Cinema of
Reality
"This is the way things are." — Roberto Rossellini
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About Italian Neorealism Cinema
Before the indies and even before the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism staked out new cinematic territory. One of those blanket terms that mean all things to all people, neo-realism has few absolutes, though there are elements that set the Italian version distinctly apart.
Screenwriter and poet Cesare Zavattini wrote an actual manifesto to guide these films, but their creation was just as much a result of timing, chance and fluke. Unquestionably, their greatest single influence was the anti-Fascism that marked World War II's immediate postwar period. Key elements are an emphasis on real lives (close to but not quite documentary style), an entirely or largely non-professional cast, and a focus on collectivity rather than the individual. Solidarity is important, along with an implicit criticism of the status quo. Plot and story come about organically from these episodes and often turn on quite tiny moments.
Cinematically, neo-realism pushed filmmakers out of the studio and on to the streets, the camera freed-up and more vernacular, the emphasis away from fantasy and towards reality. Despite the rather short run - 1943 to 1952 - the heavyweight films of the period and the principles that guided them put Italian cinema on the map at the time and continue to shape contemporary global filmmaking.
Origins
A little history goes a long way toward understanding Italian neorealism. By the outbreak of World War II, the country had been under Benito Mussolini's hefty thumb 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."
Whether they were being shown the glories of their Roman past, their fascist future or ofl'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 beingTreno popolare (1933) by Rafaello Matarazzo and, paradoxically, in documentaries produced by LUCE institute, under complete control of the regime.
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's1860 (1934) influenced neo-realism, but the movement was to a great extent a matter of 1940s practicalities: with Cinécittà (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.
So what is neo-realism? André Bazin called it a cinema of "fact" and "reconstituted reportage," 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 neighbourhoods, the stories focus on everyday people, often children, with an emphasis on the unexceptional routines of ordinary life.
Cesare Zavattini "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."
Cesare Zavattini : Some Ideas on the Cinema >>> |
Historical Timeline
The Precursor
The Breakthrough
The Masterpiece
The Andreotti Law
The Sunset
It's no accident that Michael Tolkin chose neo-realism's classic Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) to rock his studio exec's world in The Player. Though it's in some ways anti-Hollywood, neo-realism drew a great deal from American noir writing and films. Luchino Visconti based Ossessione (Obsession, 1942) on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti used long takes and complex shots to convey the dismal and ridiculous world of the three protagonists, the lovers (played by Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai) and the husband they bump off (played by Juan De Landa). Visconti's neo-realism heightens the interplay between characters and surroundings, the bleak, unforgiving interiors and street shots reflective of the lousy hand these no-hopers have been dealt.
Visconti described his own style as "anthropomorphic cinema," declaring, "I could make a film in front of a wall if I knew how to find the data of man's true humanity and how to express it." Although Mussolini himself approved of the film, his son Vittorio (who ran the film journal Cinema) had a fit about its bleak Italian landscapes, the natural light, and all the shooting on location in the Po Valley.
Roberto Rossellini's Roma: città aperta (Romas Open City, 1946) shows most clearly neo-realism's link with the Resistance movement. Set during the Nazi occupation of Rome, it mines the tensions of the foreign presence and the divisions among those who abetted and those who opposed. Made under duress (black market film stock, little studio shooting, rushes unexamined, sound synchronized in post-production, and, no surprise, a tiny budget), Open City has an eyewitness immediacy tempered with operatic emotion. Pragmatic realities drove the film as much as the script, co-written by Sergio Amedei and Federico Fellini.
The hybrid of melodrama and actual footage was the result of Rossellini's populist, episodic approach, the story told in bursts, intense and unsparing details of ordinary lives undone by the trauma of occupation. Veracity rather than comfort informed the narrative. As the Gestapo search for and find a key member of the Resistance, Rossellini keeps his primary focus on Pina (Anna Magnani), engaged to marry an unassuming but Partisan typesetter by whom she is already pregnant. Open City may be most cited for two unforgettable scenes - a torture scene, to which Reservoir Dogs's lopped-ear scene bears a marked resemblance; and a sudden and dramatic death scene, a final posture evocative of painterly renditions of Christian martyrs. It also emphasizes the futility of war, its senselessness, a theme Rossellini struck throughout his war trilogy.
