Adriano Aprà
To begin with, it will be useful to summarize cultural relations between Italy and France in the period preceding the “discovery” of neorealism. In the 1910s, Italy, by then heavily industrialized, “stole” several comic actors from France: André Deed (known as Cretinetti), Marcel Fabre (Robinet), and Raymond Fran (Kri‐Kri), while Ferdinand Guillaume (known as Tontolini at the Cines production house, but Polidor at Pasquali productions) was, in spite of his name, Italian. They were to become extremely popular in Italy. One should also recall the presence at Itala Film of Turin of the Catalan “master of tricks,” Segundo de Chomón, who was of French background, and the occasional voyage through Italy of French directors Vincent Denizot, Louis Gasnier, Gaston Ravel, and Gaston Velle.
When the film industry went into deep crisis in the 1920s, a number of Italian directors went abroad to France, including Carmine Gallone and, especially, Augusto Genina, who produced two excellent films, Prix de beauté (Miss Europe) (Miss Europe, 1930) and Nous ne sommes plus des enfants (We Are Not Children, 1934). In the 1930s, the production of films in both French and Italian editions (with different casts) became common, with French actors performing in Italian films and French directors working on Italian majority or minority film coproductions. Worthy of mention in this regard are Jean Epstein (Cuor di vagabondo/Coeur de guex, 1936), Jean‐Paul Paulin (Jungla nera/L'esclave blanc, 1936—a film that was to have been directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer), Pierre Chenal (Il fu Mattia Pascal/L'homme de nulle part/Feu Mathias Pascal, 1937), Abel Gance (Ladro di donne/Le voleur de femmes/The Woman Thief, 1938, and Le Capitaine Fracasse/La maschera sul cuore/Captain Fracasse, 1943, coproduced by the French branch of Lux Film, a leading Italian production company), Marcel l'Herbier (Terra di fuoco/Terre de feu, with Giorgio Ferroni, 1939, and Ecco la felicità/La comédie du bonheur, 1940), Louis Daquin (Le voyageur de la Toussaint/Il viaggiatore di Ognissanti, 1943), and Christian‐Jaque (Carmen, 1944).
Particularly intriguing was the arrival in Italy of Jean Renoir for Tosca (1941), a film that, because of the outbreak of war, saw the director’s sudden return to France and his replacement by his assistant, Carl Koch, who completed the picture. The hiring of Renoir was not by chance. It signaled a growing interest in French realist cinema not only by critics but also by an industry not yet entirely conditioned by Fascism. Curiosity about the cinema of Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Julien Duvivier produced, among the more attentive and engaged critics, articles that urged an examination of the French realist model in the hope of a similar renewal of Italian cinema.
Symptomatic, for instance, was Giuseppe De Santis’s (1943, 86–87) review of Renoir's L'angelo del male (La bête humaine, 1938), released in Italy much later and in a heavily censored, dubbed version: “Renoir's love of the creative research of human truth, acknowledged from the very first of his films, has in this case achieved miracles. We know of few cinematic works with such a powerful and frank connection to life…. We would like to conclude these remarks not with the hope that L'Angelo del male will make our directors discover themselves, but, at least, with the hope that it might open their eyes to the world of poetry.” More significant yet was a 1943 piece by Umberto Barbaro (1976, 500–504), titled “Neorealismo,” in which the critic and theorist, starting with Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) by Carné (released in Italy in 1943 under the title Il porto delle nebbie), undertakes a lengthy discussion of what he initially terms “French cinematic realism,” and then “French neorealism.” Finally, he calls for a “realistic film” for Italy, citing (somewhat strangely) the appearance in a Ferrara square in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1942) of an ice‐cream cart. These exhortations to look to France for inspiration explain why Visconti was at Renoir's side during the shooting of Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country, 1936), and somewhat less so, the presence of Michelangelo Antonioni on the set of Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir (1942), by contrast a strikingly “unrealistic” film.
