9
Italian Neorealism: Quotidian Storytelling and Transnational Horizons

Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson

Introduction

In 1961, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote “Proiezione al ‘Nuovo’ di Roma città aperta” (“Projection of Rome Open City at the ‘Nuovo’ [Cinema]”), a poetic account of watching Roberto Rossellini’s influential 1945 film. Through his retelling of what is no doubt the most tragic moment in the film—the death of Pina, the character played by Anna Magnani—he shapes a vision of the crumbling beauty of the Eternal City itself. For Pasolini (2014, 189), screening Rossellini’s film created a kind of overwhelming “epic neorealist landscape …. It is there that the present is dissolved and mutilated and deafens the poet’s song.”¹ Pasolini suggests that this contact with the film, with the past, and with the memory of that past, violently shifts the poetic sensibilities of the present and restructures the poet’s sense of creative possibilities.²

In this chapter, we look for extensions of Pasolini’s concept of an “epic neorealist landscape” by offering our interpretation of how to understand Italian neorealism vis‐à‐vis its global impact. We trace some of the ways Italian neorealism has moved well beyond the place and era with which it was initially associated, becoming a deeply influential tool to create politicized filmic possibilities elsewhere. We are less interested in defining what neorealism is than in illustrating how it has influenced filmmakers. We first focus briefly on a few of the many Italian filmmakers influenced by neorealism and then we move to discuss filmmakers’ connections with neorealism from well beyond Italy’s borders.³ Especially in regard to the latter, adaption mainly stems from those Italian films most internationally accepted as representative of neorealism: Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948). These films, as well as others, have found themselves refashioned in the work of artists from all over the world: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Algeria, Senegal, India, Iran, France, the Czech Republic, China, the United States, and elsewhere. In particular, filmmakers working within explicitly politicized cultural spaces have often looked to neorealism for lessons about how cinema could be adopted in such a way as to create narratives that had unambiguous ideological perspectives while remaining cognizant of the aesthetic possibilities of the medium of cinema.

Figure 9.1 La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966). Screen grab.

De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (which rolled out in various international locations and film festivals in the early 1950s) was transformative for an international cadre of artists and critics. The film garnered awards in countries the world over between 1950 and 1951, and continued to inspire filmmakers thereafter. Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1976, 9–10) famously described his first screening of Ladri di biciclette thusly: “Within three days of arriving in London I saw Bicycle Thieves. I knew immediately that if I ever made Pather Panchali … I would make it in the same way, using natural locations and unknown actors.”⁴ Our position is that while neorealism has had many horizons and many perspectives, it can be understood in a relatively clear way through a transnational lens. Moreover, while not all neorealist‐inflected films can be said to be explicitly political, this chapter explores ways in which Italian neorealism’s transnational legacy is more often than not characterized by radical, experimental, and political forms of expression.

Initial Observations on Neorealism

Although we will complicate our use of the term neorealism further along, we begin with a somewhat superficial acceptance of what it refers to. We understand neorealism as characterized by what we might call a documentary‐like style, produced mainly in the immediate post–World War II era and reflecting the everyday realities of common people. More precisely, we accept the rather strict temporal definition of neorealist films beginning with Rossellini’s Roma città aperta released in 1945 and ending with Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D released in 1952 (Bondanella 1991; Marcus 1987; Sitney 1995; Ruberto and Wilson 2007). We see these beginning and end dates as important markers for the ideological impact those early films continued to have well beyond Italy.

Beyond these specific dates, we accept a kind of formal series of traits that link most neorealist films. These traits include what Millicent Marcus (1987, 22) identifies as:

… location shooting, lengthy takes, unobtrusive editing, natural lighting, a predominance of medium and long shots, respect for the continuity of time and space, use of contemporary, true‐to‐life subjects, an uncontrived, open‐ended plot, working‐class protagonists, a non‐professional cast, dialogue in the vernacular, active viewer involvement, and implied social criticism.

Of course, some of these elements were heavily constructed and not haphazard at all. Not all films called neorealist even share these traits, yet they remain a workable starting point for us.