In Paisà (Paisan, 1946), Rossellini directly engaged the effects of the American presence in Italy, complicated by the Yankee shift from enemy to ally. In each of the six episodes, he examines the expectations and disappointments inherent in the crossing of two such different cultures and the inevitable - sometimes fatal - misapprehensions. Newsreel footage separates the vignettes and, throughout, Rossellini plays with the stereotypical images held by each side, his overall theme being that war is an equal-opportunity brutalizer.
Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947) has a more personal feeling, influenced, no doubt, by the death of Rossellini's eldest son in 1946. Set in the rubble of Berlin, the film has a young protagonist (rare for Rossellini), a 15-year-old who lives with his father and sister, who falls under the spell of a pedophile, eeking cash from the sale of this scammer's Third Reich memorabilia. Potent and unbearable images make the desperation of the city clear; early on, for example, a horse lies dead in the street, hit perhaps by a tram, as people matter-of-factly carve-and-carry its meat away.
Corrupted on all sides, the boy eventually resorts to the most desperate of measures.
As in Obsession, the cityscape is here used to reflect the anomie and disconnection. Open City ends horribly but with a glimmer of hope as young children witness an execution yet, together, return to the city; in Germany Year Zero, life is as stony as the razed city. It completes Rossellini's World War II trilogy, strikingly ending his work from the German perspective, the devastations occasioned by Third Reich policies no easier on its own people.
La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) took Luchino Visconti to Aci Trezza on Sicily. Far more documentary in style than the other neorealist films, The Earth Trembles relies on a completely nonprofessional cast. Visconti explained the day's shooting to the villagers and used ambient sound, allowing the people to speak their dialect (necessitating subtitles even for the rest of Italy).
The film is loosely based on Giovanni Verga's novel, I Malavoglia (The House of the Medlar Tree). When an island family risks their savings to buy a boat and fish for themselves, they struggle to pay it off, fishing in bad weather until a storm destroys their boat. Classically organized - Visconti was a veteran of opera - the film allowed him to linger on a cyclical life on the verge of disappearance (Orson Welles once noted that Visconti photographed fishermen as if they were Vogue models.) He used deep focus shots, lighting only the nighttime fishing scenes, showing their lives as an organic whole, with each aspect accorded value.
The extremely spare soundtrack comprises few words, several silences, sometimes only the peal of bells and little music. And yet there's a timeless and deeply mythic quality to the film, its emphasis on the honor and dignity that had been attached to a life earned from the unpredictable sea.
Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) begins outside Rome, in a kind of idyll of the countryside. Two shoeshine boys set aside what they've earned to buy a horse. Back in the narrow and unforgiving streets of Rome, they're roped into a blackmarket deal that goes sour.
Nabbed by the authorities, they're sent to a juvenile prison, their friendship strained nearly to breaking. After an escape, one of them accidentally dies, his death blamed on his friend. De Sica kept his exposition short, detailing the boys' existences through carefully composed scenes such as their neighboring prison cells, each one headed for a different fate. Opening and closing with the horse.
De Sica shows the freedom that's denied these two boys. His use of nonprofessionals allowed him to draw natural, seemingly improvised performances from his actors and remain, in his term, "faithful to the character."
This is especially true of his next feature, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), the leading roles of father and son occupied by two nonprofessionals. (David O. Selznick was willing to back the film, but only with Cary Grant as lead, an offer De Sica fortunately had the confidence to refuse.) When the bicycle he needs to do his job is stolen, the young father and son scour Rome to find it; the father is finally driven to steal a ride of his own.
De Sica orchestrated the film carefully, shooting some scenes with multiple cameras and drawing attention to its existence as fiction, not a documentary. Bazin termed it the "only valid Communist film of the whole past decade" and the film was often seen as simply a criticism of working conditions in Italy at the time, when unemployment stood at 25 percent. But unlike the clearcut moralizing of Rossellini's films, De Sica's works focus on a humanist sense of individual and mass. Bicycle Thieves has a mythic feel, the father ultimately forced into thievery, each moral quandary no sooner solved than De Sica poses yet another, the father sympathetic but flawed.
