What is Italian Neorealism?

The origins of Italian Neorealism

After the dramatic and sharp-edged German expressionist movement, and before the choppy and stylish French new wave, a film movement in Italy was emerging of comparable vision and importance. 

Towards the end of World War II, while Mussolini’s government was falling, mainstream Italian cinema still predominantly reflected the values of his fascist regime. Indeed, Mussolini embraced cinema as a tool for propaganda, opening the largest film studio in Europe in 1937: Cinecittà studios. Largely borrowed from Hollywood studio productions, the films that were made there were “dominated”, as Mark Shiel explains,

One of these popular genres was called “white telephone films”, describing comedies that promoted material wealth, family life, tradition, and obedience (Shiel, 2006). But a white telephone was a luxury item unavailable to the average working-class Italian, and these glossy studio productions by the same name did not reflect what life was like in Italy after the Second World War.

Much like the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism was first theoretically developed in film journals, with the movement’s primary contributors starting out as film critics. It was in an October 1941 publication of the journal titled Cinema, that ‘Truth and Poetry: Verga and Italian Cinema’, by critic and politician Mario Alicata and artist Giuseppe De Santis, appeared. In it, they described their commitment to a cinema that showed real people, places, and conditions of Italy at the time. Portrayals of this sort were inspired by nineteenth century realist literature, particularly writer Giovanni Verga. Verga was known for his naturalist depictions of Sicilian life and landscape, documenting misfortune, disease, relationships, and the struggles of the working classes. Based on this style and subject matter, Alicata and De Santis hoped that a post-fascist, new realist cinema would overthrow the elitism of popular Italian studio films.

It was not until several years later that this neorealist cinema started to formally emerge. On top of Alicata and De Santis’s suggestion of a new purpose for Italian cinema, Cinecittà studios was bombed by allied forces in the last years of the war, freeing cinema from the control of the state-funded studio system. Beginning with Luchino Visconti’s Obsession (1943), Italian neorealism was born. This was followed by films like Roberto Rossellini’s The Man with the Cross (1943), Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945), Shoeshine (De Sica, 1946), and The Earth Trembles (1948, Visconti). These examples display the key characteristics of Italian neorealism. Shot on location, often using amateur actors and real locals as extras, Italian neorealist films tell working-class stories, featuring struggling characters and children, to critique the injustices of a hierarchical social system.

Italian neorealism prioritizes stories that represent the every-day experiences of the average Italian with both compassion and cynicism, expressed in a way that made the action, characters, and settings feel significantly more real, relevant, and democratic than those previous films made at Cinecittà. As Simonetta Milli Konewko puts it in Neorealism and the ‘New’ Italy, “Neorealism made it possible to express emotions, realities, and problems previously camouflaged by the Fascists” (2016). This article will explore some of the ways in which Italian Neorealism achieved this effect, providing a deeper understanding of one of the most influential film movements in cinema’s young history.

Italian Neorealist characteristics and examples

Italian neorealism cinema has a recognizable set of key characteristics that include:

• On-location shooting
• Amateur actors
• Working-class narratives
• Explorations of family
• Stories featuring children
• Derelict, war-torn settings

The first piece of Italian neorealist cinema is widely accepted to be Visconti’s Obsession (1943). Notable for its creation under a fascist government, Visconti was working around strict restrictions and censorship. Originally, Visconti had sought to make a film based on a novel by Verga, but it was rejected. So instead, he made Obsession, an adaptation of the 1934 novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. Obsession follows a handsome young traveler, Gino (Massimo Girotti) who becomes involved with the wife of a business owner. The two have an affair, but she is reluctant to leave her husband and forgo financial security, so they conspire to murder him.  At the end of the film, Gino and his new love flee the police for their crime - a chase that ends her life. 

The story, while exposing the trappings of material wealth, is significantly more glamorous and grander than the neorealist films that followed, however early manifestations of the developing realist approach can be observed in the visual style. Obsession was shot on location, with an emphasis on the vast landscape of rural Italy. This landscape is recumbent and barren, rather than lush and romantic. Visconti’s extensive use of long and medium shots makes the characters that occupy this space feel small. Inside the small road-side tavern, owned by the man Gino murders, the opposite effect is at play. The space is cramped and cluttered, and the characters move through the messy kitchen strewn with half-eaten plates of food, empty glasses, and paper bags. This creates the sense that we are entering the real and intimate space of the characters. Between the representation of the large outside space and small, dark interior, Obsession depicts a bleak reality, untouched by the polish and glamor of studio productions.