We are not blind to the myriad complications and contradictions inherent in the term neorealism. We are cognizant, for example, of some neorealist filmmakers’ at times suspect and hermetic relationship to Fascism or conservative politics generally, and we acknowledge the importance of practical considerations, which may have fed the formal style of neorealism. For instance, Noa Steimatsky’s (2009) work has outlined how Cinecittà’s use as a refugee camp after the war, making it off‐limits for most filmmaking, helped contribute to neorealist style, as filmmakers had to turn to the streets to construct their storylines. Likewise, from an aesthetic standpoint, we know that there were precedents to neorealism in, for instance, the creative tradition of naturalist‐style verismo within Italy, trends within early Italian silent cinema (e.g., the work of Elvira Notari), and a Fascist‐era emphasis on realism in cinema.⁵

Leaving aside the somewhat broad and commonplace characteristics of neorealism, we instead turn to what we consider to be its central defining orientation, especially with regard to its global impact. In explaining the neorealist filmmaker’s role, Cesare Zavattini (1979, 67–68), sometimes called the “theorist of neorealism,” noted that films should ideologically engage an audience, raise social consciousness, question hierarchies, and dismantle dominant structures. He remarked:

[We] are now aware that reality is extremely rich. We simply had to learn how to look at it. The task of the artist—the neorealist artist at least—does not consist in bringing the audience to tears and indignation by means of transference, but, on the contrary, it consists in bringing them to reflect (and then, if you will, to stir up emotions and indignation) upon what they are doing and upon what others are doing; that is, to think about reality precisely as it is.

The filmmaker’s role, then, is to use the camera to look at reality critically; the camera, for Zavattini, is an ideal medium for critical interventions. In a sense, Zavattini’s view evokes Dziga Vertov’s (1984, 88) early‐twentieth‐century concept of the “Kino‐eye,” which recognized the film camera as ideally suited to visualize, record, and ultimately remember social realities:

Kino‐eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact, or film documents as opposed to the exchange of cinematic or theatrical presentations …. Kino‐eye plunges into the seeming chaos of life to find in life itself the response to an assigned theme. To find the resultant force amongst the million phenomena related to the given theme. To edit: to wrest through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful, from life; to organize the film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order.

Vertov’s point of view—that the camera has the power to extract what is most typical from human life—is reinforced in Zavattini’s notion that film can be used to document and resonate with an audience, thus promoting social change.

In addition, and perhaps even more relevant, Zavattini’s position reminds us of the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci and his call for political change through cultural development and engagement. Gramsci’s concept of national popular culture was rooted in the daily, lived, experiences of Italy’s marginalized and disempowered peasant and urban working poor, who had the potential to counter the hegemonic practices of the ruling class. While Gramsci’s position on what was still the young medium of cinema is underdeveloped at best, his theories of the potential for subaltern action are clear. Furthermore, Gramsci, who died in 1937 while imprisoned by Mussolini, was a constant influence on Italian artists and thinkers well into the postwar decades. In fact, his influence on film practices in Italy extends beyond the production of cinema itself. In 1958, the Italian film scholar Camillo Marino, working within the rural Italian southern province of Avellino, began an influential film journal called Cinemasud (Speranza 2002). The journal’s name (meaning “Cinema South”) evoked its leftist ideological mission, which was very much an attempt to put Gramsci’s theories into action. Marino and his colleagues created a critical dialogue about cinema in order to find and reinforce solidarities between southern Italians’ experience of disenfranchisement on a personal and institutional level and communities across the globe that were affected by Western colonialism and imperialism. As an offshoot of the journal, and with the help of Pasolini, the southern Italian film professionals started the Festival di Neorealismo (1959–1989), which highlighted works from nations where economic, political, and cultural marginalization were the norm, with particular emphasis on films from Eastern Europe and Latin America (Speranza 2007). Such an example begins to suggest the varied possibilities of a global neorealist approach to the art and theory of cinema.

Italian Neorealism Beyond the First Years

Italian film scholars have made ideological connections among various films and filmmakers within Italy and the legacy of neorealism. Luca Barattoni (2012, 61), for instance, comments on how Italian filmmakers of the 1960s “distilled the neorealist image for their own aesthetic agenda” with Pasolini and Gillo Pontecorvo using neorealism as a starting point to construct their own style of engaged and expressive cinema. More recently, contemporary filmmakers—from Gianni Amelio to Matteo Garrone—have shaped their body of work with both the burden and strength of a neorealist heritage behind them (Marcus 2007; Ruberto and Wilson 2007; Verdicchio 2007, 2011). Nonetheless, while for all these filmmakers neorealism might be seen as a starting point, it was not something they adopted wholly or uncritically.⁶

Pasolini is a case in point. The artist not only engaged with neorealism in his poetry but also quite explicitly critiqued the limitations of neorealism in cinema. As Pasquale Verdicchio (1997, 69) puts it, Pasolini “expands on neorealism’s dictum that to ‘show poverty (or injustice) is to protest against it’” by not veiling his work’s political perspectives. Pasolini’s films, then, “represent a construction of a pedagogical series of works that are firmly political in scope, and ideological in their warnings,” thus achieving his unique fusion of the political and the creative.