Italian audiences hardly embraced these new films. To be shown their country in such stark terms made the majority very unhappy. It even became part of the law: the Andreotti Law (1949), named for its author Giullio Andreotti, offered subsidies for those who followed the neo-realist style in a manner "suitable... to the best interests of Italy," but with the proviso that they avoid the blemishes on Italian life.
Legislation had little immediate effect on what was made, though the stories began to reflect the scramble for work and stability that defined this period. Visconti's terrific Bellissima (1951) centers on a daughter and fanatic stage-mamma, the inimitable Magnani, eager to get her modestly talented daughter a spot in a movie. To her husband's dismay, she squeezes every extra penny into lessons and cosmetic improvements for the little girl. Ultimately, the mother all but puts herself on the market to get the recognition she's convinced will make life worth living.
Set in a working-class Roman neighborhood, Bellissima gives rare insight into how provincial big-city life could be, each neighborhood a virtual small town, the neighbors sometimes helpful, often petty and jealous of any advantage. Though not traditionally considered a neo-realist film, Bellissima did focus on people's lives in the wake of war, the sense of wanting to better oneself and the struggle to find a way out of the grind of poverty. It becomes yet more poignant in this context.
This sense of Rome as a small town is especially acute in Umberto D. (1951), which was De Sica's favorite film and is in many ways the masterpiece of neo-realism, an overall superb piece of work. The crisis-filled days of a pensioner, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti), and the complications of his relationship with his dog and a young maid in his apartment building become a study in the difficult drama that constitutes an ordinary life. As played by a dignified nonprofessional - a professor, who, in the event, was often subsequently taken for his character on the street - Umberto D. is stodgy, fussy, irritating and curiously sympathetic. Unlike other films of the era, this was shot nearly entirely in the Cinécittà studios.
The indignities of the family-less and indigent old-age are laid out with sensitivity but not sentimentality. Umberto is vulnerable and all but invisible, barely distinguishing himself in a crowd of protesting pensioners, desperately trying to maintain his independence and self-respect. There is no real plot other than the minuscule and life-shaping crises of late-life impoverishment. Even the end strikes a melancholy note of ambiguity.
Giuseppe De Santis's Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) was described at the time as the "last gasp of the neo-realist movement." Like Obsession, its strongest overt influences are American films - noir and westerns and even a hint of musicals). It introduced audiences to a smoldering Sylvana Mangano, who played a rice weeder. By the hundreds they descended on the Piemonte region in the postwar years and into the 1960s. The brutally exhausting work demanded precision, suited, as the voice-over states, to the delicate "hand that rocks the cradle or threads the needle." Mangano's characters long to go to America, where she's sure "everything is electric."
In Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), De Sica kept to neorealism's focus on the marginalized mass, but his approach marked a break with just about every other neo-realist premise.Miracle in Milan is a kind of neo-fantasy. He showed postwar conditions and real locations - in this case, the run-down outskirts of Milan - the dreariness leavened with make-believe. When his foster mother (Emma Grammatica) gives him a white dove, Toto (Francesco Golisano) can suddenly grant the wishes of his neighbors in the periferia or shantytown where they live. De Sica jettisoned chronological time, replacing logic with magic.
And yet, this has some of the grittiest urban landscapes of any of its contemporaries, the long shots of the shantytowns conveying a sense of how imprisoned the characters are. De Sica termed it a "fairy story and only intended as such," yet the film had the unintended effect of essentially signalling neo-realism's official end.
A Long Shadow
In general, people look backwards when talking about neorealism, acknowledging its roots, according it artifact status. But the films stand on their own even without the movement they've come to represent. More important, they pointed out new directions for filmmakers in Italy and elsewhere. Both Fellini and Antonioni worked on neo-realist films and even in Fellini's later, extremely fanciful work and Antonioni's brooding studies of men and women, there's a similar urge to document Italy's social realities.
