Italian Neorealism

Italian Neorealism (1945-54): Defining Traits and Principles

A socially committed, realist cinema that developed in Italy right after WWII, generally recognized by the following characteristics:

• Preference for actual locations rather than studio sets

• Use of non-professional actors• Use of documentary-style cinematography

• Focus on lower echelons of the class structure• Focus on quotidian and commonplace events• Focus on current events and/or the recent past• Looser, more episodic plots • Moral consciousness stemming from a leftist

humanism• Commitment to refashioning and exploring an

Italian national identity in the wake of the war

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Terra trema (Visconti, 1948)

Problems of Definition

• Neorealism not altogether new – the experimental crossing of fiction and documentary can be traced to wartime propaganda films commissioned by Mussolini (where some of the neorealists got their start as filmmakers)

• Very few of the films in the canon of neorealism (see p. 331 in Thompson and Bordwell) have all of these distinguishing traits

• Neorealism a hybrid form – it combines several existing film genres and traditions, including popular genres such as the melodrama and film noir

• Be careful not to reduce neorealism to a checklist of technical traits: those traits are necessary but not always sufficient; think of them as imperfect markers; they let you start talking about neorealism but they shouldn’t be a basis for a conclusion.

• Be mindful that neorealism doesn’t imply the absence of style and artifice.

Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema” (1953)  A radical reconsideration of possible subject matter for a dramatic film  “Social attention,” sustained and acute emphasis on “things as they are,” preserved in their actual duration – neorealism as “minute, unrelenting and patient search” (53) Focus on contemporary happenings, “today, today, today” (57) Humanist observation informed by a (Christ-like) moral consciousness (56)  A cinema of ordinary people and ordinary, day-to-day events rather than traditional heroes. “Every moment is infinitely rich … Excavate, and every little fact is revealed as a mine” (58).

A cinema in diametric opposition to Hollywood spectacle and the capitalist ideology that imbues it (51-2)

Zavattini offers a prescriptive theory of neorealism as a mode of observation in which moral responsibility and aesthetic innovation go hand in hand.  

André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène” (1951)  Rossellini’s neorealism as a “way of seeing”; De Sica’s, by contrast, as a “way of feeling” (62) The originality of neorealism owes to its “never making reality the servant of some a priori point of view” (64) An anti-spectacular cinema comprised of natural settings, untrained actors, and respect for events in their real-time unfolding (65) An ontological position that does not reduce to a “recipe” of certain technical characteristics (66) Self-effacement: the mise en scène “aims at negating itself,” at making itself transparent to “the reality it reveals” (68)  “Ontological ambiguity of reality” – nothing is accorded meaning in advance by the filmmaker (68)    

André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène” (1951)  Things are there, why manipulate them? – things of the world allowed to exist for their own sakes (69) All characters are, at some level, “sympathetic” – no absolute separation of heroes and villains (69)  Love and affection toward characters but devoid of pity, which would rob them of their dignity (70) Love that “scales the walls and penetrates the stronghold of ideologies and social theory” (71)