Similarly, we might consider the work of Pontecorvo, whose political awakening coincides with neorealism’s decline in Italy in the 1950s (Celli 2005, xxi). As Clarissa Clò (2008) argues, Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas’s La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) represents another of the diverse avenues of influence of the genre characterized by a relationship to militant radical cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Pontecorvo and Solinas were asked to make the film by members of the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) organization. Regardless of whether or not Pontecorvo’s direct connection to Italian neorealism was a reason why he was approached by the Algerian government to coproduce a film, his and Solinas’s orientation within the film was neorealist:

Pontecorvo’s choices … in terms of style, content, mise‐en‐scène, casting and characterization, powerfully contributed to its successful portrayal of a revolution. Drawing from Italian Neorealism and Rossellini’s lesson, particularly in Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), he used only nonprofessional actors, except for Jean Martin who plays Colonel Mathieu; he shot on location in the Casbah and the European Quarter of Algiers, and worked for weeks on the photography in order to give to the black and white film the grainy quality of a TV newsreel which, he claimed, was “the kind of photography through which people are most commonly accustomed to coming in touch with reality.”

(Clò 2008, 207)

Clò’s exploration of the legacy of La battaglia di Algeri frames the film as a “cultural text” that resonated with and connected nations and communities that were “in struggle against colonialism and capitalism both in the First and Third Worlds” (204). Such a continuum reflects the way in which neorealist films impacted global cultural practices.

Figure 9.2 Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948). Screen grab.

While the film’s importance to militant left‐wing cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and its indebtedness to Italian neorealism are not surprising, its relevance in a post‐9/11 American context is somewhat fraught (Clò 2008). Page DuBois and others have highlighted the fact that the torture techniques used in the United States’ “war on terror” (waterboarding, electric shock, isolation, etc.) have their origins in lessons taught by the Gestapo. One sees references to such techniques in Roma città aperta and La battaglia di Algeri. DuBois (1991, 5) traces a path from the Gestapo to the French, “who taught the Americans in Indochina, and they passed on some of their expertise to the Argentinian, the Chilean, El Salvadoran torturers.” This rendition of torturous lessons learned is partially correct. La battaglia di Algeri played an even more prominent and direct role in counterinsurgency pedagogy in the Americas than many people realize. In her documentary, Death Squadrons: The French School (2003), Marie‐Monique Robin explores the almost simultaneous transfer of methods of torture and death‐squad procedures used by the French in Algeria in the 1950s to the Dirty War officers in Argentina and to American intelligence forces. In both cases, La battaglia di Algeri served as an important teaching text, and in the case of Operation Condor, the links to France are stronger than previously thought. And yet, in spite of this significant, if surprising, drift of some of the film’s content into counterinsurgency hands, La battaglia di Algeri remains, as Edward Said (2000, 283) suggested, a film whose spirit is full of “resourceful revolutionary optimism.”

These reflections on Pasolini and Pontecorvo remind us of the diverse ways neorealism’s legacy has continued throughout Italian cinema and point to its promise for filmmakers outside Italy.

Multiple Directions of Influence

Perhaps the most striking examples of how neorealism continued to be shaped internationally come from Latin America. To begin with, Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri called Italian neorealism the “cinema of the humble and offended” and suggested that it was possible everywhere. For Birri, neorealism reflected an exportable rhetoric of underdevelopment, one that freed filmmakers around the world to experiment in their work with compelling stories about other realities (Hess 1993, 110). Birri’s own classic Tire Dié (Throw a Dime, 1960) is an experimental documentary that catalogues the daily struggles of members of a shantytown in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina, with a particular emphasis on the community’s children, who are small, agile, and fast enough to beg for money from the passengers on a moving train, as it slows just long enough to cross a bridge. The pathos evoked by the images of children risking their lives for a dime, only to be ignored by the train’s upper‐class passengers, rivals that derived from Bruno’s hope that his father’s bicycle will be recovered in De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette. The fact that Birri’s film is a documentary offers an added realist dimension to this pathos.

Most directly, Italian neorealism infiltrated Latin America by way of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Birri, Julio García Espinosa, and Gabriel García Márquez (B. Ruby Rich 1997). These and other Latin American filmmakers travelled to Rome to study under the guidance of Zavattini, at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and at the University of Rome, between 1952 and 1955, and thus forever linked the postwar movement with later experiments in cinema.