Among the filmmakers influenced by Italian neo-realism are the French New Wave, Dogme 95 and, as Images writer Chris Norton points out, the Los Angeles School of Black Independent Filmmakers (known as the L.A. School). The latter include directors such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima and Julie Dash, all of whom have at some level addressed the working-class experience in America with methods borrowed or inspired by neo-realism.
Even such apparent non neo-realists as Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Gianni Amelio and Lina Wertmüller carry over the ideas of neo-realism with their emphasis on class conflicts (the eternal north/south tension) and use of non-professional actors, particularly children, to great effect.
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.
Megan Ratner is an Associate Editor at Bright Lights Film Journal. Her work has appeared inBlack Book, Filmmaker, The New York Times, Senses of Cinema, and Frieze.
Italian Neorealism: Martin Scorsese’s Origins
Martin Scorsese has stated many times that one of the biggest influences in his work was the Italian Neorealism period in Italy. His personal documentary My Voyage to Italy (also check out: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies) is a journey through Italian Cinema history and marking influential films.
My Voyage to Italy>>>
Italian Neorealism and GLOBAL CINEMA (PDF)
1937 - Cinecittà Studios founded in 1937.
Late 1930s-Early 1940s - The neorealist style was
developed by a circle of film critics that revolved around the
magazine Cinema, including Luchino Visconti, Gianni
Puccini, Cesare Zavattini, Giuseppe De Santis and Pietro
Ingrao. (the editor-in-chief of the magazine was Vittorio
Mussolini, son of Benito Mussolini)
1943 - The first neorealist film is generally thought to be
Ossessione by Luchino Visconti
1943 – Itally surrenders - Sept 3rd, The Armistice of Cassibile
signed on 3 September 1943 by Walter Bedell Smith and
Giuseppe Castellano, and made public on 8 September,
between the Kingdom of Italy and the Allies ("United
Nations") of World War II.
1945 – May – Germany surrenders in Italy.
1946 – Neo Realism get its birth with Roberto Rossellini's
Rome, Open City, when it won the Grand Prize at the
Cannes Film Festival as the first major film produced in Italy
after the war.
1946 - Shoeshine d. Vittorio De Sica.
1948 - Bicycle Thieves (Italian: Ladri di biciclette; often
known in the United States as The Bicycle Thief) is a 1948
Italian film directed by Vittorio De Sica.
1949/50 – Bicycle Thieves Voted by the Academy Board of
Governors as the most outstanding foreign language film
released in the United States during 1949; 1950.
1950s - Italian neorealism rapidly declined in the early
1950s.
1951 - Miracle in Milan (Italian: Miracolo a Milano) d. Vittorio
de Sica.
1952 - Umberto D. d. Vittorio De Sica – The Last of the true
“Neo Realist” films.
1954 - La Strada and
1955 - Il bidone - Transitional films by Federico Fellini's
Italy's move from individual concern with neorealism to the
tragic frailty of the human condition can be seen through
Federico Fellini's films
1964-66 - Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) and Blow-up (1966)
take the neorealist trappings and internalise them in the
suffering and search for knowledge brought out by Italy's
post-war economic and political climate.
Roberto Rossellini and his Italian Cinema: The Search for Realism
by Karen Arnone
Toward the end of the second World War, when the air raid sirens ceased to scream and enemy bombs ceased to fall, Italy awoke to find itself enveloped in crime and social unrest. Seizing the energy of a free society, one without the repressive controls of a dictator, film makers set out to record and document the rebirth of Italian society. The morose reality was recorded by the cameras of visionary film makers who found enough inspiration within their dismal atmosphere to create a new stylistic approach to film making: Neorealism.Quite often, Italian Neorealism is considered a phenomenon which exploded onto the cinema scene when the Fascist regime fell, giving Italian film makers the artistic freedoms which were denied to them for over 20 years. It is commonly regarded as a smooth break from the repressive Fascist era. Neorealism's prescription for cinematic realism, set forth by film scholars and critics, called for the use of non-professional actors, regional dialects, current subject matter, authentic locations, documentary aspects, and the use of the film as a social statement. In 1945, Roberto Rossellini was hailed "The Father of Neorealism" with his first international success "Rome, Open City" which was consistent with the neorealist prescription. His next two movies, "Paisan" and "Germany, Year Zero" likewise did the same. However, the similarities between Rossellini's realism and that defined by the mainstream end here.
