Directory of World Cinema: Italy

Louis Bayman

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781841504001
• eBook ISBN: 9781841505350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

 

While Italian cinema has long been popular with international audiences, a surprising unfamiliarity remains regarding the rich traditions from which its most fascinating moments arose. Directory of World Cinema: Italy aims to offer a wide film and cultural context for Italian cinema's key aspects, from political radicalism to opera, from the art house to popular cinema. Essays by leading academics about prominent genres, directors, and themes provide insight into the cinema of Italy and are bolstered by reviews of significant titles. From the silent spectacle to the giallo, the spaghetti western to the neorealist masterworks of Rossellini, this book offers a comprehensive historical sweep of Italian cinema that will appeal to film scholars and cinephiles alike.

NEOREALISM

Bitter Rice/Riso amaro, Lux/De Laurentiis.

There are two political statements which demarcate the origin and closure of the initial era of neorealism. The first is of Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il duce, storming out of a screening of the poverty-ridden crime-drama of Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943) with the insistence that ‘This is not Italy!’ The other was made by the Christian Democrat MP Giulio Andreotti in a letter to film-maker Vittorio De Sica. In defending his censorship laws that were killing off the movement’s critical edge, Andreotti claimed that De Sica had ‘rendered a poor service to his country if people throughout the world start thinking that Italy in the twentieth century is the same as [his 1952 film] Umberto D.’

The former incident occurs during the war and Fascist dictatorship. The latter is a product of the post-war Christian Democrat restabilization of Italy, and after two years of military occupation, the Partisans’ anti-Fascist struggle and the liberation of the country, and during the social and economic problems of post-war reconstruction. If perhaps apocryphal, the Mussolini story is at least well invented for, together, the quotes place neorealism as a political challenge to the Italian social system whether dictatorial or democratic. They indicate that at stake was a battle over the role of national culture itself in defining Italy.

Although they had to gain success at international film festivals first, Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), about a Communist and a Catholic who join the Partisan struggle to rid Rome of the Nazis, and Sciuscià/Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946), about two shoeshine boys struggling unsuccessfully against poverty and imprisonment, were critical sensations. They heralded a period of film-making that was opposed to the fascist rhetoric of national wellbeing, and different from the studio-bound conventions of classical cinema.

What most made neorealism seem like a revolutionary change in cinema was the seriousness with which it took the aim to record real life. Neorealist films were set on location in the streets and fields where its protagonists lived and worked, and often used non-professional actors speaking in dialect. Neorealism’s mimetic realism, seeking to look like the actual world from which its stories were drawn, was developed through prominent moments of long takes, deep focus, and episodic digressions which seemed to record an environment which existed before, and continued beyond, any film-maker’s attempt to capture it.

The reason for this urge to document reality can be found in an insistence during the neorealist period that cinema mattered, both artistically and socially. Neorealist film-makers sought to discover the authentic Italy, to be found in the inclusion of real locations and of characters who were weakened and uncertain. Authenticity was guaranteed by a direct relationship to an environment either through the physical labour of the worker, the economic dependence of women, children and the unemployed, or the hand-to-mouth existence of the petty criminal. The image of an authentic, suffering Italy also allowed a reconstruction of the national image into that of a working and peasant population pre-existing and opposing Fascism and its rhetorical bombast. In keeping with its influence from verismo, the turn-of-the-century Italian variant of naturalism, neorealism offered an unsentimentalized look at the locales, habits, rituals, song, and entertainments that characterize popular life. Anticipating the later influence of Marxist literary critic György Lukács in Italian cinema, it offered protagonists on whom historical and political questions centre and form dramatic conflicts.

While techniques such as location shooting and even an interest in the ordinary person from the street were not as new to cinema as mythology surrounding neorealism would have it, freshness lay in the adoption of newspaper values of chronicling and campaigning on matters of immediate public interest. Titles such as Roma città aperta or Roma, ore 11/Rome 11:00 (Giuseppe De Santis, 1952), precisely designating time and place, indicate dramatizations of real events; more common were tales of unemployment and banditry, of poor housing and official neglect, that could make up an item in any hypothetical newspaper. For principal neorealist theorist Cesare Zavattini, scriptwriter for De Sica’s principal neorealist films amongst many others, events were sought that might not even be important enough to fill a few lines in a newspaper, but which highlighted the poverty and social relations that could give small events – such as the simple theft of a bicycle in Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948) – vital importance.

