Original from moviemail.com
Roberto Rossellini, one of Italian neo-realism’s pre-eminent directors, defined it as, “above all a moral position from which to look at the world”. Coming in the wake of studio-bound melodramas of the Fascist regime – ‘white telephone’ films – neo-realist films demonstrated a new social consciousness, with their emphasis on working class hardship and the daily struggle to get by in post-war Italy, where the shadow of defeat lay over its material conditions of economic hardship in war-damaged cities.
Bicycle Thieves 1948
Although Italian neo-realism made its mark on the international stage with Rossellini’s Rome, Open City – an account of life and resistance in Rome under Nazi occupation which took the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1946, Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) is generally regarded as the first ‘neo-realist’ film. It certainly shocked the then Fascist government with its depiction of an authentic proletarian life, steeped ‘in the air of death and sperm’, as co-screenwriter Guiseppe de Santis said of it.
Rome, Open City 1945
Neo-realist films were typified by location shooting, often in poor neighbourhoods and the countryside, and by using predominantly non-professional actors. A direct, unadorned style of filming was typical, notably in long takes. Ending with De Sica’s Umberto D in 1952, true neo-realist films were few. An export ban on films that ‘maligned’ Italy, combined with the increasing popularity of American movies, meant that the style fell out of favour with producers and audiences.
Neo-realism may have been short-lived but was profoundly influential – not least to the French New Wave – and one of its films, Bicycle Thieves, also famously made an indelible impression on Satyajit Ray.
Cinema Neorealismo Italiano 