First, Rossellini's interest in the portrayal of realism was deeply rooted within the Fascist cinematic era in which he was trained by truly Fascist film makers and government officials. Apparently there was not a smooth break between the Fascist and the Neorealist eras. Second, he vehemently rebelled against critics, scholars, political figures and other film makers who tried to set and force others to follow guidelines as to what elements were necessary to portray reality. The tension between these two sides, which ran particularly height in post-war period to the early 1950's, caused Rossellini's popularity with the mainstream audience and critics to plummet substantially. One writer even wrote, "To change one's profession in certain circumstances is, without doubt, the wisest thing one can do," suggesting that Rossellini get out of the film business (Films 98). Even though, with each consecutive film, the ticket sales steadily decreased, Rossellini continued to forge ahead in the development of his own personal portrayal of truth and realism, a movement which, though contrary to that of the mainstream, was important in shaping post-war cinema. Therefore, in order to show how his personal conception of truth and reality evolved within these high-tension years, it is essential to look at the evolution of these realistic aspects within his films from 1941 to 1953, apart from the interference of mainstream recommendations and criticisms.
Roberto Rossellini: Early Life and Experiences
Other Links:Timeline
Rossellini's Early Films
The Cinema Under Mussolini
The Fascist Trilogy (1941 - 1944)
The Fascist Trilogy: Realism in the Story Line
The Neorealist Trilogy (1945 - 1947)
Concept of Rossellini's Neorealist Trilogy: The Neorealist Prescription
Rossellini's Transitional Films
Rossellini's Transitional Films: A Step Toward A New Reality
The Trilogy of Solitude
The Trilogy of Solitude: A Look At Psychological Realism
The Evolution of the Concept of Reality in Rossellini's Works
Bibliography
The Cinema of Fact
Exploring Italian Neorealism (1943-1952): A cinematic revolution born from the rubble of World War II, dedicated to raw truth and everyday struggles.
The Aesthetics of Necessity and the Moral Reconstruction of Italian Cinema: A Comprehensive Analysis of Neorealism
The emergence of Italian neorealism in the mid-1940s represents arguably the most significant paradigm shift in the history of the moving image. It was a movement born not of luxury or purely intellectual exercise, but of a profound socio-political crisis and the physical ruin of a nation. As the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini collapsed and the dust of World War II began to settle, a group of filmmakers and critics sought to strip away the artifice of the studio-bound cinema that had characterized the previous two decades. This "Golden Age" of Italian cinema was defined by a commitment to the "new reality"—a term that directly translates the movement’s Italian name, Neorealismo—which aimed to provide an unvarnished window into the lives of the poor and the working class. It was more than a cinematic style; it was a moral and ethical philosophy, a "documentary and communicative" effort to reconstruct the Italian psyche through the lens of a camera.
The Crucible of Fascism and the Antecedents of the New Reality
The roots of neorealism are paradoxically found within the very industry it sought to dismantle. Under Mussolini, the Italian film industry was centralized and subsidized, with the founding of Cinecittà in 1937 under the slogan "cinema is the strongest weapon". The regime utilized film for state propaganda, producing lavish historical epics that promoted nationalist ideology. However, the dominant genre of the era was the Telefoni Bianchi, or "White Telephone" films—slick, sentimental melodramas set in Art Deco environments that offered the public a sense of escapism from the brewing tensions of the 1930s.
Against this backdrop of artifice, a circle of critics revolving around the magazine Cinema—including Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, and Gianni Puccini—began to call for a return to the verismo (realism) of 19th-century literature. They were inspired by the "poetic realism" of French directors like Jean Renoir, with whom both Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni had worked. This period also saw the rise of "Calligraphism," a short-lived movement that, while markedly different from neorealism in its formalistic obsession with literature and art, nevertheless signaled a growing dissatisfaction with mainstream commercial cinema.
