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Italian neorealism (Italian: Neorealismo) is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors. Italian neorealist films mostly contend with the difficult economical and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy, reflecting the changes in the Italian psyche and the conditions of everyday life: poverty and desperation. Neorealism is properly defined as a moment or a trend in Italian film, rather than an actual school or group of theoretically motivated and like-minded directors and scriptwriters. Its impact nevertheless has been enormous, not only on Italian film but also on French New Wave cinema and ultimately on films all over the world. “The term ‘neorealism’ was first applied by the critic Antonio Pietrangeli to Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), and the style came to fruition in the mid-to-late forties in such films of Roberto Rossellini, Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica as Rome, Open City (1945), Shoeshine (1946), Paisan (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and The Earth Trembles (1948). These pictures reacted not only against the banality that had long been the dominant mode of Italian cinema, but also against prevailing socioeconomic conditions in Italy. With minimal resources, the neorealist filmmakers worked in real locations using local people as well as professional actors; they improvised their scripts, as need be, on site; and their films conveyed a powerful sense of the plight of ordinary individuals oppressed by political circumstances beyond their control. Thus Italian neorealism was the first postwar cinema to liberate filmmaking from the artificial confines of the studio and, by extension, from the Hollywood-originated studio system. But neorealism was the expression of an entire moral or ethical philosophy, as well, and not simply just another new cinematic style”.
By the outbreak of World War II, the country had been under Benito Mussolini’s since 1924. In the regime’s 1930s heydays, swank productions set in big hotels, tony nightclubs and ocean liners made up the ‘white telephone’ movies, the shorthand term for their decadent Deco interiors. The protagonists always found a resolution to their insipid dilemmas, the prevailing Italian style as unchallenging as blowing bubbles. There were also plenty of American imports, equally unreflective of Italian realities. Describing this time, Federico Fellini said, “For my generation, born in the 20s, movies were essentially American. American movies were more effective, more seductive. They really showed a paradise on earth, a paradise in a country they called America.”
Treno popolare (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1933)
Whether they were being shown the glories of their Roman past, their fascist future or of l’America, a country unreal outside the movie-house, what Italians rarely saw were images that reflected their lives. As early as 1935, anti-Fascist journalist Leo Longanesi urged directors to “go into the streets, into the barracks, into the train stations; only in this way can an Italian cinema be born.” Aside from the political realities, it’s worth remembering that Italy was still in the first stages of a huge transition from agriculture to manufacturing. People struggled; the economic miracle was still more than a decade away. Yet few films showed this, the exceptions being Treno popolare (1933) by Rafaello Matarazzo and, paradoxically, in documentaries produced by LUCE institute, under complete control of the regime.
With the fall of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1943 and the end of World War II, Italian directors, newly freed from Fascist censorship, were able to merge a desire for cinematic realism (a tendency already present during the Fascist period) with social, political, and economic themes that would never have been tolerated by the regime. Neorealist films often took a highly critical view of Italian society and focused attention upon glaring social problems, such as the effects of the Resistance and the war, postwar poverty, and chronic unemployment. Continuing a trend toward realism that had already been initiated during the Fascist period by prewar directors such as Alessandro Blasetti (1900–1987), Augusto Genina (1892–1957), and Francesco De Robertis (1902–1959), these new postwar faces – dubbed neorealists by critics who praised the ‘new’ realism they believed such directors sought to create – rejected, in some instances, traditional dramatic and cinematic conventions associated with commercial cinema in both Rome and Hollywood. Some (though very few) even wanted to abandon literary screenplays altogether to focus on improvisation, while most preferred to chronicle the average, undramatic daily events in the lives of common people with the assistance of a literate script. But almost all neorealists agreed that the ‘happy ending’ they associated with Hollywood was to be avoided at all costs.