Visconti’s debt to Renoir in his debut, Ossessione, was signaled in a journalist's account of the production: “That director Luchino Visconti has collaborated with Jean Renoir in the past emerges in every frame, even unconsciously: thus does he manage to express his vision, to be more renoiresque than Renoir himself. In his case, we might even talk about an obsession with realism” (Càllari 1943, 7). In the first review of a film that at the time received extremely limited circulation due to censorship issues, the young Guido Aristarco (1943, 3)—who would become one of Italy’s most influential critics in the postwar period—remarked, “[The dialogue] is characterized by a stark realism that in certain lines recalls [John] Steinbeck and the French neorealism of Renoir, Carné, Duvivier. The influence of this cinematic current is clearly evident throughout the whole movie, particularly in the bluntness of the content, which is especially influenced by the maestro Renoir (in whose school Visconti developed).”
That might be considered one of the first uses of the term “neorealism” in relation—albeit indirectly—to an Italian film, but Aristarco’s debt was more than likely to Barbaro (1976), whose article had been published a few days earlier. The claim that Mario Serandrei, the editor of Ossessione, was the first to speak of neorealism, appears less sustainable. While previewing the rushes of the film in Rome, he wrote to Visconti in September–October 1942: “I do not know how I could define this type of cinema if not with the adjective ‘neorealist.’” The problem is that Serandrei’s letter was made public much later (Visconti 1973, 56). In any case, Ossessione was clearly received from the start as a film of French derivation, although it cannot be excluded that the term “neorealism” was circulating in Italian cinema circles still confused between French origin and Italian practice.
Even when the term “neorealism” was applied in direct reference to Italian postwar cinema, its context was French. Consider, for example, the following statement by Georges Sadoul (1946b, 8):
This great Italian film is entirely worthy of the unprecedented success that greeted it in the United States, and which has been all the more so because New York does not yet know our own Bataille du rail. Rome ville ouverte [Roma città aperta/Rome Open City, Roberto Rossellini 1945] is a powerful work, brave and true. From the other side of the Alps comes a new “verism,” a realism that seems to be the hallmark of the best contemporary European productions. Why do they still hesitate to show us French these new Italian films? Roma città aperta, Il bandito [The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada, 1946]—and Chuchas [Sciuscià/Shoeshine, Vittorio De Sica, 1946) and Le soleil se lèvera demain [Il sole sorge ancora, Aldo Vergano, 1946], which [unlike the first two] were not screened at Cannes. One can predict for these films a comparable success to that of Swedish and expressionist films a quarter of a century ago. The new greatness of Italian cinema, liberated from Fascism, is the great news that the festival showed us.
Thus wrote the great French historian (whose Histoire générale du cinema [1945–1954] was translated in 1955, becoming a point of reference for years to come) in the closing statement of the first Festival of Cannes. It was the first sign of recognition of a “new ‘verism,’” not yet termed neorealism, that according to Sadoul characterized not only certain Italian films but also other contemporary European productions seen at Cannes: the Swiss Die letzte Chance (The Last Chance, 1945) by Leopold Lindtberg, and the French Bataille du rail (The Battle of the Rails, Réne Clément, 1946) and Farrebique ou le quatre saisons (Georges Rouquier, 1946). Initially, there was talk of a European school, but a few months later the attention focused exclusively on Italy.
The reception of the first Italian postwar films at Cannes was confirmed in November with the screening of Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà (Paisan, 1946) in Paris in the presence of the director. It was a triumph. The definitions of this “new” realism multiplied. What was also remarkable was that Marxist and Catholic critics—the two fronts lining up against each other in Italy—were in agreement in their evaluations of this form of cinema. On that occasion, the Marxist Sadoul (1946a, 7) reiterated his conception of “nouveau réalisme” as a European tendency, and the same term was used by the Catholic André Bazin (1947, 5) shortly afterward.
In the meantime, Sadoul (1947, 8) proposed the term “neorealism,” still in reference to European cinema, but including Italian cinema. In fact, one of the first documents in Italy to use the term “neorealism”—in quotation marks and hyphenated—in reference to postwar Italian cinema was a column by the Marxist Luigi Chiarini (1948, 3) that inaugurated the new series of Bianco e Nero, the magazine he directed, and that discussed “what has been termed by foreign critics as the ‘neo‐realist Italian school.'” But who were these foreign critics? Sadoul? Bazin? In reality it was a Belgian Dominican monk Félix Morlion (1979, 116), a future collaborator of Rossellini, who affirms in an essay of June 1948: “Since we Catholic critics invented the term ‘neo‐realist school of cinema,' we shall have to demonstrate and defend just what it is we find of substance in this artistic trend.”