The physical destruction of Cinecittà by Allied bombing during the war necessitated a new method of production. Deprived of their studios, filmmakers were forced into the streets, utilizing the ruins of Rome and the countryside as their backdrops. This logistical constraint became a stylistic hallmark. The "shambolic ruins" served as an anxiety-charged setting that resonated with the collective trauma of the population. As early as 1935, journalist Leo Longanesi had urged directors to "go into the streets, into the barracks, into the train stations," and by 1943, this urge became a survival strategy for the industry.
The Philosophical Architecture of Neorealism
Italian neorealism is frequently defined by its rejection of Hollywood-style narrative conventions. Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, often considered the "godfather" or chief theorist of the movement, argued for a "hunger for reality". He believed that cinema should observe the "unexceptional routines of ordinary life" rather than constructing artificial dramas. This philosophy led to the development of several core aesthetic principles that distinguished the movement from its predecessors and its contemporaries.
The use of non-professional actors was perhaps the most radical of these principles. Directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica believed that a factory worker or a fisherman could bring an "unselfconscious" authenticity to a role that a trained actor could not. This was not merely a cost-saving measure; it was an attempt to bridge the gap between art and life. Even when professional actors were used, they were often stripped of their star personas to blend into the social environment. This was complemented by the use of conversational speech and regional dialects, which rejected the literary and theatrical dialogue common in Fascist-era films.
Visually, the neorealist style was characterized by a "documentary-like" quality. Directors avoided the manipulation of reality through elaborate editing, lighting, or camerawork. Instead, they utilized long takes and real-time sequences to respect the "entirety of the reality" they filmed. This "styleless style" was an intentional aesthetic choice meant to prioritize the "fact" of the image over the artifice of the story. André Bazin, the influential French critic, described this as a cinema of "fact" and "reconstituted reportage," highlighting its roots in the anti-Fascist Resistance.
Thematic Concerns and the Humanist Impulse
Thematically, neorealist films focused on the "larger social concerns of humanity" as experienced by the common person. They addressed the crushing weight of poverty, chronic unemployment, and the moral degradation that followed years of Fascist rule and the devastation of war. A central theme was the struggle for survival within a simple but unforgiving social order.
The movement was characterized by a "new democratic spirit" and a refusal to make facile moral judgments. It sought to represent the individual as an inextricable part of society, showing their relationship to the real social environment rather than to romantic fantasies. This humanist approach was often a blend of Christian and Marxist values, aiming to communicate a sense of shared responsibility for the nation's future.
Roberto Rossellini and the Birth of Global Recognition
While the true beginning of the movement is often debated, Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943) is generally accepted as the first neorealist film. However, it was Roberto Rossellini's "War Trilogy" that brought neorealism to the international stage. Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945), filmed just months after the city was liberated from Nazi occupation, remains one of the most important films in cinematic history. It blended professional actors, most notably Anna Magnani, with non-professionals to tell a gritty story of Resistance and sacrifice.
The film's impact was immediate. When it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946, it signaled the rebirth of Italian culture. Rossellini followed this with Paisan (Paisà, 1946), a six-part episodic journey up the Italian peninsula that documented the encounter between Allied forces and the local population. The final film in the trilogy, Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero, 1948), took the neorealist camera to the ruins of Berlin to examine the moral and physical collapse of the German people through the eyes of a child. Rossellini famously described neorealism not as a technical formula, but as a "moral position," an attempt to "see things as they are" without imposing a preordained narrative structure.
Rossellini's later work, specifically Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1954), is often viewed as the "bookend" to the movement. Starring Ingrid Bergman, the film shifted focus from social disorder to the internal psychological crisis of a dissolving marriage. Martin Scorsese has described this film as the beginning of "modern cinema," as it raised the execution of art to a new level of perception, moving away from "reconstituted reportage" toward a more spiritual and metaphysical reality.
The Humanist Masterpieces of Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini
The partnership between director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini produced the movement's most enduring and empathetic works. Their collaboration began with Shoeshine (Sciuscià, 1946), a devastating story of two young boys whose friendship is destroyed by the indifference of the adult world and the brutality of the Roman prison system. The film was the first to be awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, recognized for proving that "the creative spirit can triumph over reality".