For many Italians, neo-realist films put images to the ideas of the Resistance. In the film journals Cinema and Bianco e Nero, writers called for a cinema that resembled the verismo (realism) of literature. This had begun as a 19th century literary movement which was expanded by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese and Pier Paolo Pasolini, most of whom wrote for – or about – the movies as well. Although philosophical ideas informed Italian neo-realism, it is very much a cinematic creation. As Calvino pointed out, “neo-realists knew too well that what counted was the music and not the libretto.” The aim was not to record the social problems but to express them in an entirely new way.
Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935) and Alessandro Blassetti’s 1860 (1934) influenced neo-realism, but the movement was to a great extent a matter of 1940s practicalities: with Cinécitta (Rome’s studio complex) relegated to refugees, films had to be shot outside. Surrounded by the shambolic ruins of World War II, human and structural, filmmakers had ready-made drama even in their backdrop, the atmosphere anxiety-charged and utterly uncertain. After twenty-one years under Mussolini, all bets were off as to what direction Italy would take. In the war’s aftermath, members of the Resistance (including several of the neo-realist directors) had to come to terms those who collaborated. Though unstated, this almost civil war-like tension fuels neo-realist cinema.
Ideologically, the characteristics of Italian neorealism were:
a new democratic spirit, with emphasis on the value of ordinary people
a compassionate point of view and a refusal to make facile (easy) moral judgements
a preoccupation with Italy’s Fascist past and its aftermath of wartime devastation
a blending of Christian and Marxist humanism
an emphasis on emotions rather than abstract ideas
Stylistically, Italian Neorealism was:
an avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favor of loose, episodic structures that evolve organically
a documentary visual style
the use of actual locations – usually exteriors – rather than studio sites
the use of nonprofessional actors, even for principal roles
use of conversational speech, not literary dialogue
avoidance of artifice in editing, camerawork, and lighting in favor of a simple ‘styless’ style
So what is neo-realism? André Bazin called it a cinema of ‘fact’ and ‘reconstituted reportage’, having its antecedents in the anti-Fascist movement with which these directors identified. Although they owed a debt to Renoir (with whom both Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni had worked), the neo-realists respected the entirety of the reality they filmed. This meant occasionally showing scenes in real-time and always resisting the temptation to manipulate by editing. Scenes are shot on location, with no professional extras and often a largely unprofessional cast. Set in rural areas or working-class neighborhoods, the stories focus on everyday people, often children, with an emphasis on the unexceptional routines of ordinary life.
Neorealism preferred location shooting rather than studio work, as well as the grainy kind of photography associated with documentary newsreels. While it is true that, for a while, the film studios were unavailable after the war, neorealist directors shunned them primarily because they wanted to show what was going on in the streets and piazzas of Italy immediately after the war. Contrary to the belief that explains on-location shooting by its supposed lower cost, such filming often cost much more than work in the more easily controlled studios; in the streets, it was never possible to predict lighting, weather, and the unforeseen occurrence of money-wasting disturbances. Economic factors do, however, explain another characteristic of neorealist cinema – its almost universal practice of dubbing the sound track in post-production, rather than recording sounds on the supposedly ‘authentic’ locations. Perhaps the most original characteristic of the new Italian realism in film was the brilliant use of nonprofessional actors by Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti, though many of the films accepted as neorealist depended upon excellent performances by seasoned professional actors.
Some film historians have tended to portray neo-realism as an authentic movement with universally agreed-upon stylistic or thematic principles. In fact, Italian neorealist cinema represents a hybrid of traditional and more experimental techniques. Moreover, political expediency often motivated interpretations of postwar neorealism that overlooked the important elements of continuity between realist films made during the Fascist era and realist films made by the neorealists. After 1945, no one in the film industry wanted to be associated with Mussolini and his discredited dictatorship, and most Italian film critics were Marxists; neorealism’s ancestry was thus largely ignored.