Tomás Crowder‐Taraborrelli (2007) suggests that García Márquez’s encounter with neorealism fueled a literary style (“magical realism”), rather than a cinematic one. In his review of Ladri di biciclette for El Heraldo, García Márquez “was especially impressed by the way in which De Sica and Cesare Zavattini turned a bicycle into a myth, calling it ‘a divinity on wheels and pedals with which—and only with which—man can be superior to hunger’” (quoted in Crowder‐Taraborrelli 2007, 129). García Márquez’s encounter with Cesare Zavattini in Rome (after the premier of Ladri di biciclette) and the importance of that meeting to his literary career had an impact on the development of an emerging community of militant and experimental artists, filmmakers, and theorists. In the short story “The Saint” (from his Strange Pilgrims collection), García Márquez (1993) reconfigures a newspaper article he wrote about a man named Margarito Duarte from Colombia, who journeyed to Rome with the intact corpse of his young daughter, in order to try to have a meeting with the Pope so that she might be beatified. In the short story, the father walks endlessly around Rome with a small coffin, the size of a violin case, in his arms. While García Márquez tells the father’s story, through first‐person narration, in “The Saint,” he likewise shapes a tale of how neorealism left Italy through the student–teacher relationship between Zavattini and his group of mentees, thereby creating a kind of origin myth regarding neorealism’s global phenomenon:

Cesare Zavattini … taught us plot development and screenwriting. He was one of the great figures in the history of film and the only one who maintained a personal relationship with us outside class. He tried to teach us not only the craft but a different way of looking at life.

(García Márquez 1993, 48)

This “different way of looking at life,” recalls Zavattini’s words, cited earlier, about film and reality.

Back in Argentina, Birri founded the Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral (also known as the Documentary School of Santa Fe), where he instructed students in social criticism and film. For Birri, incorporating a socially attuned filmmaking style that championed the marginalized made sense even simply from his own family’s migration history, as he explained in an interview:

Logically enough, this eagerness to reach the broadest possible audience, which characterizes all my work, has a lot to do with my own background and class consciousness. My popular roots are still fresh. I am a typical Argentine; I am the second generation of an immigrant family. Hard times and intrusive carabinieri prompted my anarchist grandfather, a farmer and miller from Northern Italy, to emigrate to Argentina around 1880.

(Quoted in Burton 1986, 2)

Birri went on to direct what are now considered classics of the social documentary genre: not only Tire Dié but Los inundados (The Flooded Ones, 1961). Moreover, his efforts had a direct influence on Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, who worked secretly from 1966 to 1968 on a 4‐hour film (La hora de los hornos, The Hour of the Furnaces) that lambasted the Argentine military dictatorship and its capitalist supporters. Out of this radical experiment in filmmaking, which included clandestine screenings and script revisions based on audience input, Solanas and Getino published in 1969 an influential manifesto on radical filmmaking for a revolutionary audience, titled “Towards a Third Cinema” (“Tercer Cine,” published originally in Tricontinental and translated a year later in Cineaste), in which they argued:

In an alienated world, culture—obviously—is a deformed and deforming product. To overcome this it is necessary to have a culture of and for the revolution, a subversive culture capable of contributing to the downfall of capitalist society. In the specific case of cinema—the art of the masses par excellence—its transformation from mere entertainment into an active means of de‐alienation becomes imperative. The camera then becomes imperative. Its role in the battle for the complete liberation of man is of primary importance. The camera then becomes a gun, and the cinema must be a guerilla cinema. (1)

Solanas and Getino’s (1970) words militarize the sensibility of Zavattini, for the sociopolitical climate and revolutionary stakes in 1960s Latin America were different from those of an Italian post‐Fascist era. In fact, as Rachel Gabara (2007) has argued, whereas Italian neorealist directors had been waging an internal struggle for an Italian authenticity untouched by Fascism, Latin American filmmakers attempted to develop a “regional realism” that would allow them to resist centuries of multilayered European and North American colonization (194). Latin American filmmakers began with neorealism but “ended up rethinking realism itself to remake both Latin American film and Latin American reality” (197).

