Juan Monroy — History of Film: Italian Neorealism

resurgence of modernist impulses of the 1920s
- French Impressionism
- Soviet Montage
- German Expressionism
new generation of filmmakers
- European social and intellectual life began to revive
- filmmakers began to identify with innovations
  - literature
  - painting
  - theater
stylistic features
- true to life
  - exposing class antagonisms
  - horrors of war and occupation
  - episodic
  - slice-of-life narratives, opposed to tightness of Hollywood
  - open ended narratives
    - without firm conclusions
    - heavy use of long take
    - camera movements
- new styles of performance
  - halting delivery
  - fragmentary/elliptical speeches
  - subjective reality
  - use of flashbacks, dreams, hallucinations, fantasies
- authorial commentary
  - pointing out something about what we’re watching
  - sometimes used to point out film’s own artifice
Fascists came to power in 1922
- no effort to control media
- did not nationalize film industries
- propaganda centralized by LUCE
  - L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa
  - documentaries
  - newsreels
Venice Film Festival
- established in 1932
- international showcase for Italian cinema
Government Support
- guaranteed subsidies from box office receipts
- theaters were required to program a certain number of Italian films
- helped encourage production to 45 films per year by the end of the 1930s
“General Direction of Cinema”
- established by the government
- believed entertainment was key
- Mussolini reviewed films but never banned them
- government subsidized production but industry overall lost money
Cinecitta
- 12 sound stages
- film school
- journal
- trained
  - directors
  - performers
  - technicians
Films
- propaganda films
- romantic melodramas
- comedies
- “White Telephone films”
Wartime Realism
- emerged as a reaction to Hollywood style films of the prewar years
- younger filmmakers influenced
  - Ernest Hemingway
  - William Faulkner
  - Italian tradition of regional naturalism
  - theorists calling for directors to film problems of ordinary people in actual surroundings
  - Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s
Realist filmmaking
- Rosselini: “A realist film is precisely one which tries to make people think. What mattered to us was an investigation of reality, forming relationship with reality.”
- Expressionism
  - lighting
  - angular framing
  - visualization of psychological pressure
  - Kammeraschaft in showing claustrophobic domestic environment
- Poetic Realism
  - unrelenting vision of people in hard times
  - emphasis on lower class life
  - dreary and dark mise-en-scene
  - pessimistic sense of fate
  - Renoir had close ties with Rosselini and Visconti
Style
- films deliberately looked different
  - part by design
  - part out of necessity
- found stories
  - newspapers
  - popular reports
  - rejected glossy romances and melodramas
  - focused on poverty, suffering, death
Postwar Neorealism
- emerged as force for cultural renewal and social change
  - “Italian Spring”
  - people eager to break with tradition
contrast with Cinecitta films
- studio was partly destroyed during war
- filmmakers moved into the streets and countryside
- shot on location
- dialogue dubbing in post production
shot on location
- ambient lighting
- however interior shots were often shot in a studio
- sound was dubbed in post production
use of non-professional actors
- leads were unknown, non-professionals
- mixed with professional actors
rough offhand composition
- little use of makeup
- long takes, tracking shots, negative space compositions
- however edited with Hollywood style
- smooth camera movement
- crisp focus
- sweeping musical scores
everyday life
- sought to embrace everyday life
- varying moods
- extreme mixtures of tone
- from tragedy to comedy
innovative storytelling
- coincidences, as in real life
- lacking carefully motivated chain of events
- greater use of ellipsis
- scenes are not as tightly connected to each other
- skipping over important causes for events
- climaxes are downplayed
- unresolved endings
reception
- officials disliked portraits of poverty
- Church objected to anti-clerical themes and depictions of sexuality
- leftists attacked for pessimism
- films not popular with audiences
- Andreotti Law
  - passed in 1949
  - established quotas
  - preproduction censorship
    - government committee
    - reviewed scripts
  - encouraged films with apolitical slant
  - films which slandered Italy could be denied export license
- movement would end by 1953
legacy
- influential for its political activism and world view
- innovations in film form
- would inspire and encourage international new wave filmmakers of the 1960s