The most influential critical appraisals of Italian neorealism today emphasize the fact that Italian neorealist cinema rested upon artifice as much as realism and established, in effect, its own particular realist conventions. All too many early assessments of Italian neorealism focused lazily upon the formulaic statement that Italian neorealism meant no scripts, no actors, no studios, and no happy endings. In the 1964 edition of his first resistance novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947), Italo Calvino (1923–1985) reminded his readers that Italian neorealism was never a school with widely shared theoretical principles. Rather, it arose from a number of closely associated discoveries of an Italian popular culture that had traditionally been ignored by ‘high’ Italian culture. Neorealist film and literature replaced an official cinema and literature characterized by pompous rhetoric and a lack of interest in the quotidian and the commonplace. Cesare Zavattini, who functions as a kind of godfather of the movement, stated: “This powerful desire of the [neo-realist] cinema to see and to analyze, this hunger for reality, for truth, is a kind of concrete homage to other people, that is, to all who exist.” The aim, method and philosophy was fundamentally humanist: to show Italian life without embellishment and without artifice. Breezy fare this is not, but it did significantly alter European filmmaking and eventually cinema around the world. Neo-realism reflected a new freedom in Italy and the willingness to pose provocative questions about what movies could do. As director Giuseppe Bertolucci (Bernardo’s brother) noted: “The cinema was born with neo-realism.”
With the fall of Mussolini and the end of the war, international audiences were suddenly introduced to Italian films through a few great works by Rossellini, De Sica, and Luchino Visconti that appeared in less than a decade after 1945, such as Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946); De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948), and Umberto D. (1952); and Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). Italian neorealist films stressed social themes (the war, the resistance, poverty, unemployment); they seemed to reject traditional Hollywood dramatic and cinematic conventions; they often privileged on-location shooting rather than studio work, as well as the documentary photographic style favored by many directors under the former regime; and they frequently (but not always) employed nonprofessional actors in original ways. Film historians have unfortunately tended to speak of neo-realism as if it were an authentic movement with universally agreed-upon stylistic or thematic principles. While the controlling fiction of the best neorealist works was that they dealt with universal human problems, contemporary stories, and believable characters from everyday life, the best neorealist films never completely denied cinematic conventions, nor did they always totally reject Hollywood codes. The basis for the fundamental change in cinematic history marked by Italian neorealism was less an agreement on a single, unified cinematic style than a common aspiration to view Italy without preconceptions and to employ a more honest, ethical, but no less poetic, cinematic language in the process.
Il bandito (Alberto Lattuada, 1946)
These masterpieces by Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti are indisputably major works of art that capture the spirit of postwar Italian culture and remain original contributions to film language. But with the exception of Rome, Open City, they were relatively unpopular within Italy and achieved success primarily among intellectuals and foreign critics. “Back in 1942, when Vittorio Mussolini, the head of the film industry, saw Visconti’s Ossessione, he stormed out of the theater shouting, “This is not Italy!” Most Neorealist films elicited a similar reaction from postwar officials. The portrait of a desolate, poverty-stricken country outraged politicians anxious to prove that Italy was on the road to democracy and prosperity. The Catholic Church condemned many films for their anticlericalism and their portrayal of sex and working-class life. Leftists attacked the films for their pessimism and lack of explicit political commitment”.[3] In particular, De Sica was criticized for “washing Italy’s dirty laundry in public” by Giulio Andreotti, a Christian Democratic politician who was later to become one of Italy’s most powerful prime ministers.
“Few Neorealist works were popular with the public. Audiences were more drawn to the American films that came flooding into Italy. The state undersecretary in charge of entertainment, Giulio Andreotti, found a way of slowing the advance of American films while also curbing the embarra ssing excesses of Neorealism. The so-called Andreotti law, which went into effect in 1949, not only established import limits and screen quotas but also provided loans to production firms. To receive a loan, however, a government committee had to approve the script, and films with an apolitical slant were rewarded with larger sums. Worse, a film could be denied an export license if it “slandered Italy”. The Andreotti law created preproduction censorship. This move coincided with a general drift away from the ‘purer’ Neorealism of the period from 1944 to 1948″.[3]
One of the paradoxes of the neorealist era in Italian film history, an epoch that lasted no more than a decade, is that the ordinary people such films set out to portray were relatively uninterested in their self-image. In fact, of the approximately eight hundred films produced between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s in Italy, only a relatively small number (about 10 percent) could be classified as neorealist, and most of these few works were box-office failures. After years of fascist dictatorship and the deprivations of war, Italians were more interested in being entertained than in being reminded of their poverty.