In fact, Gabara (2007) suggests that a geopolitical offshoot of this process of “regional realism” can be found in the undertheorized relationship of influence among Italian neorealism, Latin American cinematic movements, and African cinema, which further attests to the wide net of film culture and helps clarify that no one film tradition functions outside others. While figures such as De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti are generally absent from discussions of African cinema, Gabara points out that African postcolonial cinema was concerned with presenting a more realistic image of Africans than found in European films about Africans, which position them as “exotic backdrops” (198). She cites the 1973 Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algeria, which brought together sub‐Saharan African filmmakers and Latin American filmmakers (including Fernando Birri), as an important moment, which resulted in a set of common goals toward supporting filmmaking that was realistic and self‐consciously critical at the same time. Sada Niang (2012, 196–97) also discusses this 1973 meeting as seminal because it brought together filmmakers from Algeria and other African nations and featured the “aesthetics of neorealism” as a cornerstone in the “crafting of a new—albeit ideal—aesthetic charter for the emerging African cinema.” In addition, Niang (196) suggests that there were identifiable linkages between Italian neorealism and African cinema even as far back as the early 1960s when several African filmmakers (largely from North Africa) studied at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; notable among them were Souheil Ben‐Barka (Morocco), Moussa Haddad (Algeria), and Ababacar Samb Makharam (Senegal).

While Ousmane Sembène’s films of the 1960s have been called neorealist by European and North American critics, Gabara argues that this simplistic assessment misses the larger point of the particularly African quality of Sembène’s “innovative realism,” an approach that parallels Italian neorealism or New Latin American Cinema, but that is ultimately based on rejection and refusal rather than wholesale adoption. Niang (2012, 198) places a higher value on the aesthetic affinities between Italian neorealism and the emerging African cinema of the 1960s, citing the Fédération Panafricaine de Cinéastes (Fepaci) which:

matched almost point by point the major positions of Italian neorealists: film becomes an argument for action on persons, social processes, and social conditions. Film language, narrative, dialogues, music and costumes are informed by the relevant features of the local context and combine to ground the meaning of—mostly linear—narratives, actions, and character types in reality. … It is a means through which the lives of African men and women can be improved if not changed.

Just as the term Italian neorealism eludes exact definition and travels across a wide horizon of interpretations, the migration of the genre into other national film traditions (e.g., German Rubble Films, the Czech New Wave, Third Cinema, Brazil’s Cinema Novo, New Latin American Cinema)⁷ has taken many paths. In Brazil, neorealism infiltrated the cinema community directly through the films of Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Glauber Rocha, both of whom, according to Antonio Traverso (2007, 166), “studied film in Europe and became precursors of a lasting tradition of political filmmaking in Brazil.” Traverso traces a line of influence in Brazil from the Italian neorealists, to dos Santos and Rocha, to more contemporary films such as Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1980) and Walter Salle’s Central Station (1998). Concetta Caresita Greenfield (1973, 112) suggests that in Brazil, the type of neorealist influence found in dos Santos’ Vidas Secas (Barren Lives, 1963)—directly influenced by a Zavattinian emphasis on the exploitation and humiliation of the lower classes—evolves into a form she calls “expressive realism.” Expressive realism, associated with Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969), incorporates symbolic, revolutionary folk epic and is able to complement the conventions of Italian neorealism (115). Greenfield contrasts this complementary coexistence between neorealism and expressive realism in Brazilian film with the more documentary, journalistic, and traditionally neorealist work of New Chilean Cinema. For example, she cites Miguel Littín’s El Chacal de Nahueltoro (Jackal of Nahueltoro, 1969) and Aldo Francia’s Valparaíso, mi amor (Valparaiso My Love, 1969) as traditional neorealist films (122). The influence of Italian neorealism on Cinema Novo, which can be traced back to films such as Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, Rossellini, 1947) and Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950), centers on themes of violence, consumption, physical ruins and reconstruction, and moral collapse. The children in Babenco’s Pixote live and play in the rubble of “third‐world corporate capitalism and … an adult world so absorbed in itself that it has neither time nor compassion for these children” (Traverso 2007, 165). Italian neorealism became part of Cinema Novo’s mission to create a filmmaking style that emphasized cultural decolonization and experimentation.

