Italian Neorealism

Italian Neo-realism Thesis

What?

It sought to deal realistically with the events leading up to the war and with their resulting social problems. Rooted in the 1920s, it was similar to the verismo ("realism") movement, from which it originated, but differed in that its upsurge resulted from the intense feelings inspired by fascist repression, the Resistance, and the war.

Italian aesthetic movement that flourished especially after World War II.

Neorealism in film embraced a documentary-like objectivity; actors were often amatuers, and the action centred on commonplace situations. Often crudely and hastily made, Neorealist productions stood in stark contrast to traditional escapist feature films.

It must be said that neorealist style, like most styles, does not have an inherent political message. The most common attribute of neorealism is location shooting and the dubbing of dialogue. The dubbing allowed for filmmakers to move in a more open miss-en-scene. Principal characters would be portrayed mostly by trained actors while supporting members (and sometimes principals) would be non-actors. The idea was to create a greater sense of realism through the use of real people rather than all seasoned actors. The rigidity of non-actors gave the scenes more authentic power. This sense of realism made Italian neorealism more than an artistic stance, it came to embody an attitude toward life.

The Bicycle Thief stands alongside Rossellini's Rome, Open City as a neorealist achievement. It was, however, not without its own controversy. The film offered no slick solutions and so fell between the firing lines of the country's ideological debate--to conservatives it was impermissible to show society's flaws so brazenly, to the left, it lacked analysis and a clear agenda for social change. De Sica says to us though, "My films are a struggle against the absence of human solidarity. . .against the indifference of society towards suffering. They are a word in favor of the poor and unhappy."

Italian Neorealism ended in 1948. Liberal and left wing parties wee defeated in the polls. Levels of income were surpassing prewar levels, most Italians liked American cinema and the vision of a desolate, poverty-stricken country outraged politicians anxious for democracy and prosperity.

Despite its lack of organization and relatively short lifespan, the Italian neorealist movement deeply influenced directors and film traditions around the world. This collection examines the impact of Italian neorealism beyond the period of 1945-1952, the years conventionally connected to the movement, and beyond the postwar Italian film industry where the movement originated.

Providing a refreshing aesthetic and ideological contrast to mainstream Hollywood films, neorealist filmmakers demonstrated not only how an engaging narrative technique could be brought to bear upon social issues, but how cinema could shape and redefine national identity. The fourteen essays in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema consider films from Italy, India, Brazil, Africa, the Czech Republic, postwar Germany, Hong Kong, the United States, and Great Britain. Each essay explores neorealism's complex relationship to a different national film tradition, style, or historical period, illustrating the profound impact of neorealism and the ways that it continues to complicate the relationship between ideas of nation, national cinema, and national identity.

n the immediate postwar period, Neorealism shouldered a central role in attempting to fashion the new Italian nation. From this perspective the great neorealist achievement of Roma cittÐo aperta (Italy 1945) was precisely the creation and projection of an alternate imagined community to the (equally media-constructed) nation or imagined community of fascist construction. A year later PaisÐo (Italy 1946) took the process of nation-building further by not only attempting to unite different regional communities together in its six different episodes but also explicitly bringing spaces together in the map of the Italian peninsula which gradually becomes uniformly white as the forces of liberation are shown moving upwards along the Italian boot. It's significant, suggests Restivo in an aside, that Rossellini doesn't end up showing the Italian boot completely whitened by the movement of liberation but rather allows a "stain"to remain in the northeastern sector, approximately at the place of SalÑ‚ (Italy/France, 1975).

Nevertheless, as is well-known, Neorealism itself failed and, in a sense,