This important characteristic of Italian neorealism – an approach to space that feels naturalistic – persists in what is perhaps one of the most famous pieces of neorealist cinema: Vittorio De Sica’s 1945 Bicycle Thieves. Bicycle Thieves is a quintessential example of the way that the characters and world are portrayed in neorealism. The film opens with establishing wide-shots of a derelict post-war Rome and a rabble of out-of-work men, waiting to be assigned jobs. Protagonist Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), who is looking to support his young family, gets offered work posting advertisement bills, a job that requires a bicycle. But his first day on the job, his bicycle is stolen. Antonio and his young son, Bruno, pursue the thief with little avail. At the end of the film, once Antonio has lost all hope, he sees an unattended bicycle. As Bruno watches, Antonio makes an attempt to steal it but is chased by an angry group of men. The men pull Antonio off the bike and are ready to take him to the police, until they see Bruno’s distress and take pity on the two, letting Antonio go free.

The representations at work in Bicycle Thieves are typical of neorealist cinema. The narrative is minimalist and slow-paced and “without the dramatic urgency or storytelling efficiency of classical cinema, especially classical Hollywood” (Shiel, 2006). This realism extends to the settings of the film where the urban landscape is piled with rubble and ruins, eliminating any romanticization of post-war Italy. The characters, too, are unglamorous and undone as they struggle to make ends meet. This was in clear contrast to the style of the studio productions that were popular during the war. This contrast can be observed in the following scene:

This clip features many key characteristics of Italian neorealism. The on-location shooting, the spatial depth of these shots, and the real people that populate the streets give the film almost a documentary visual style at moments. This is balanced by the subtle but steady movement of both the camera and the narrative that signals a more poetic and allegorical purpose to the film. In this clip, we see Antonio laying a poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), a contemporary piece of film noir cinema. Film noir was a popular Hollywood genre known for its glamorous and opulent characters and carefully constructed cinematic world. This was at odds with the project of neorealist cinema that strove to expose the desolate social and economic state of Italian life. The war-torn urban wasteland, shown through wide shots with deep depth of field, serves as a poetic representation of character psychology: the trauma of the war, the destruction of fascism, the desperation and marginalization of a life of poverty. The way in which these Italian neorealist devices set the movement apart from the Hollywood genres of the time is distinctly laid out in the visual contrast between the glamorous and sexualized Gilda and post-war, working-class Rome.

The portrayal of children has a certain significance in neoromanticism, particularly in the work of De Sica, as evidence in Bicycle Thieves, but also The Children Are Watching Us(De Sica, 1943)and Shoeshine (De Sica, 1946). As Hilary Neroni describes in Realist Film Theory and Bicycle Thieves:

Children in neorealist films are often trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they have no means of escape, but they can also offer the potential for redemption and a quiet optimism for the future. In Bicycle Thieves, it is compassion for Bruno’s innocence, his future, that compels the men to release Antonio without consequence. This suggests elements of hope amongst the bleak portrayal of contemporary life.

The formal approach of neorealism was one that prioritized place, character and narrative rather than stylized filmic devices. The set-up and movement of the camera, the cuts and editing, do not draw attention to themselves, providing a naturalized vision of the film’s action. This more fully immerses the viewer into the world on screen, rendering the melancholy of the character’s and their way of life all the more impactful.

Filmic influences of Neorealism

Aside from the political leanings of a post-fascist Italy that gave rise to Italian neorealism, there are several artistic influences that inspired the movement’s unique aesthetic. One such influence was French poetic realism which launched the careers of figures like Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo and Marcel Carné. As Shiel explains:

This inspiration stretched as far as providing work opportunities for many budding neorealist filmmakers. Michelangelo Antonioni assisted Carné on his 1942 film Les Visiteurs du Soir and Visconti worked as assistant to Renoir in 1936, credited as a set-dresser on his short film, A Day in the Country (1946). Like the neorealist movement to come, these directors focused on the stories of marginalized characters with the same unflinching commitment to real-world conditions. These films, particularly those of Renoir, were very successful in Italy. While poetic realism presented a closer depiction of reality than the Hollywood-inspired genres like the “white telephone films”, it was nonetheless bound by the French studio system and so did not strive to show real places and people (Shiel, 2006). Hence, poetic realism reconstructed a working-class reality but in a stylized way that was less evocative of the documentary aesthetic of those realist movements to come. Its attention to emotion and character study, and the leftist democratization of cinema that this style represented, made it a highly influential movement for Italian neorealist filmmakers, providing them with both inspiration and filmmaking experience.  