When did Morlion propose the term? It was revealed by Barbaro (1948, 5), who accused the Azione Cattolica Italiana (Italian Catholic Action) of working “against the best Italian films, against the films of the neo‐realist school, such as Paisà, of which a Belgian Dominican padre, O.P. [Ordo Predicatorum, that is to say, a Domenican and thus, certainly, Morlion], has written that it introduces for the first time the Christian spirit in cinema.”
The foreign origin, namely French (or francophone), whether Marxist or Catholic, was denied in Italy, without supporting evidence, only by the Marxist De Santis (1950, 261): “The term ‘neorealism’ was not coined in France, where the discussion was always and only of the ‘nouvelle école italienne.’ It was Italian critics who coined this ‘label’ to refer to works of a particular tendency.” Aside from, perhaps, Barbaro in 1943, De Santis was here referring to Bazin and his founding essay “Le réalisme cinématographique et l'école italienne de la Libération” (Bazin 1948), which in fact does not employ the term neorealism. On the other hand, a critic of similar political tendency, Antonio Pietrangeli, who would also become a director, wrote of a “school baptized ‘neorealist, postwar’ in France” (12), in an essay published in 1948 in which he tried for the first time to trace an Italian genesis for the new movement (Pietrangeli 1948).
Therefore, the French origin of the term, of Marxist as much as Catholic provenance, was accepted by both opposing groups in Italy, but only ex post facto, after the main neorealist films had been created or were in process of production. The dual national origins of the term, soon to be forgotten, were not without consequences in terms of the interpretation of these films. If Visconti continued to be the heritage of Italian Marxist critics, Rossellini would, after the disastrous double presentation at the 1950 Venice Film Festival of Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (Stromboli, 1950) out of competition, and Francesco Giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis, 1950) in competition (both heavily promoted by Catholics), be rapidly abandoned to the French, in particular to those of the Cahiers du Cinéma, Bazin among them.
The reception of Roma città aperta and Paisà and, overall, Germania anno zero (1948), was much more enthusiastic in France than in Italy, though it went with reservations that weighed on the director’s future activities. The Catholic wing of French criticism took Rossellini to its heart, with Henri Agel, the Jesuit Amédée Ayfre, and Bazin distinguishing themselves, but their influence on Italian criticism was nonexistent. By the time Eric Rohmer (1990) published his 1950 defense of Stromboli (Terra di Dio) in the Gazette du Cinéma and Alexandre Astruc his in the Cahiers du Cinéma (Astruc 1951), the demolition of the “myth” of the director of Paisà was already underway. Neither Ayfre nor Bazin was unknown to Italian critics, thanks to translations of their writings—but those writings did not address Rossellini. Italy had to wait until 1955 for the first sign of the “scandalous” reevaluation of Rossellini's films with Ingrid Bergman, then taking place in France. In that year, Cinema Nuovo, the fortnightly Marxist review, published an open letter from André Bazin (1955) to the magazine’s director, Guido Aristarco, titled “Difesa di Rossellini” (“In Defense of Rossellini”). Aristarco, instructing one of his collaborators to draft the reply, appeared deaf to the passionate arguments of the French critic in support of, among other films, Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954), a film Cinema Nuovo decided not even to review, so low in the magazine’s esteem had the director sunk.
When Cahiers du Cinéma published its list of the best films in history in the 1958 Christmas edition—in contrast with the more “official” list drawn up by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique—in third place (after Sunrise [1927] by Murnau and La règle du jeu [1939] by Renoir) was Viaggio in Italia by Rossellini, cited under the title of the original, English‐language, version Journey to Italy (Cahiers du Cinéma 1958, 20). For the young enthusiast, such as I then was myself, the shock was so great that I did everything in my power to see a film that had been ignored, rather than crushed, by most Italian critics. How was it possible that a film could be regarded a masterpiece in France, yet worthless in Italy?