The first neorealist experiment in Cuba was, not surprisingly, a collaborative endeavor between Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa (both of whom studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia), and several of their countrymen. El Mégano (The Charcoal Worker, 1954) denounced the exploitation of coal workers on the island and, garnering the attention of the Batista regime, was confiscated (Burton 1997, 126). This film enjoys “the special distinction of being the only recognized antecedent of post‐revolutionary cinema …. All who collaborated on it have gone on to become leading figures in the ICAIC [the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry]” (126). Under the direction of Santiago Álvarez, the ICAIC attempted to develop a new form of revolutionary visual literacy aimed at all of Latin America. As in the case of the postwar neorealist filmmakers in Italy, revolutionary filmmakers in Cuba were limited in terms of funds, materials, and resources (127). The influence of Italian neorealism in early 1960s Cuba is thus a product of postrevolutionary socioeconomic conditions on the island combined with a prerevolutionary ideological and aesthetic interest, on the part of certain filmmakers, in the Italian neorealist project (132).

Figure 9.3 El mégano (The Charcoal Worker, Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1955). Screen grab.

Roma città aperta and Ladri di biciclette: Echoes, Parallels, Influence

As the preceding examples suggest, neorealism’s afterlife in the filmmaking world outside Italy is especially inspiring. What becomes clear in the Latin American cases as well as the countless other examples from across the globe is the long‐term echo specifically of Roma città aperta and Ladri di biciclette, which, arguably more than any other films, moved the concept of neorealism onto international terrain, in an ongoing transmigration of creative thought, political energy, and filmic production. What is of central interest to us is not so much the intentionality of these two films but instead their cultural movement as other filmmakers responded to them.

The tendency toward the globalization of neorealism seems almost inherent to the style itself and perhaps can be understood as stemming from the communal and broad‐based approach of the films. Joseph Luzzi (2014, 34), in his A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film, reminds us of the prominence of chorality in early neorealist films and teases out this moral, cultural, and politicized push to the communal in a number of postwar films. Luzzi captures the essence of this choral cultural gesture as a reflection on the need for generous and progressive communities:

All told, the choral imagery in neorealist film stemmed from a sense of commitment beholden more often than not (especially in Visconti) to leftist discourses about the political function of the artist. That chorality in modern art became associated with cinematic neorealism and the discourse of italianita suggests the degree to which the choral was thought to have found its supreme expression in the emerging medium of film, the total art especially poised for sociopolitical intervention.

Neorealism screened hope, generosity, and the spirit of the undervalued and exploited. Thus, while Hollywood became a global model of how economic success and worldwide reach could be had through motion pictures, neorealism became a model for a more politicized, accessible, and activist art. This is not to suggest that Hollywood’s films were devoid of political implications but rather that the Italian exported examples were more explicitly marked with a kind of ideological perspective that was compelling to filmmakers in the throes of politically charged circumstances.

Again and again, filmmakers have noted that neorealism taught simple lessons that were easily translatable and transportable to new locations—that neorealism could be made local, thus creating a glocal neorealist movement of sorts. The exact moment or event that triggered this cultural migration is not always easy to pinpoint. For instance, in the case of Hong Kong, as early as 1983, the film scholar Lam Lin‐Tong noted the influence of neorealism on a number of cinema movements worldwide. He pointed out that these traces of neorealist‐style filmmaking overlapped with countries undergoing “political unrest, economic disaster resulting from wars, the intervention of Western imperialism, the demand for decolonization, and the independence movements of the third world” (in Chan 2007, 207),⁸ but he did not focus on a specific film or sequence of films that connected say China or Hong Kong with neorealism. However, more recent scholarship makes explicit connections between Sixth Generation filmmakers in contemporary China and Italian neorealism. Characterized by a return of sorts to an amateur, realist aesthetic, Sixth Generation films, such as Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (2000), Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Shan Going Home (1995) and Still Life (2006), represent the work of a cadre of filmmakers directly affected by post–Tiananmen Square state censorship policies. For this reason, Sixth Generation filmmakers have created a number of inexpensive films using unprofessional actors that explore the unglamorous, contradictory sides of China’s economic rise as a modern world leader (Zhong 2014).

In other instances, the origin story, so to speak, is much more precise and easier to map, such as in the case of García Márquez and Latin American cinema. Or, for example, during the Cold War years, throughout Soviet Bloc countries, where Italian neorealist films were regularly used in film schools as illustrations both of how to film the quotidian and how to critique capitalist structures through cinema (Giovacchini and Sklar 2012; Ubnick 2007). Even more specifically, we know that filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray and Fernando Birri have recalled the kind of epiphanic effect that seeing neorealist films for the first time had on their creative impulses.

Others also recall the significance of first seeing such Italian films. For example, American director Martin Scorsese makes note of the impact of watching Italian films on television in New York during his childhood:

[my films are in a] direct line with Italian neorealism—Paisan and The Bicycle Thief and Shoeshine; real people, non‐actors, in real urban settings. There’s no doubt about it. They were more than movies to me. They especially hit me at that age of five or six years old, because it was so personal because of watching them with my family.