Anna Magnani in L’onorevole Angelina (Luigi Zampa, 1947)
A number of less important but very interesting neorealist films were able to achieve greater popular success by incorporating traditional Hollywood genres within their narratives, thereby expanding the boundaries of traditional film realism. This group of commercially successful works include Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1947) by Luigi Zampa (1905–1991), a comical view of Germans, Italians, and Allied soldiers at war that cannot help but bring to mind the World War II TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes; Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948) by Alberto Lattuada (1913–2005), a daring film noir about the black market, prostitution, and American racism in postwar Livorno; Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) by Giuseppe De Santis, a vaguely Marxist film about proletarian class solidarity that gave birth to the phenomenon in Italy of the ‘sweater girl’ known as the maggiorata, making Silvana Mangano (1930–1989) an overnight sensation; and Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950) by Pietro Germi (1914–1974), a film about poor Sicilian miners migrating to France in search of work. These four films reflect a shift from the war themes of Rossellini to the interest in postwar reconstruction typical of De Sica’s best efforts, but they are even more important as an indication of how the Italian cinema moved gradually closer toward conventional American themes and film genres. Neorealist style in these films becomes more and more of a hybrid, combining some elements identified with neorealism with others taken from the commercial cinema of Hollywood or Rome.
“Some filmmakers sought to acquire a Neorealist look by shooting traditional romances and melodramas in regions that would supply picturesque local color. Other directors explored allegorical fantasy – such as in De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951) and Rossellini’s La macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine to Kill Bad People, 1952) – or historical spectacle (such as Visconti’s Senso). There also emerged rosy Neorealism, films that melded workingclass characters with 1930s-style populist comedy. Against this background, De Sica and Zavattini’s Umberto D. (1952), which depicted the lonely life of a retired man, could only strike officials as a dangerous throwback. The film begins with a scene of police breaking up a demonstration of old pensioners, and it ends with Umberto ‘s aborted suicide attempt”.[3] In a public letter to De Sica, Andreotti castigated him for his wretched service to his fatherland:
If it is true that evil can be fought by harshly spotlighting its most miserable aspects, it is also true that De Sica has rendered a poor service to his country if people throughout the world start thinking that Italy in the 20th century is the same as Umberto D.
Controversy over tax breaks and subsidies also clouded Pietro Germi’s semi-film noir about a troubled youth, Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, 1947), a situation that would repeat for Germi’s emigration drama Il cammino della speranza (The Road of Hope, 1950).
In spite of the fact that Italian intellectuals and social critics preferred the implicitly political and sometimes even revolutionary messages of the neorealist classics, the public preferred Hollywood works or Italian films made in the Hollywood spirit. While the key works of Italian neorealism helped to change the direction of the art form and remain today original contributions to film language, they were, with the exception of Rome, Open City, relatively unpopular in Italy. They were far more successful abroad and among filmmakers and critics. In addition, it became more and more difficult to make neorealist films, as political pressures to present a rosy view of Italy limited government financing from the ruling Christian Democratic party. Also, the Italian public was more interested in Italian films that employed, however obliquely, the cinematic codes of Hollywood or in the vast numbers of films imported from Hollywood itself. Besides resistance at the box office, where ordinary Italians preferred Hollywood works or Italian films with a Hollywood flavor, even the most famous neorealist directors soon became uncomfortable with the restrictive boundaries imposed upon their subject matter or style by well-meaning leftist critics, Italian intellectuals or social critics that films should always have a social or ideological purpose.