Thus began my personal “defense of Rossellini” as well as, as soon as I began to publish, my attempts to propagate the Cahiers du Cinéma’s “politique des auteurs” in my country (since Rossellini was not the only underrated director in Italy). I think I succeeded. Slowly, French critical influence began to impose itself upon Italian judgments of this director (and others). How could one ever forget the line in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964): “One cannot live without Rossellini”?
Less traumatic was the Franco–Italian dialogue over Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini. It is striking that the first book on De Sica printed in Italy was the work of Bazin (1953), who, in sourcing his work, felt the need to rely not on the director but his scriptwriter. (See also the written exchange between Zavattini and his French translator, Nino Frank—Frank 2002.) This interest, however, was limited to De Sica’s first films in the postwar period: Sciuscià, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), and, with some hesitation, Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1950). We cannot identify, as is also the case in Italy, any efforts to reevaluate the later works, which increasingly reveal a shift by both director and scriptwriter away from what we can accurately define as their neorealist period.
The first monographs on Italian cinema published in France date back to these years: Nino Frank’s (1951) Cinema dell'arte. Panorama du cinéma; Patrice G. Hovald’s (1959) Le néo‐réalisme italien et ses créateurs (the best one); Raymond Borde and André Bouissy’s (1960) Le néo‐réalisme italien, une expérience de cinéma social, ; followed a few years later by Pierre Leprohon’s (1966) Le cinéma italien. On the French cinema of the 1930s—proof of prewar interest and quickly published in Italy—is Osvaldo Compassi’s 10 anni di cinema francese, volumes I (1948) and II (1949).
From 1947 onward, majority or minority coproductions with France started to occur in Italy. This resulted in exchanges of personnel, especially actors, but only rarely did loans influence the narratives of the films. Widespread use of dubbing meant that French actors in Italian film almost invariably played Italian roles, a practice that continued for many years. Jean Gabin is “French” in René Clément’s Au delà des grilles/Le mura di Malapaga/The Walls of Malapaga (1949), set in Genoa (but, thanks to dubbing, he quickly speaks impeccable Italian). He is “Italian” in È più facile che un cammello…/Pour l'amour du ciel/His Last Twelve Hours (1950) by Luigi Zampa. The same is true of Gaby Morlay in Prima comunione/Sa Majesté Monsieur Dupont/Father’s Dilemma (Alessandro Blasetti, 1950) and Anna (Alberto Lattuada, 1951), and Martine Carol in La spiaggia/La pensionnaire/Riviera (Lattuada, 1954).
Nevertheless, there are two pleasant comedies in which coproduction did influence narrative: Luciano Emmer’s Parigi è sempre Parigi/Paris est toujours Paris/Paris Is Always Paris (1951), focusing on a group of Italians on holiday, and Luigi Zampa’s Signori, in carrozza!/Rome‐Paris‐Rome (1951), dealing with a train ticket inspector who divides his time between his two families, one in Rome, the other in Paris. Both star Aldo Fabrizi, and in both cases the dubbing “Italianizes” the French characters. Perhaps the most famous case of “Italianization” concerns Fernandel in the popular series Don Camillo, based on the works of Giovanni Guareschi—the first two movies of which, Don Camillo (1952) and Il ritorno di Don Camillo (1953), were directed by Duvivier.
Indicative but isolated was I vinti (1953) by Michelangelo Antonioni, a film in three episodes about “rebel youth” filmed in Paris, Rome, and London, which retained each country’s original language in the international version.
