejuvenate an all too familiar, all too hackneyed subject. A surprising serenity predominates... It is a film with a tragic vein that in the end proves to be light-hearted and occasionally amusing". La Notte magazine's Giorgio Carbone felt the maestro had "finally reached a splendid maturity that permits him to lavish his treasures upon us for the simple pleasure of doing so. Behind the festival of images and colours we can feel his delight in making this film, a delight which, from the very first scene, becomes ours too, and it's something we haven't felt in a long time... If the film lacks suspense in its story (we care little what happens to Snàporaz or Katzone because we know that sooner or later Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
and those bosomy extras will appear on the scene), there's suspense in the images and in the scenic inventions".
Screened out of competition on 19 May 1980 at the 33rd Cannes Film Festival
1980 Cannes Film Festival
The 33rd Cannes Film Festival was held on May 9-23. The showing of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker is interrupted by an electricians strike.- Jury :*Kirk Douglas *Ken Adam *Robert Benayoun *Veljko Bulajić...
, the film was panned by the majority of French critics, some of whom offered review titles such as "Zero for Fellini", "A Tiring Deception", "A Disaster", as well as "A Mountain of Tedious Pretention". Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director, widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of the 20th century....
, in Rome that year for the pre-production of Nostalghia
Nostalghia
Nostalghia is a 1983 Soviet film, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and starring Oleg Yankovsky, Domiziana Giordano and Erland Josephson.The plot of the film centers around the meaning of the term nostalgia, which describes a longing for the past, often in idealized form.-Plot:The opening scene is a...
, noted in his diary that City of Women was a fiasco: "At the Cannes Festival the papers said that Fellini's last film was a total disaster, and that he himself had ceased to exist. It's terrible, but it's true, his film is worthless."
USA
Released by New Yorker FilmsNew Yorker Films
New Yorker Films is an independent film distribution company founded by Daniel Talbot in 1965. It started as an extension of his Manhattan movie house, the New Yorker Theater, after he discovered he was unable to obtain certain foreign titles for exhibition....
in the United States in April 1981, the film garnered generally favorable reviews but little box-office success. Daniel Talbot of New Yorker Films offered an explanation for the public's lack of interest: "Here, it played in less than fifty theatres, and of those, six provided 75 percent of the earnings. I don't know what Gaumont
Gaumont Film Company
Gaumont Film Company is a French film production company founded in 1895 by the engineer-turned-inventor, Léon Gaumont . Gaumont is the oldest continously operating film company in the world....
or Fellini could have expected with that kind of personal film. He had lost most of his audience here by then. Which isn't to say that I don't think him one of the great filmmakers of the world." For Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...
of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, however, the film was a success: "Though the film is overlong, even for a Fellini aficionado, it is spell-binding, a dazzling visual display that is part burlesque, part satire, part Folies-Bergère, and all cinema. As Snàporaz is haunted by the phantoms of all the women he has known, or wanted to know, from childhood on, Mr Fellini in City of Women is obsessed by his own feelings toward women, by his need for them, his treatment (mostly poor) of them, his continued fascination by them and his awareness that (thank heavens) they'll always be different... Though City of Women is about a libertine, it's anything but licentious. Mr Fellini's licentiousness suggests a profound longing for some kind of protective discipline, if not complete chastity. As such discipline would destroy Snàporaz, it would make impossible the conception and production of a film as wonderfully uninhibited as City of Women."
John Gould Boyum of the Wall Street Journal observed that "the film's entire thrust has little or nothing to do with the striking of attitudes, the analyzing of ideas. What Fellini seems after here is the recording and communicating of a set of feelings: those complex, contradictory ones experienced by a middle-aged Italian male suddenly faced with a cataclysmic upheaval in social and sexual mores... We do not go to Fellini to immerse ourselves in story and character or to encounter ideas. What we want from the maestro and what he gives us are fabulous adventures in feeling - a decidedly original mixture of nostalgia, poignancy, and joy that is unmistakably Fellini's own."
Other uses of the title
- City of Women is also the title of a history written by Christine Stansell about sex and class in New York from 1789-1860.
- The Book of the City of LadiesThe Book of the City of Ladiesthumb|400px|right|Picture from The Book of the City of LadiesThe Book of the City of Ladies , or Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, is perhaps Christine de Pizan's most famous literary work, and it is her second work of lengthy prose. Pizan uses the vernacular French language to compose the book, but...
(1405), a book defending women, by Christine de PizanChristine de PizanChristine de Pizan was a Venetian-born late medieval author who challenged misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the male-dominated medieval culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own day; she completed 41 works during her 30 year career , and can be regarded as...
, is sometimes referred to as City of Women. - The film is classified as R18 in New Zealand for sex scenes.
Further reading
- Lederman, Marie Jean . "Dreams and vision in Fellini's City of Women." Journal of Popular Film and Television, Volume 9, n° 3 Fall 1981, p. 114-22. Cini, Roberta. Nella città delle donne : femminile e sogno nel cinema di Federico Fellini, Tirrenia (Pisa) : Edizioni del Cerro, 2008. Monti, Raffaele. Bottega Fellini: la Città delle donne: progetto, lavorazione, film, with photographs by Gabriele Stocchi. Roma: De Luca, [1981].
External links
- Review by Vincent Canby, The New York Times, April 1981