Their most famous work, Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948), is frequently cited as a cinematic masterpiece and the "pinnacle" of the neorealist movement. The plot, centered on a man's desperate search for his stolen bicycle—his only means of livelihood—serves as a poignant allegory for the broader desperation of post-war Italy. By casting a factory worker in the lead role, De Sica achieved a level of verisimilitude that blurred the lines between fiction and documentary. The film's moral core—the idea that "an eye for an eye makes the world go blind"—resonated with an international audience grappling with the ethical debris of the war.
As the movement progressed, De Sica and Zavattini continued to push its boundaries. Miracle in Milan (1951) introduced elements of fantasy and social allegory, while Umberto D. (1952) returned to a stark, observational style. Umberto D. follows an elderly pensioner struggling to survive with his only companion, a dog named Flike, in an increasingly unsympathetic and indifferent society. The film's uncompromising focus on the mundane—such as the long sequence showing the maid Maria performing her morning routine—was hailed by Bazin as the ultimate expression of the neorealist ethos. However, its bleak conclusion and sharp social critique also marked the beginning of a significant political backlash.
Political Friction and the "Dirty Laundry" Controversy
The success of neorealism was not met with universal acclaim within Italy. As the "Italian Spring" faded and the Cold War began to polarize national politics, the movement found itself at odds with the ruling Christian Democratic party. The government, anxious to promote a vision of a prosperous and stable Italy to both its citizens and the international community, viewed neorealism's focus on poverty and despair as "dirty laundry that shouldn't be washed and hung to dry in the open".
Giulio Andreotti, then a vice-minister in the De Gasperi cabinet, became the most vocal critic of the movement. He famously castigated De Sica in a public letter, arguing that Umberto D. was a "wretched service to his fatherland" because it depicted Italian life in such a miserable light. This political hostility culminated in the Andreotti Law of 1949, which established a system of state subsidies and export bans. The law was designed to discourage gritty realism and instead provide financial support to films that showed Italy from its "best sides".
The Andreotti Law, combined with rising income levels during the "Italian economic miracle," led to a rapid decline of the movement in the early 1950s. The themes of poverty and desperation began to lose their relevance for an audience increasingly hungry for the optimism found in American imports. Consequently, the industry shifted toward "Pink Neorealism" (Neorealismo rosa)—sentimental comedies that used neorealist settings and non-professional actors but offered escapist plots and happy endings, as seen in Mario Comencini's Bread, Love and Dreams (Pane, amore e fantasia, 1953).
Transition and the Crisis of Neorealism
By the mid-1950s, the "pure" neorealist impulse had entered a phase often referred to as the "crisis of neorealism". Filmmakers began to feel constrained by the expectations of leftist critics who insisted that every film must have an explicit social or ideological purpose. Directors like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, who had been involved in the movement's early years, began to pivot toward a more individualized and psychological cinema.
Fellini’s early works, such as I Vitelloni (1953) and La Strada (1954), are considered transitional films. While they retained neorealist elements—shooting on location, focusing on marginalized characters—they were essentially allegorical and spiritual in nature, exploring internal alienation rather than external socioeconomic conditions. Antonioni’s The Cry (Il grido, 1957) and his subsequent "Incommunicability Trilogy" further internalized the neorealist aesthetic, focusing on the "tragic failure to communicate" and the spiritual malaise of the growing middle class.
This transition marked the evolution of Italian cinema from a tool of social reportage to a medium of high art and existential inquiry. While the strict stylistic conventions of neorealism were abandoned, its core commitment to "seeing things as they are" remained a foundational influence for the next generation of Italian filmmakers, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci.
The Global Legacy: From the French New Wave to the L.A. Rebellion
The impact of Italian neorealism extends far beyond the borders of Italy and the historical moment of the post-war period. It "liberated filmmaking from the artificial confines of the studio," proving that compelling stories could be told with minimal resources and non-actors. This lesson was foundational for several major international cinematic movements.