Zavattini names this dramatic strategy pedinamento, or shadowing, discarding dramatic action to unobtrusively follow small incidents. Pedinamento was exemplified in Umberto D in a famous scene that lingers on the maid making coffee – the sequence has no dramatic importance, but instead refocuses attention on what is everyday in life.

Neorealism thus mattered not only in debate over Italy’s post-war future but also because it enabled opportunities to explore the very relationship of cinema to reality. For French critic André Bazin, what was important was how cinema conveys the experience of reality: marked by ambiguity, continuity and spontaneity, neorealism’s breakthrough was its emphasis on the process of revelation. Although a film such as Stromboli, terra di Dio/Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950) is not directly concerned with immediate social issues, it is constituted by a series of revelations made to its protagonist, and therefore the audience: the way of life of Sicilian fishermen, a volcanic and apparently pre-historic landscape, and a spiritual awakening. The revelation of previously unseen aspects of the world is found in the importance in neorealism of an often haphazard and bewildered journey: a soldier returning to Turin from a POW camp to his bombed-out home in Il bandito/The Bandit (Alberto Lattuada, 1946); a man and his son in search of a stolen bike through Rome in Ladri di biciclette; Sicilian immigrants in search of work northwards through the peninsula in Il cammino della speranza/Path of Hope (Pietro Germi, 1950), for example.

In a later development of Bazin’s phenomenological interest in the experience of reality that cinema offers, Gilles Deleuze saw neorealism as marked by a new perception of time and movement which was disoriented and uncertain in the wake of the horror of wartime destruction. Such critical theory positions neorealism decisively within European art cinema, which was, however, to develop by questioning the very basis of neorealism: the ability of cinema to capture reality at all. The French New Wave and Italian film-makers like Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini (see Accattone [1961] review below) were driven by a politicized will to debunk the claim that artworks objectively present reality; film is not a reflection of the world but a recreation and construction of the illusion of a world.

Historically, debate over neorealism has been structured by the perception of a series of overlapping failures: a failure to succeed in delivering unmediated truth, or to reach a popular audience or, alternatively, a failure of subsequent Italian film culture to live up to the cinematic high-point represented by neorealism. Such pessimism is perhaps already the predominant mood within neorealist films themselves (even the Communist-made Caccia tragica/Tragic Pursuit [Giuseppe De Santis, 1947] places its victory for the collective at the film’s end, concentrating for the duration of the narrative on the personal misfortunes of its proletarian protagonists). The focus in neorealism is primarily on suffering and dramatic defeats (also when, as with Roma città aperta, the historical referent – the Partisan struggle – was one of eventual victory). Neorealism’s focus on suffering can be seen as much as a Catholic lamentation for the ills of the world as a Marxist exhortation to social change.

And so, finally, one can ask whether neorealism, its pitying gaze frequently rejecting popular pleasures, mattered to the masses it aimed to represent. Yet the alleged unpopularity of neorealism is itself a critical construct, with the commercial failures of La terra trema/The Earth Trembles (Luchino Visconti, 1948) and Umberto D taken as emblematic rather than the popular successes of Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1948) or Vivere in pace/To Live in Peace (Luigi Zampa, 1947). Suggestion that such works gained their popularity by an impure or traitorous contamination of neorea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction by the Editor
• Film of the Year I Io sono I’amore
• Film of the Year II Le quattro volte
• Industry Spotlight Valerio Jalongo Interview
• Cultural Crossover Opera and Cinema
• Directors Federico Fellini Nanni Moretti
• Silent Cinema Essay Reviews
• Neorealism Essay Reviews
• Melodrama Essay Reviews
• Comedy Essay Reviews
• Giallo Essay Reviews
• Gothic Horror Essay Reviews
• Peplum Essay Reviews
• Spaghetti Western Essay Reviews
• Political Cinema Essay Reviews
• Contemporary Cinema Essay Reviews
• Recommended Reading
• Online Resources
• Test Your Knowledge
• Notes on Contributors
• Filmography