(quoted in Schickel 2011, 58)

Again and again, in interviews and elsewhere, Scorsese identifies these and other postwar Italian films as crucial to his aesthetic development, and this identification has repeatedly been used to discuss his films in neorealist terms (Ruberto 2014). Furthermore, the tendency in many of his films to reflect a gritty, urban atmosphere, to highlight the rough edges of humanity, and to strive for authenticity of language, dress, location, and music have been associated to varying degrees with the Italian postwar style. And while, by and large, Scorsese’s films are not socially engaged or political films to the same degree as those of the other non‐Italian filmmakers we have been discussing here, his work as an advocate and activist for film globally is arguably a significant link to the Italian postwar cinematic tradition precisely because it is a politicized gesture. Laura E. Ruberto posits as much by outlining Scorsese’s references to watching Italian neorealism in relation to the restoration and distribution work he has spearheaded through his World Cinema Foundation (WCF), and its support of films from countries whose national film systems are politically or economically unable to care for their cinematic patrimony. By restoring rare films and bringing them to a global audience, the WCF functions within the ethical position of Italian neorealism: it uses “cinema to give voice to peoples and stories that usually remain unheard and unseen within a dominant culture” and “offers alternative cinematic narratives, ones which promote subaltern cultural trends, not dominant consumerist ones” (Ruberto 2014, 7).

His politics of solidarity has led Scorsese to support arrested or imprisoned filmmakers in countries such as Syria or Iran. In 2012, he spoke out against the detainment of Syrian filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia (cited in Fernandez 2012), and he has made supportive statements for Iranian filmmakers Mohammed Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi, who were arrested and, in Panahi’s case, sentenced to 6 years in prison and a 20‐year ban on filmmaking. Not surprisingly, the work of all three of these filmmakers has at times been described as neorealist.

Many critics have made sense of much of postrevolutionary Iranian filmmaking by talking about how it adopts neorealist techniques and vision for new creative purposes. Formal parallels abound, especially between the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi and their Italian postwar colleagues. Interestingly, in interviews, both Kiarostomi (2002) and Panahi (Deasy 2010) position themselves as working differently within a neorealist tradition, but their reliance on nonprofessional actors and on‐location shooting and their employment of children and marginal plots all suggest the abiding presence of neorealism, at least as an indirect influence.⁹ That these filmmakers are working within a heavily censored and restricted industry and that both are in different ways supporters of Iranian political opposition movements further connect their creative efforts to the revolutionary potential neorealism offers.

The connection between politics and filmmaking is key to how Panahi’s work has been understood, especially after his arrest. In speaking about that work in the wake of the elder Panahi’s 2009 arrest, Panahi’s son, Panah Panahi, describes his father’s work as a “humanistic cinema” that is indebted to Italian neorealism in its gritty dedication to ordinary human life. Perhaps even more strongly, he has claimed, “it was [Ladri di biciclette] that taught [my father] cinema” (quoted in Deasy 2001).

In referencing Iranian cinema’s apparent connection to neorealism, Jafar Panahi (2001) outlines an approach to filmmaking and a theory of the art form that certainly resonates with Zavattini’s words, so much so that it is worth quoting at length:

The Iranian cinema treats social subjects. Because you’re showing social problems, you want to be more realistic and give the actual, the real aesthetics of the situation. If the audience feels the same as what they see, then they would be more sympathetic. Because you’re talking about the humanitarian aspects of things, it will touch your heart. We talk about small events or small things, but it’s very deep and it’s very wide—things that are happening in life. According to this mode, it has a poetic way and an artistic way. This may be one of the differences between Iranian movies and the movies of other countries: humanitarian events interpreted in a poetic and artistic way. In a world where films are made with millions of dollars, we made a film about a little girl who wants to buy a fish for less than a dollar (The White Balloon, 1995)—this is what we’re trying to show. Whatever shows the truth of the society, in a very artistic way—that will find its own neo‐realism.¹⁰

Panahi positions Iranian cinema outside commercial pressures and emphasizes a visual medium that poetically underscores the dramatic nuances of everyday life. In essence, he characterizes an Iranian neorealism. His short 2010 film, The Accordion, is a succinct example—a reworking of neorealism within an Iranian context. The film uses nonprofessional actors, on‐location shooting, young protagonists, a sense of real time, and regional accents to engage an audience. It gently tells the tale of two young musicians, one of whose accordion is stolen while they are playing outside a mosque. The camera then follows them around the streets of Tehran as they look for their instrument and seek a resolution with the thief. The short, 8‐minute, film bears a striking resemblance to Ladri di biciclette in both plot and visual tropes, and, at the same time, critiques contemporary Iranian dominant culture’s views on public behavior through the innocent children’s desire for basic human dignity, self‐preservation, and friendship.

