The term ‘Neo-Realism’ (Italian: Neorealismo) was first coined by Italian critics in the early 1940s, Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini was one of the key writers of the Neo-Realist movement and one of its main theorists. He called on filmmakers to take to the streets, get on to buses and trams and to ‘steal’ their stories from every day, writing in his wartime diary, Sequences from a Cinematic Life: Set up a camera in the street, in a room, see with insatiable patience, train ourselves in the contemplation of our fellow man in his elementary actions. Zavattini went on to script such films as ‘Ladri di biciclette’, ‘Umberto D’, and ‘Miracolo a Milano’, all of which focus on the hardships ordinary people encounter in contemporary Italy. Italian cinema of the Neo-Realist period is full of stories of people trying to solve everyday problems. This was a reaction to the style of the ‘Telefono Bianco’ movies of the 1930s that emulated Hollywood films and focused on bourgeois society. Neo-Realist films often used non-professional actors and were filmed on location in poor areas, depicting people performing mundane daily activities, with the emphasis on gritty realism and a sense of rough energy.
‘Ossessione’, directed by Luchino Visconti, is sometimes cited as the first Neo-Realist film, although it is a movie with strong noirish elements. Its screenplay is based on James M. Cain’s crime novel ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. Visconti worked on it with fellow writers and filmmakers from the magazine Cinema, among them Giuseppe De Santis. It is a seamy tale set in provincial Italy about a tramp who has an affair with the wife of a restaurant owner; the lovers plot to kill the husband. Visconti faced censorship problems with the film, which was banned in Fascist Italy.
Neo-Realist protagonists range from the very young to the very old.
‘Umberto D‘, directed by Vittorio De Sica is about an elderly man (Carlo Battisti) reduced to poverty but clinging desperately to his dignity. He potters around Rome with his one loyal companion, his dog. By contrast, children have prominent roles in ‘Ladri di biciclette’ and ‘Miracolo a Milano’. However, Neo-Realist directors did not always take a documentary-style approach to the material. For example, De Sica’s ‘Miracolo a Milano’, concerning a homeless group in a shantytown on the outskirts of post-war Milan, might well be described as ‘magical realist. Alongside its digs at greedy landowners and venal squatters, the film has a strong fantasy element. Nor did all Neo-Realist films use non-professional actors. ‘Roma, città aperta’ , by Roberto Rossellini, features Anna Magnani, one of Italian cinema’s biggest post-war stars, and the actor, writer and director Aldo Fabrizi. ‘Roma, città aperta’ won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and had an immediate impact. Movie myth suggests that the director made it with ‘short ends’-scraps of film stock given to him by camera-wielding US soldiers who had liberated Rome in World War II. His shooting style was determined by the constraints under which he was working. Scenes were shot rapidly with abrupt cutting. Rossellini was inspired by his own experiences hiding from Nazi patrols out to press-gang young Italians into fighting for the Fascists. The idea that he made the movie on the hoof is exaggerated. Nonetheless, it has a roughness and energy that have come to be seen as Neo-Realist hallmarks.
Rossellini went on to make ‘Paisà’, a sprawling war film about the end of the war in Italy. This was followed by the brutal ‘Germania anno zero’ set in rubble-strewn, burnt-out Berlin and detailing the plight of a boy struggling to survive in the wake of the Nazi defeat.
There is a big difference between the films in Rossellini’s war trilogy and his work with Ingrid Bergman in ‘Stromboli’. This is a strange and eerie story about a young Lithuanian emigrée who marries an Italian fisherman to escape a displaced person’s camp at the end of the war. She goes to live with him on a remote island and finds herself bewildered and oppressed by the patriarchal society she encounters.
By the early 1950s, Neo-Realist cinema in Italy no longer had the urgency that characterized the movement in the immediate post-war years. Conditions had changed; Italian society was more affluent and filmmakers were less concerned about portraying those on the margins. Yet Neo-Realism’s influence was wide, and Cinema Novo in Brazil, Free Cinema in Britain, the French Nouvelle Vague and the cinema-vérité movement in documentary were all indebted to the work of directors such as De Sica and Rossellini in the 1940s.
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