Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective

It is generally known, though not often well appreciated, that the Italian Neo-Realist movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s had a profound effect on the direction of the modern cinema. It was not simply due to the fact that the Neo-Realist movement rejected the artificial and illusionistic tendencies of the Hollywood dream factory, though the documentary-like photographic style and open-ended narratives of the early Neo-Realist films did defy the sleek yet empty artifice of the commerical cinema. But the Italian Neo-Realist movement had several more serious objectives and it is these larger concerns, rarely dealt with by contemporary filmmakers, that still makes the movement supremely important to a critical understanding of film images and their relationship to society.

For the Neo-Realist filmmakers, the cinema was crucially concerned with ethical and political issues. To believe otherwise was not just an evasion of the artist's responsibility, but also invoked the false notion that any artist lived apart from the history and culture surrounding him. Further, for the Neo-Realists, the cinema had an obligation to critically confront the actual day-to-day realities of their society. Most Western filmmakers simply do not do this, instead they work within the confines of genre conventions, mock mythic perspectives, and predetermined middle-class ideology. The Italian Neo-Realist cinema, however, took to the streets and countryside of Italy, searching for the sense and feel of how people really lived, with an admitted bias toward the otherwise forgotten faces of the poor.

Roberto Rossellini is often wrongly credited with being the founder of the Neo-Realist movement. There was no single founder and Rossellini was one of several major Italian filmmakers who emerged from the fascist era with a vigorous desire to steer the cinema away from the banalities and lies of the Mussolini period. Rossellini was, however, one of the most gifted of the Neo-Realist filmmakers and was the first to reach a wide international audience through his production of Open City (Italy 1945). He was also the one filmmaker of the movement who adhered to the principles of Neo-Realism throughout his career and who most extensively explored the visual, moral, and historical ramifications of the main philosophical concerns of the movement.

Though Rossellini had directed several films during the fascist period, it was only with the impending liberation of Rome that he was able to create a work fully expressive of his experience of life under war and dictatorship. Open City was largely shot on location while the German army was still retreating from advancing American forces and some of the troops in the film were actual German soldiers who were unaware of the cameras. But the vivid documentary look of the film is not to be confused with objectivity. Part of the raw emotional power of Open City (and it still remains an emotionally potent experience on first viewing) is derived from its subtle use of comic and melodramatic conventions. Further, the seemingly improvised structure of the film belies its overt political agenda. Like all of the Neo-Realist filmmakers,Rossellini was a leftist and,while he was not a member of the Italian Party, he was interested in forging the foundation for a possible coalition between the party and the Catholic Church. The central narrative of Open City is an attempt to present points of commonalty between the two major social forces in post-war Italy.

The legacy of fascism and World War Two were two of the major subjects of the Neo-Realist filmmakers and Open City was the first installment in Rossellini's war triptych in which he relentlessly examined the personal and ethical conditions of the war and its aftermath. The other two films in this triptych, Paisan (Italy 1946) and Germany, Year Zero (Italy/Germany 1947), expanded beyond the immediate concerns of Open City as each work focused on the larger social and cultural effects of fascism.

Paisan is centered on the points of contact and misunderstandings that directly and indirectly arose between the Italians and Americans during the liberation of Italy. Even the film's title refers to this since the word "paisan" was a relatively archaic and unused term that was imported back to Italy by Italian-American troops. Throughout most of the short stories of Paisan, Americans and Italians confront each other through a series of linguistic confusion, cultural contradictions, and, in the film's finale, mutual sacrifice.

While Paisan deals with the war's final days in Italy, Germany, Year Zero explores the persistence of the fascist mentality in post-war Germany and Europe. It was a basic tenet of the Neo-Realist movement that history had to be critically examined, not forgotten, and that the failure to do so would merely pave the way for a resurgence of history's most recent horrors. Rossellini sensed that all of Europe was at a crossroad and that, like the character of Edmund in the film, the European mind was still conditioned to the mental and social structures of the recent past.

The satiric vein of The Machine to Kill Bad People (Italy 1948) was an unusual departure for Rossellini and it is no secret that he lost interest in the film just before the end of filming, leaving it to be completed by another director. Yet the film not only works as a surprisingly deft comedy, but its allegorical narrative actually delineates the philosophic attitudes of the Neo-Realist filmmakers to the photographic image. The camera was not a passive instrument for them, but rather a powerful weapon. The gaze of the lenses was not impassive, but rather a forum for moral judgement and political determination. Neither film nor photography were neutral, but rather loud voices in the greater struggles of the society.