Other moments in film history that can be traced in the development of Italian neorealism is the 1920s Soviet montage cinema. Despite the two movement’s disparate editing styles, Soviet montage films were equally concerned with the representation of everyday urban life, something that neorealism became known for. The parallels between the Russian civil war and the circumstances of neorealism become clear in both movement’s concern with fraught economic and political conditions. Shiel provides proof that the subject matter of Soviet cinema would have been known to the neorealist filmmakers, asserting,

More speculative theories of the precursors to Italian Neorealism suggest that 1930s Japanese cinema may have impacted the aesthetic and subject matter of neorealist cinema. For example, the 1935 silent film by Yasujirō Ozu,An Inn in Tokyo, follows an out-of-work father and his two sons as they wander industrial Tokyo in search of a job. The low-budget, documentary aesthetic of the film, its bitter but sentimental subject matter and the prominence of children are all characteristics of Italian neorealism. Here is a clip from An Inn In Tokyo that, compared to examples like The Bicycle Thieves, might reveal consistency of form and storytelling:

Despite the obvious similarities (and the assertive title of this video), it’s unclear whether the young neorealist filmmakers in Italy would have been aware of such films, but their rich film education allows us to hypothesize on the wealth of neorealist influences. As Shiel points out:

The legacy of Italian Neorealism

It may be challenging to imagine how inventive the visual style of Italian neorealism, its narrative devices and subject matter, really was. It was one of several historical appeals to cinema’s capacity to reveal and disseminate the truth, one that popularized on-location shooting and casts of non-professional actors, characteristics that have become commonplace in contemporary and arthouse cinema. Evidence of the neorealist style can be found in films like Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020) - about a woman who loses everything in the recession and travels the U.S. in a van - or The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017) - a story that explores the life of a young, struggling mother living out of a hotel room through the eyes of her six-year-old daughter. In this clip of The Florida Project, we can see the way that the naturalist acting, the long, deep shots, and the desolate sense of space act upon the influences of Italian Neorealism:

While some critics treat Italian neorealism as a ‘short-term phenomenon’ - an ‘event rather than a process’ concluding a mere decade before it started - others consider it to be embedded in a history of Italian and realist cinema, with a blurry sense of beginning and end. In Neorealist Film Culture, Francesco Pitassio eludes to this more expansive notion of Italian neorealism, writing:

Whether we choose to see Italian neorealism as a mere moment in film’s historical development or a form of cinematic expression that is inextricable from the filmic development it is a part of, its impact on the artform was significant, inspiring such auteurs from Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, to the likes of Ken Loach and Martin Scorsese.

Further Italian Neorealism reading on Perlego 

Bondanella, P. and Pacchioni, F. (2017) A History of Italian Cinema. 1st edn. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/499983/a-history-of-italian-cinema-pdf

Gelley, O. (2012) Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism. 1st edn. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1685236/stardom-and-the-aesthetics-of-neorealism-ingrid-bergman-in-rossellinis-italy-pdf

Gennari, D. T. (2011) Post-War Italian Cinema. 1st edn. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1686739/postwar-italian-cinema-american-intervention-vatican-interests-pdf

Gundle, S. (2019) Fame Amid the Ruins. 1st edn. Berghahn Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2604283/fame-amid-the-ruins-italian-film-stardom-in-the-age-of-neorealism-pdf 

Marcus, M. (2020) Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1377393/italian-film-in-the-light-of-neorealism-pdf 

Reich, J. and Garofalo, P. (2002) Re-viewing Fascism. Indiana University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/569074/reviewing-fascism-italian-cinema-19221943-pdf

Bibliography

Konewko, S. M. (2016) Neorealism and the ‘New’ Italy. Palgrave Macmillan

US. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3487874/neorealism-and-the-new-italy-compassion-in-the-development-of-italian-identity-pdf

Neroni, H. (2023) Realist Film Theory and Bicycle Thieves. 1st edn. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3883294/realist-film-theory-and-bicycle-thieves-pdf 

Pitassio, F. (2019) Neorealist Film Culture, 1945-1954. 1st edn. Amsterdam University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1458677/neorealist-film-culture-19451954-rome-open-cinema-pdf 

Shiel, M. (2006) Italian Neorealism. Columbia University Press. Available at:https://www.perlego.com/book/775524/italian-neorealism-rebuilding-the-cinematic-city-pdf