WTI Magazine #80    2016 June 17
Author : Edoardo Peretti      Translation by:

If the Italian cinema has almost always been part of the "G8" of world cinema, we can enlighten two particular moments when it was able to exceptionally influence the worldwide development of the seventh art. The first dates back to the origins, to the second decade of the XXth century, when a masterpiece like Mazrio Pastrone's "Cabiria" gave a decisive boost to cinema as a great epic narrative cutting the umbilical cord with the theater, lesson learned - for example - by David W. Griffith. The second flourishes from the rubble of World War II: we are talking about neorealism.

The word itself suggests the impact of that trend: a more direct approach, raw and sincere. Let's remember that the Italian reality was that of a country emerging from war, on its knees, ready to get up but still characterized by poverty and widespread suffering. So the actors, often professionals, interpret characters mostly from the most popular classes and in difficulty, especially in movies filmed in locations as pure as possible, keeping to a minimum the intervention of the designers.

This narrative was certainly due also to the logistical and technical difficulties: for example, Cinecittà was a camp for displaced people, and there was difficulty in finding material; moreover, "Rome, Open City" was shot with expired film. But crucial was also the desire of directors and writers to come out of the doldrums imposed by the fascist cinema: frivolous, educational in a dictatorial sense and uninterested to take a look on the country context.

So, a fundamental role was played by the union between the reaction to strict rules imposed for a long time and the awareness of a reality in the country that could not be ignored. This new storytelling, in fact, is already developed in the early years of the war: for example with the war documentaries by Francesco De Robertis and Roberto Rossellini or with some comedies in which the elegy of the two fascist decades began to crack, like Alessandro Blasetti's "4 passi fra le nuvole" for rural realities or "Campo de Fiori" for urban realities.

However, it was the formidable "Ossessione" by Luchino Visconti, sordid and sentimental romantic noir set in the Po valley, in 1943 to give the go. Two years later, the most important confirmation about this new trend was given by Roberto Rossellini and his masterpiece "Rome, Open City", the story of one of the most dramatic moments of the Nazi occupation of Rome. Rossellini continued to remember the war with "Paisan" (1946), episodic film dedicated to different parts of Italy; and with "Germany Year Zero" (1948), the story of an orphan lost in the rubble of Berlin.

The third musketeer of neorealism was Vittorio De Sica, who between 1946 and 1951 together with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini gave birth to movies that made the history of world cinema like "Bicycle Thieves" and "Umberto D.", describing individuals and social classes at the edge of the reconstruction and dedicated to the fight for survival.

The movies of Visconti, Rossellini and De Sica can be considered the purest examples of neorealism, even if each one of the three was different from the other two in more than one way: Visconti was more literary and elegant, Rossellini was more radical and thoughtful, De Sica was more simple and attentive to contemporary social issues.

Neorealism ended pretty soon, at least in its purity; either because the huge international success was not matched to an equal success in the Italian box office, either because since the early fifties the poetic started to mingle with the suggestions of film genres. An example is the Sicilian western "In the name of the law" by Pietro Germi or the melodrama "Bitter Rice" by Giuseppe de Santis.

But neorealism laid its roots in the most effective manner in the comedy genre. The Italian reality of the fifties was in fact pictured from a series of films in which realism was interpreted with a lighter and less bitter tone (even if just apparently, sometimes). These were frivolous and sketchy movies, sometimes: but other times there were more complex movies, loaded with a smart irony and successful in intercepting the changes and trends of the Italian society and ready to open the way for the Italian comedy of the sixties, the decade of the economic boom.

By the way, from those years on all the cinema worldwide that wanted to be "realist" would have had to deal with the Italian experience of the neorealism: this was explicitly stated by the authors of the French Nouvelle Vogue or by many authors of the New Hollywood in the seventies.