Stromboli (Italy 1949) was the first of several collaborations between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Bergman, who had grown intensely dissatisfied with both her life and career in Hollywood, was extremely impressed by the film Open City and contacted Rossellini about the possibility of working together. It was not long after their first meeting that Bergman and Rossellini began their romantic relationship and when she left her Swedish husband for Rossellini, Bergman was systematically blacklisted from Hollywood for "immoral" behavior. She would spend most of the 1950s in Italy with Rossellini, raising their children and acting in his films. While the films they made together tended to be more melodramatic than his other works, Stromboli and the other films not only offered Bergman some of her finest opportunities for displaying a very naturalistic form of acting, but they also created an extensive portrait of the many emotional and psychological faces of a woman.

The Italian Cinema: Beyond Neo-Realism

In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Italy became the national force behind one of the most important movements in the modern cinema: the Italian Neo-Realist movement. Beginning with such films as Rome: Open City (Italy 1945) by Roberto Rossellini and La Terra Trema (Italy 1947) by Luchino Visconti, as well as the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica, the Italian cinema brought to the art of film making an overt social and political consciousness. With the fall of Mussolini's Fascist government and the end of the Fascist controls which had stifled the Italian cinema of the 1930s, an energetic spirit of film making literally took to the streets of Rome.

Though the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement were very different from each other, they shared certain common concerns. The recent political history and diverse social conditions of modern Italy were the central subject matter of the original Neo-Realist productions. Likewise, the Neo-Realist filmmakers combined a seemingly objective cinematic style with subjective, and overtly political, viewpoints. Whether they were moderate democratic figures like Rossellini and De Sica, or avowed Marxists like Visconti and, later, Bernardo Bertolucci, the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement immersed themselves in the vivid turmoil of contemporary Italy.

Aesthetically, the Neo-Realist movement presented the triumph of spatial realism over editing and montage. Long-takes and camera motion be­came the chief tools of this cinema. In these films, the artificial recon­struction of reality through the editing process was replaced by an intense concern for the ever changing nature of an open-ended sense of composition and perspective. The Neo-Realist camera would prowl the set (which often would be a real location), delineating the spatial dimensions perceived through the lens and allowing the compositional elements of the image to shift and change.

By the mid-1950s, the Italian cinema began to change, but the basic tenets of Neo-Realism remained an important influence. Increasingly, new forces were being felt by Italian filmmakers and the Neo-Realist cinema had to adapt to the unique demands of the period. The need for increased pro­duction monies led Italian filmmakers into a series of co-production ventures. This meant, however, that Italian films had to address themselves to broader European concerns and risk losing some of their Italian perspective. The Italian filmmakers also began shifting away from the special realism of the early films and toward the more internalized concerns of psychoanalysis. The short-lived economic boom of the 1960s and the rapid expansion of modern industrialization created an increasing sense of alienation in Italian society as the ancient landscapes and cities were seemingly replaced by the dehumanizing forms of modern technology. This resulted in a nostalgia for the pre-Fascist past, especially the 19th century and the agrarian culture of the Italian countryside. This nostalgia was not, however, uncritical; Italians explored their past in search of the roots of their contemporary problems.

It was because of these complex and diverse forces that the Italian cinema entered its second great period during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, a second generation of major film­makers emerged and many of the earlier artists of the Neo-Realist movement entered new stages in their own development, producing films which were sometimes even more impressive than their original work. It was an active and dynamic decade that still overshadows the minor achievements of the 1980s. In this program, we present some of the significant films in the Italian cinema during this last great period.

One of the most famous of the second generation filmmakers to appear in the 1960s was Bernardo Bertolucci. Though The Conformist (Italy/France/W.Germany 1970) was his first film to receive wide inter­national attention, Bertolucci was already known in Italy for his work both as a filmmaker and as a poet. His earliest films, such as Before the Revolution (Italy 1964) and The Spider's Stratagem (Italy 1970), were expressive of his political concerns with Marxist ideals as well as his revisionist view of recent Italian history. He became increasingly concerned, however, with Freudian psychology and sexuality, as demonstrated in his production of Last Tango in Paris (Italy/France 1972) and Luna (Italy/USA 1979). While Marxism and Freudianism are not necessarily contra­dictory, Bertolucci's growing interest in psychology paralleled his dis­enchantment with conventional Marxist politics. Both The Conformist and, especially, 1900 (Italy/USA 1976) are indicative of this developing con­tradiction in his films.