The Most Quotidian Story, an Epilogue

We have presented neorealism’s influences on international cinema within the context of, among other things, revolutionary and politicized filmmaking. A conclusion to this overview must note that this story remains unfinished; filmmakers continue to look to neorealism as a model for their art in new and complex ways. This survey of influence and of parallels reminds us that neorealism, while not easy to define in its original form, becomes even more fluid as it moves past Italian borders. At the same time, the general tenor of the films discussed here allows for a style that is continually adaptable to new locations, new communities, and new artistic needs. In other words, “there may be rules, but they will be broken,” and ultimately this is neorealism’s staying power (Ruberto and Wilson 2007, 7).

Around the time that Ladri di biciclette was released, Cesare Zavattini (2009, 81) wrote a short piece, only recently published, where he seems set on explaining as clearly as possible the filmmaking style he and De Sica were interested in creating:

De Sica and I believe we now know what it is we want. We want a cinema that helps us understand ourselves. We are tired of lying …. Film has to speak the truth and to do so does not mean we have to be prophets. Only now, after the stupidest of all the wars, because it has come after the others, are we able to really see the truth; we see it right in front of us, on the expressions of a factory worker or a poor man …. We would feel like we have utterly failed if the story of the Roman bill‐poster was not seen as the most quotidian story of this world.

These words offer prescient hints about the ways in which Italian neorealism would have an active afterlife well past its first years. Zavattini’s “most quotidian story of this world” has often proven transnationally to be a most interesting and, at times most political, one.

References

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Notes

1 The English translation of the poem cited here comes from the uncredited text of Borgna, Ballo, and Bergaia (2014): Pasolini Roma: Cinema, Arte, Fotografia, Letteratura, Poesia, Critica.

2 Minghelli (2014, 124) evokes this Pasolini poem also, noting the emotional impact of the moment: “And so the tears erupting in front of the images of that faraway Rome become a purely physical event unmoored from memory and history.”

3 For more in‐depth discussions of the specifics of how neorealism continues within and outside an Italian context, see Ruberto and Wilson (2007) and Giovacchini and Sklar (2012). Each of these collections addresses a series of specific filmmakers and/or film traditions that have been influenced by neorealism, sometimes explicitly (such as Satyajit Ray’s films from India) other times implicitly (such as Ousemene Sembene’s films from Senegal). In this chapter, we shed new light on some of the material from these studies.

4 For more on Ray and neorealism, see Biswas (2007); for other directions neorealism took in Indian filmmaking, see Majumdar (2012).

5 See, for instance, Bruno’s (1993) work on Elvira Notari, which takes note of the Neapolitan filmmaker’s use of on‐location shooting and nonprofessional actors, two traits not conventionally associated with Italian silent cinema.

6 Many other Italian filmmakers (e.g., Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Ermanno Olmi) could be discussed in terms of the legacy of neorealism (Marcus 1987).

7 For the relationship between neorealism and post–World War II “German Rubble Films,” see Fisher (2007); for neorealism and the Czech New Wave, see Ucnik (2007); for neorealism and Third Cinema and Cinema Novo, see Traverso (2007), Crowder‐Taraborelli (2007), Wilson (2007), Halperin (2012), and Hess (1993).

8 Lam Lin‐Tong’s article is not available through university libraries or other sources in the West. We are thus indebted to Natalia Sui‐hung Chan’s essay in our anthology (2007) for uncovering this rare reflection by early Chinese film scholars about Italian cinema.

9 For Kiarostami’s comments on the (non)influence of neorealism and Rossellini, see his September 28, 2002, interview in The Telegraph.

10 Panahi goes on to say, “but this depends on the period. In Italy, neo‐realism was defined by its time after the war. And now in Iran, that kind of neo‐realism is disappearing” (Panahi 2001). However, the fact that a certain kind of neorealism can disappear (or more likely mutate) does not negate the importance of neorealism in the Iranian work we have been discussing. In fact, by talking of “kinds” of neorealism, Panahi implies that neorealism itself endures, though its manifestations may change.