As mentioned before, in Italian cinematic history this transitional phase of development is often called the ‘crisis’ of neorealism. In retrospect, it was the critics who were suffering an intellectual crisis; during this period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Italian cinema was evolving naturally toward a film language concerned more with psychological problems and a visual style no longer defined solely by the use of nonprofessionals, on-location shooting, and documentary effects. Three early films by Michelangelo Antonioni ( 1912-2007)), Fellini, and Rossellini are crucial to this development. Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950), Antonioni’s first feature film, is a film noir in which the director’s distinctive photographic signature is already evident, with its characteristic long shots, tracks, and pans following the actors, and modernist editing techniques that attempt to reflect the rhythm of daily life. Fellini’s La Strada (1954), awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, is a poetic parable that explores a particular Fellinian mythology concerned with spiritual poverty and the necessity for grace or salvation (defined in a strictly secular sense). Rossellini’s ‘cinema of the reconstruction’ in Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy, 1954), starring Ingrid Bergman, marks his move away from the problems of the working class or the partisan experience to explore psychological problems, middle-class protagonists, and a more complex camera style not unlike that developed by Antonioni.
“Italian neorealism also had a worldwide impact as a model for an oppositional cinema against the Hollywood commercial cinema. The working methods of neorealism offered a way to produce films without large financial resources. The stories of common men, often played by nonprofessional actors, inspired filmmakers in Europe such as the directors of the French New Wave school of the late 1950s and early 1960s championed by critic André Bazin, who were heavily influenced by Rossellini’s Paisan”.[2] Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer embraced neorealism as proof that filmmaking could be possible without a huge industrial structure behind it and that filmmakers could be as creative as novelists. In particular, they appreciated the psychological move beyond neorealist themes in the works of Antonioni and Rossellini. “Neorealism’s influence can also be seen in the Cinema Novo of Brazil, the Free Cinema of Britain, the Nova Vlna of Czechoslovakia, the Third Cinema of Argentina, in Egyptian neorealism, the Mexican films of Bunñel such as Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones, 1950), and even to the present day in the films from the emerging cinemas in countries with extremely strict censorship codes, for example, turn of the millennium Iran, or whenever a film/television serial is made based upon simple production values that attempt an objective depiction of everyday existence”.[2] Even in Hollywood in the immediate postwar period, such important works as Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) and Edward Dmytryk’s Give Us This Day (1949) aka Christ in Concrete show the direct influence of neorealism’s preference for authentic locations within the American tradition of film noir.
Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950)
Most importantly, however, a second generation of Italian directors reacted directly to the model of the neorealist cinema. The early films of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940), Marco Bellocchio (b. 1939), Paolo (b. 1931) and Vittorio (b. 1929) Taviani, and Ermanno Olmi (b. 1931), particularly those shot in black and white, returned in some measure to the conventions of documentary photography, nonprofessional actors, authentic locations, and social themes. But this second generation also combined lessons from their neorealist predecessors with very different ideas taken from the French New Wave, and they were far more committed (with the exception of Olmi) to an aggressively Marxist worldview. Olmi continued to be true to the neorealist preference for nonprofessional actors in such important works as Il posto (The Job, 1961), I fidanzati (The Fiancees, 1963), L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, 1978), and Il mestiere delle armi (Profession of Arms, 2001). The neorealist heritage may still be detected, with a postmodern twist, in the cinema of Nanni Moretti (b. 1953), such as Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993) and the more recent La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001).
The last word on this goes to Fellini. He agreed in principle, he said, with the neo-realist idea of taking films from life but he redefined it for himself as “looking at reality with an honest eye – but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him.” Fellini taps into the essence of neo-realism, the reason the films of that particular era still appeal and the reason they continue to inspire: they address the human condition which, despite technological advances and special effects, remains very much what it was when these filmmakers took to the streets and captured what surrounded them.
Cinema Neorealismo Italiano 