The question of sexual identity and political commitment are central to The Conformist. The film's narrative, in which Jean-Louis Trintignant's character attempts to hide a homosexual episode from his youth by mindlessly conforming to the Fascist society around him, suggests the coercive nature of ideology. Though his father is an imprisoned Leftist, Trintignant's character joins Mussolini's political party and becomes a member of the Fascist secret service. The meaninglessness and banality of his actions are ultimately exposed by a series of political, sexual, and finally, murderous confrontations in which his lack of convictions results in brutal­ity and betrayal.

Though his best-known films are those of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni originally emerged as part of the Neo-Realist movement. His earliest feature films, such as Cronaca di un Amore (Italy 1950), were already moving toward a cool, austere stylization which prefigured the abstract and demanding aesthetics of his later works. With the production of L'Avventura (Italy 1959), La Notte (Italy 1960), L'Eclisse (Italy 1962), and Red Desert (Italy 1964), Antonioni created a stunning series of films which successfully redefined the spatial concerns of the Italian cinema.

In Red Desert, as in his other films, the spatial relationships of Antonioni's compositions emphasize negative space and accent the strange and ugly appearance of the industrial landscape surrounding the film's characters. This was also Antonioni's first film in color; he used a striking range of garish contrasts and monochromatic design in order to invoke the madness and alienation felt by Monica Vitti's character. With Red Desert, Antonioni created a genuinely disturbing vision of a world dominated by slag heaps, factories, and industrial waste.

Like Antonioni's career, Pietro Germi's went back to the beginning of the Neo-Realist movement. Though Germi had a long film making career and had produced a substantial range of works, he is probably best known for two comedy films of the 1960s--Divorce, Italian Style (Italy 1962) and Seduced and Abandoned (Italy 1964).In these films, Germi presented a series of bitingly savage satires on Italian society and mores.

In Seduced and Abandoned, Germi deals with the contradictions of Sicilian culture and the self-serving mentality of the Italian male. The film's black humor systematically exposes the hypocrisies of the characters' actions and outlines the particular conditions of Sicilian life. As in Germi's other comedy films, the slapstick and farce of Seduced and Abandoned succeeds in chastening the more dubious aspects of Italian behavior.

As a filmmaker, novelist, poet, and essayist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most important — and most controversial — Italian artists of the 1960s, Even his violent death in 1975 remains a subject of heated debate. His films, however, provide a complex legacy which ranged from the harsh Neo-Realist statement of Accattone (Italy 1961) to the psychological and political subject matter of Teorema (Italy 1968) and Pigsty (Italy 1969). The abrasive, and often extreme, nature of Pasolini's films made him an unusual director for a religious film. Yet his production of The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Italy 1966) is one of the few serious and intelligent works ever made on the life of Christ.

The film was a fairly close adaptation of Saint Matthew's gospel, tracing the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Resurrection. By using a documentary style of photography and a cast of non-professionals for his cast, Pasolini invoked the spirit and stylization of the Neo-Realist cinema. In the film, he places a strong emphasis on Christ's place within the context of the politics and history of the gospel's time period. In making The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Pasolini attempted to create a grand synthesis of Christianity and Marxist politics. In the process, he created a film of unique intensity and integrity.

The paradoxical life and career of Luchino Visconti parallels the contradictions of modern Italy. A direct heir to the Visconti title, he rejected his aristocratic heritage and became a member of the Italian Communist Party. As one of the founding members of the Neo-Realist movement, Visconti actually lived with Sicilian peasants and fishermen during the production of La Terra Trema. Yet Visconti was a supreme aesthete whose films contained an odd combination of Marxist analysis and operatic grandeur. By the 1960s and 1970s, his films were obsessed by history and decadence as he articulated a series of visual treatises on the futilities and failures of politics and art.

Visconti's production of Death in Venice (Italy/France 1971) was a curiously personal production for him. Based on the novella by Thomas Mann, the theme of both the story and film were close to Visconti's own personal situation and concerns. His failing health and growing estrange­ment from the modern world was similar to that of the central character of Death in Venice and the eulogistic tone of the film was indicative of Visconti's own feeling of nostalgia as well as knowledge of the deceits of history and the social bankruptcy of the past.Bern

Fellini: the Early Films

Praised by some as one of the great visionaries of the cinema and condemned by others as the betrayer of Italian Neo-Realism, Fellini has the satisfaction of knowing that critics are not indifferent to his work. Since 1949, he has created some of the most extraordinary images of the modern cinema and, although the charge of self-indulgence is accurate, his skill and imagination allow his indulgences to be both fascinating and memorable.