The Franco–Italian efforts of René Clair, La beauté du diable/La bellezza del diavolo/Beauty and the Devil (1950) and Les belles‐de‐nuit/Le belle della notte/Beauties of the Night (1952), were disappointing despite the fact that Clair was held in high esteem by Italian critics and the first monograph on the director was written by an Italian, Glauco Viazzi (1946). In turn, Renoir's visit to Cinecittà, where he filmed one of his masterpieces, Le carrosse d'or/La carrozza d’oro/The Golden Coach (1952), starring Anna Magnani, was unjustly ignored by Italian critics. Italy no longer looked to France as a model. At the same time the French debate on Italian cinema was focused in the postwar period and in the 1950s on directors and films linked to the neorealist movement. Rossellini, De Sica‐Zavattini, and Visconti were the most cited. Little interest was shown in directors such as De Santis, Lattuada, or Pietro Germi. More substantial was the admiration for Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni; the French “defense” of the latter’s L'avventura at the 1960 Cannes Festival was indicative of this.
A significant change in perspective occurred at the start of the 1960s. On one hand, the first Italian translations of André Bazin's more important theoretical essays appeared, later to be collected in a volume (Bazin 1973). On the other, Cahiers du Cinéma displayed a renewed interest in Italian cinema. It published a special issue composed of essays praising, besides Rossellini, young auteurs such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio De Seta, Elio Petri, Ermanno Olmi, Francesco Rosi, and Valerio Zurlini, and it offered an expansive dictionary that evaluated minor and “commercial” directors, and included essays on auteurs such as Bertolucci and Ermanno Olmi, who could be linked to the nouvelle vague.
With regard to commercial cinema, the most striking case was emphatically Vittorio Cottafavi, author of melodramas and pepla (a genre of Italian‐made historical or Biblical pseudo epics, or “sword‐and‐sandal” films), who was a real—and “scandalous”—discovery for the French. It was followed by other magazines’ reevaluations (later shared by a minority of Italian critics) of Riccardo Freda, Raffaello Matarazzo, and, to a lesser extent, Mario Bava.
We are also indebted to France—through the mediation of Italian critics such as Goffredo Fofi and Lorenzo Codelli—for the reevaluation of commedia all’italiana and directors such as Luigi Comencini, Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, and Ettore Scola. The magazine Positif was the first to draw attention to these commercial productions that art cinema critics, both in France and Italy, had mostly overlooked.
Between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s, the use of foreign actors, many of them French, in Italian roles continued, thanks to dubbing. Among the many we can mention (for the sake of flow, I will refrain from inserting directors, dates, and English titles in these instances): Anouk Aimée (La dolce vita, 8 1/2), Yvonne Furneaux (Le amiche, La dolce vita), Annie Girardot (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, I compagni, La donna scimmia, Dillinger è morto), Jeanne Moreau (La notte), Dominique Sanda (Il conformista, Il giardino dei Finzi‐Contini, Novecento), Jacqueline Sassard (Guendalina, Nata di marzo, Estate violenta), Catherine Spaak (Dolci inganni, La voglia matta, Il sorpasso, La parmigiana, Break Up), Marina Vlady (Giorni d'amore, L'ape regina); Jean‐Paul Belmondo (La Ciociara, La viaccia, Lettere di una novizia), Gérard Blain (Il gobbo, I delfini, L'oro di Roma), Bernard Blier (La grande guerra, I compagni, Il magnifico cornuto), Jean‐Claude Brialy (La notte brava, Io la conoscevo bene), Pierre Clementi (Partner, Porcile), Alain Delon (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, L'eclisse, Il gattopardo, La prima notte di quiete), Philippe Leroy (Leoni al sole, Il terrorista, La mandragola), François Périer (Le notti di Cabiria, La visita), Jacques Perrin (La ragazza con la valigia, Cronaca familiare, Un uomo a metà), Michel Piccoli (Dillinger è morto, L'udienza), Jean Sorel (Dolci inganni, Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa…), Laurent Terzieff (La notte brava, Vanina Vanini), and Jean‐Louis Trintignant (Estate violenta, Il sorpasso, Il conformista). The image of the “Italian” in cinema was, therefore, a cosmopolitan one, thanks largely to France.
