As with most film movements, historians differ about how unified and uniform Italian Neorealism was. At a 1953 conference on Neorealism, Zavattini, Visconti, and other participants could not agree on what characterized the movement. A 1974 conference of scholars saw little coherence; many believed that Neorealism was a loose ethic, not an aesthetic or a political position. A good survey of the range of opinions can be found in chapter 4 of Mira Liehm’s Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Historically, Neorealism can be studied from several perspectives. For one thing, the film movement had parallels with a postwar “neorealist” literature, as exemplified in the novels of Elio Vittorini, Pratolini, and Cesare Pavese. These writers’ works are discussed in Sergio Pacifici, A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1962).
There is also the tricky question of the ties of Neorealism to the political left. In the immediate postwar period, an aesthetic of realism arose within the Communist party. Its proponents sought to create a “national-popular” strategy that would show a progressive, critical realism to be part of Italian cultural history. See David Forgacs, “The Making and Unmaking of Neorealism in Postwar Italy,” in Nicholas Hewitt, ed., The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought and Film 1945-1950 (New York: St. Martins, 1989), pp. 51-66. Communist critics at first favored the Neorealist films, and the directors, while not Marxists, often had leftist sympathies. Very soon, however, relations cooled. As early as 1948, Bitter Rice was attacked for its sex and its lack of “typical” characters. Between 1950 and 1954, when many directors shifted toward psychological analysis, Marxist attacks intensified.
Since the mid-1950s, the debate about the political underpinnings of Neorealism has continued, and not only in Italy. For a sample, see Liehm, Passion and Defiance (cited above), as well as Pierre Sorlin, “Tradition and Social Change in the French and Italian Cinemas of the Reconstruction,” in Hewitt, ed., The Culture of Reconstruction (cited above), pp. 88-102.
REFERENCES
1. Quoted in Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 16.
2. Quoted in Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 91.
3. Quoted in Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, p. 26.
4. Ibid., p. 70.
5. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 54-55.
6. Ibid., pp. 81-82.
7. Quoted in Pierre Leprohon, Michelangelo Antonioni: An Introduction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), pp. 89-90.
8. Quoted in Mario Verdone, Roberto Rossellini (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1963), p. 89.
9. Quoted in Gaia Servadio, Luchino Visconti: A Biography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983), p. 78.
10. Quoted in Marcus, Italian Film in the Light ofNeo-realism, p. 183.
11. Quoted in Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 14.
12. Jacques Rivette, “Letter on Rossellini,” in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 203.
13. Federico Fellini, “My Experiences as a Director,” in Peter Bondanella, ed., Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 4.
14. Quoted in Virginia Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), p. 28.
FURTHER READING
Armes, Roy. Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian NeoRealist Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Barnes, 1971.
Bernardini, Aldo, and Jean A. Gili, eds. Cesare Zavattini. Paris: Pompidou Center, 1990.
Bosch, Aurora, and M. Fernanda del Rincon. “Franco and Hollywood, 1939-56.” New Left Review 232 (No-vember/December 1998): 112-54.
Brunetta, Gian Piero. “The Long March of American Cinema in Italy from Fascism to the Cold War.” In David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds., Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994, pp. 139-54.
“Le Neo-realisme italien.” Etudes cinematographiques 32-35 (1964).
Overbey, David, ed. Springtime in Italy: A Reader on NeoRealism. London: Talisman, 1978.
Rossellini, Roberto. My Method: Writings and Interviews. Ed Adriano Apra. New York: Marsilio, 1992.
Sitney, P. Adams. Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
World History