Many of Fellini's films are suggestively autobiographical, yet this is somewhat misleading since he enjoys making up preposterous stories about himself. Fellini was born in 1920 in the small provincial town of Rimini on the Adriatic sea coast. He was educated at a series of strict Catholic schools and claims to recall little except for their oppressive discipline. As a child, he ran off and joined a circus, an environment which he found more stimulating than provincial life. Dragged back to school, Fellini submerged himself in the only subjects which interested him: drawing and art history. His skills as a cartoonist proved profitable after the liberation of Rome in 1945, when he made his living in the Italian capital by selling caricatures to American servicemen. By this time, he also wrote satiric stories for several Roman magazines, and it was on the basis of these tales that he was invited by Roberto Rossellini to collaborate on the screenplay of Rossellini's film Rome: Open City (Italy 1945). Fellini's first film, Variety Lights (Italy 1949), was co-directed by Alberto Lattuada due to Fellini's own doubts about his ability to make a film on his own. The theme and visual texture of Variety Lights clearly identifies it, however, as a Fellini film and the storyline is loosely based on his own experiences as a traveling actor in the late 1930s.

Checcho, the self-proclaimed impresario of the film, and his troupe of performers have convinced themselves that they are bringing great musical acts to the rustics in the countryside, but the film's harsh photography betrays their tawdriness and ineptitude. As in Fellini's later films, the conflict between illusion and reality cannot be resolved, and Checcho blindly continues in spite of the well deserved indifference he receives. Like the men in I Vitelloni (Italy 1953) and Zampano in La Strada (Italy 1954), Checcho discovers his own inability to change. He ultimately comes to a limited realization of the inadequate nature of his own ambition but he is incapable of changing his character.

Even when a change does take place, as in The White Sheik (Italy 1952), it is not necessarily a progressive step. In The White Sheik, the wife finally gives up her romantic illusions, yet the film has already shown that the reality she accepts is no better. Reality is tedious and oppressive, and Fellini constantly suggests that even a ludicrous fantasy figure like the White Sheik is, in its own way, a needed salve to soothe the pains of real life. Even the fumetti, an Italian comic book composed of photographic images, has its place, and even though the White Sheik is a farcical, foolish figure, it is the image and not the person that matters. Likewise, the husband in The White Sheik is enveloped in his own fantasy. While the wife wishes to flee from the banality of provincial life, the husband completely embraces it. It was from this kind of life that the youthful Fellini attempted to flee when he joined the circus, and it is not surprising that his films contain a circus-like atmosphere. Unlike the wife in The White Sheik, Fellini will not compromise.


Another important motif in Fellini's films is the need to believe in miracles even if they remain unfulfilled. The prostitute in Nights of Cabiria (Italy 1957) prays for a miracle to happen: for her life to change and to find a man who truly loves her. Just when she thinks she has found such a man, she discovers that he only wants to steal her money. Throughout the film, Cabiria waits for the miracle that will never arrive, yet in the film's finale it is obvious that she will continue hoping for the impossible. Nights of Cabiria is a study of faith and survival, and Cabiria, in her own small way, is one of Fellini's most tragically heroic figures. She will continue to struggle and believe, even though the reality of her life totally argues against it.

While Nights of Cabiria presents a minor triumph of faith, La Dolce Vita (Italy 1959) offers the end of faith and visually explores the ultimate corruption of both reality and illusion. The opening shot of the film shows a statue of Christ being flown by helicopter over modern Rome. The final shot of the film shows a horribly mutated fish that has washed ashore. The film is bracketed by these two symbols of Christianity and La Dolce Vita delineates a progression from its satiric opening image to its final vision of total decadence and grotesqueness. Marcello, the central figure of La Dolce Vita, wanders aimlessly through a world that has seemingly come to a dead end. Like Cabiria, Marcello secretly hopes for the miracle that will change his life but unlike Cabiria, he cannot bring himself to truly believe in it. Empty, disillusioned, and completely alienated, Marcello is a modern man who finds it impossible to return to the innocence he longs for. More than any of Fellini's previous characters, Marcello realizes the problem but is the least capable of responding to it.