The French nouvelle vague was undeniably influenced by Italian neorealism, above all if not exclusively, through Rossellini. This influence, however, was not displayed so much on a stylistic as on a production level, as an explicit resistance to the methods of industrial production, and a break from its “heavy” techniques and narrative conventions. By contrast, the influence of the nouvelle vague on the emerging new Italian Cinema of the 1960s was more limited. The formal anarchy of the nouvelle vague was not positively received by most Italian critics. With regard to directors, only Bertolucci in Prima della rivoluzione (1964) and Partner (1968) explicitly refers to French models (Godard), while Olmi, particularly in I fidanzati (The Fiances, 1963) was influenced by Rossellini's mediated lesson. Indirect links with Italian cinema were forged when Godard shot Le mépris (Contempt, 1963) in Rome and Capri, later releasing it in Italy (Il disprezzo) in a dubbed version in which the editing was completely transformed, and when Danièle Huillet and Jean‐Marie Straub moved to Rome to film Othon (1969), staying on in the ensuing years and shooting several films in Italian (few of which were released with subtitles). It should be mentioned that Le mépris, Othon, and the French couple’s later films received the praise of a scant number of Italian critics.
It was in the realm of criticism that French influence became most pervasive. The present writer claims a role in spreading the Cahiers du Cinéma’s “politique des auteurs” in Italy, first by writing for the monthly Filmcritica (1960–1966), then by founding and editing the quarterly Cinema & Film (1966–1970). It was these magazines that first reappraised American directors, in particular, in an unconventional manner. Not just Hitchcock and Hawks, but also John Ford, the American Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, Samuel Fuller, and others. These two periodicals played the same role in Italy as Movie in Britain, Film Culture in the United States, Film Ideal in Spain, and Filmkritik in Germany. Today, the querelles of the 1960s are forgotten, and nobody questions the values that were then asserted against the orthodoxy of the official critics. It is difficult to envision how a critical minority managed to impose a real reassessment of cinematic history and a redefinition of the authorial canon in harmony with the writers of Cahiers du Cinéma (not to mention the nouvelle vague and other cinemas emerging around the globe).
It should be noted, however, that another magazine, Ombre Rosse, headed by Goffredo Fofi, took its inspiration from Cahiers du Cinéma’s chief rival, Positif, in the second half of the 1960s. Several critics showed strong interest in Italian cinema, notably Barthélemy Amengual, Paul‐Louis Thirard, Gérard Legrand, and a little later, Jean Gili. In hindsight, one could say that these new Italian magazines, developed through the impulse of young critics to rebel against the tradition of their fathers after the French fashion—la critique de papa—paved the way for radical renewal of the study of cinema by future generations.
To conclude this analysis, I should note that the cinematic bond between Italy and France increased in the field of theoretical studies in subsequent years, thanks to the establishment of film studies courses in universities. In addition to Bazin’s work, Christian Metz's (1972, 1975, 1977, 1980, 1992, 1995a, 1995b) semiological studies were translated, as were Noël Burch’s (1980, 2001) neoformalist studies, which had considerable influence on Italian theory. It was only after the death of Serge Daney, ignored by critics when alive, that his collected writings (1995, 1997, 1999) were finally published. The influence of French philosophers who turned their hand to cinema is also significant: Gilles Deleuze (1984, 1989) and Jacques Rancière (2006, 2007) in particular.
The relationship between French and Italian cinema diminished over the years on both sides. In the field of production, Marco Ferreri’s temporary move to France was an isolated case, and the original versions of several of his films (Liza/La cagna/Love to Eternity, 1972; La grande bouffe/La grande abbuffata, 1973; Touche pas à la femme blanche/Non toccare la donna bianca/Don’t Touch the White Woman!, 1974; La Dernière femme/L'ultima donna/The Last Woman, 1976) are French (and must be treated as such) rather than Italian. There are now few Italian films distributed in France and vice versa. Specialized festivals, along with more traditional ones, are taking steps toward bridging this gap: the Festival du Cinéma Italien d'Annecy, founded in 1983 and directed by Jean Gili, and France‐Cinéma in Florence, founded in 1986 and directed by Aldo Tassone. The Festival Cinema Giovani of Turin plays a special role, for several of its publications have focused on French filmmakers in a manner at times unparalleled even in the French publishing industry. This is mostly thanks to Roberto Turigliatto and his writing on Philippe Garrel, the “frenchified” Robert Kramer, Robert Guédiguian, and Jean‐Daniel Pollet.