The French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s was directly influenced by the "scrappy, documentary-like attitude" of Rossellini and De Sica. Directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut adopted the use of real locations, low budgets, and open-ended narratives. Similarly, the British "Kitchen Sink Realism" of the late 1950s—exemplified by films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Look Back in Anger (1959)—applied neorealist techniques to the lives of the working class in northern industrial towns.
In the Global South, neorealism inspired filmmakers to document their own struggles against colonialism and poverty. Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) was profoundly influenced by De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, as was the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, which sought to use cinema as a means of social and political intervention.
The "L.A. Rebellion," a movement of Black filmmakers at UCLA between the 1960s and 1980s, found in neorealism a model for documenting marginalized communities in the United States. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) explicitly merged the neorealist vignette structure with a blues aesthetic to portray the daily, mundane life of a slaughterhouse worker in Watts. Burnett noted that his goal was to show "how some people in the black community really lived without imposing my values on it," a sentiment that echoes the neorealist refusal to provide easy moral judgments.
Modern Indebtedness and the Persistence of the Neorealist Spirit
The legacy of Italian neorealism continues to shape contemporary independent cinema. Directors like Kelly Reichardt and Chloé Zhao have been noted for their use of "neorealist molds," focusing on transient souls and marginalized individuals lost in difficult economic landscapes. Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) is frequently compared to Umberto D. for its portrayal of a protagonist and their dog navigating a world without a safety net. Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) utilizes non-professional actors playing versions of themselves, a technique that recalls Rossellini's War Trilogy and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves.
Martin Scorsese remains one of the movement's most vocal advocates, stating that its impact on his work "cannot be overstated". He credits the movement with "rehabilitating an entire culture and people through cinema" and identifies the "fool" archetype in his own films, such as Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, as being directly inspired by the characters in Fellini's La Strada. For Scorsese and many others, neorealism signifies the "rebirth of Italian cinema" and the beginning of a modern perception of the world through art.
Theoretical Reassessments: Reality vs. Artifice
Contemporary film theorists have refined the understanding of neorealism, moving away from the "formulaic statement" that the movement meant "no scripts, no actors, no studios, and no happy endings". Instead, they characterize it as a complex "relationship between film practice and the social reality of post-war Italy". Christopher Wagstaff and Millicent Marcus have noted that neorealist cinema rested on its own set of "realist conventions" and was often as much a product of artifice as of realism.
The supposedly "unmediated" truth of the neorealist image was, in fact, carefully constructed. Even the most spontaneous-looking scenes, like the search for the bike in Bicycle Thieves, were the result of literate scripts and meticulous direction. Furthermore, the continuity between the "realist" films made during the Fascist era and those made by the neorealists is now more widely acknowledged, suggesting that the movement was not a "bolt out of the blue" but a culmination of existing tendencies within Italian film culture.
Despite these reassessments, the moral and emotional power of neorealism remains undiminished. Its significance lies in its "bodily kinetics"—the restless walking of urban streets and the earthbound point of view that forced the camera to be "permeable" to the lived experiences of the poor. It was a cinema that refused to look away from the "ragged" reality of a defeated nation, choosing instead to find dignity and truth in the mundane and the unexceptional.
Conclusion: The Ethics of the Image
The trajectory of Italian neorealism, from its inception in the ruins of World War II to its evolution into the internal psychological cinema of the 1960s, represents a critical chapter in the history of human expression. It was a movement that emerged from necessity, utilized the constraints of its environment to create a new aesthetic language, and ultimately changed the way the world perceived the relationship between art and reality.
The Andreotti Law and the political backlash of the early 1950s may have curtailed the movement's output, but they could not erase its influence. Neorealism’s focus on the "pitiful and most frail aspects of what it means to be human" created a moral template that continues to inspire filmmakers who seek to represent the unrepresented and to challenge dominant social values. In the words of Martin Scorsese, neorealism was about "the execution of art and the perception of the world through art, raising cinema to another level". As long as there are communities facing hardship and individuals struggling for dignity in the face of indifference, the neorealist spirit—the "moral position" that demands we "see things as they are"—will continue to haunt and illuminate the screen.
❝"The ideal film would be 90 minutes of the life of a man to whom nothing happens."
— Cesare Zavattini (Screenwriter & Theorist)
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