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Cesare Zavattini is principally remembered as a theoretician of neorealism and as the author of the screenplays of some of the major post-war films of Vittorio De Sica ( Sciuscià/Shoeshine 1946, Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thief 1948, Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan 1951, Umberto D . 1952). In fact, his experience was more extensive and varied. He worked in different media and was especially
Although Europa 51 (1952) was the most commercially successful of the films Roberto Rossellini made with the Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman, the reception by the Italian press was largely negative. Many critics focussed on what they saw to be the ‘unreal’ or abstract quality of the films portrayal of the postwar urban milieu and on the Bergman character‘s isolation from the social world. This article looks at how certain structures of seeing that are associated in the classical style with the woman as star or spectacle - e.g., the repetitious return to her fixed image, the resistance to pulling back from the figure of the woman in order to situate her within a determinate location and set of relationships between characters and objects - are no longer restricted to her image but in fact bleed into or “contaminate” the depiction of the world she inhabits. In other words, whereas the compulsive return to the fixed image of the woman tends to be contained or neutralised by the narrative economy and editing patterns (ordered by sexual difference) of the classical style, in Rossellini‘s work this ‘insistent’ even aberrant framing in relation to the woman becomes a part of the (female) characters and the cameras vision of the ‘pathology’ of the urban landscape in the aftermath of the war.
This book is a collection of essays on the author's journeys taken during the past fifteen years. They are journeys in time and of memory about a country that no longer exists: the Italy of Roberto Rossellini's
Paisà had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1946. It is considered the most emblematic film of neorealism, though the term ‘neorealism’ was not yet part of critical debate until early in 1948. Rossellini had made his first film in 1939, Fantasia sottomarina / Underwater Fantasy , a short film on fish, halfway between a documentary and a fairy-tale. By 1946, he was shooting his sixth
that leads to Antonio’s death. The film’s central event (in which Gloria kills Antonio with a jamón and then makes a broth with it that she tries to feed to the policemen investigating the murder) quotes one of Hitchcock’s television murder mysteries and is itself quoted several years later by Bigas Luna in Jamón, Jamón (1992). 1 Like Volver ( 2006 ), ¿Qué he hecho? partakes of neo-realism’s emphasis on ordinary people, its episodic structure, and its refusal to pass judgement on the characters’ actions. However, it departs from neo-realism in style
centuries; the movements speed up the time lags. The cinema seems to have been invented in order to express the subconscious life that so deeply penetrates poetry with its roots; despite that, it is almost never used for such ends. Among the modern tendencies of cinema the best known is the so-called neorealist one. Its films offer up slices of real life to the eyes of the spectator, with characters taken from the street and with authentic buildings and interiors even. Aside from a few exceptions, and I especially cite The Bicycle Thief , neorealism has done nothing
appliquer’ … Ces considérations prétendent établir des certitudes là ou l’oeuvre d’art est essentiellement incertaine. ( Youssef Ishaghpour ) 3 Pasolini’s film theory is a sustained opposition to what he called naturalism, a phenomenon that he principally identified with Italian neo-realism. His theory was based on, in his own words, a heretical understanding of
on discussions and films relating to neorealism. They seek problems and inconsistencies in points of view and prejudices that have become institutionalized in popular accounts of neorealism, for example, those linked to the idea of a realism as a mimetic and objective reproduction of reality and those emphasizing a moral stance incapable of developing into an aesthetic one. I have strictly pursued a symbolic dimension
tasked with the creation of an embryonic national cinema? To what extent were ahistorical concerns (for example the representation of traditional, precolonial activities) able to find representation? Finally, how could film represent the trauma of a nation without rapidly transforming history into myth? At play here are not just the external influences of Italian neorealism, of Hollywood and of Soviet cinema, which lend their
formulations and in neorealism a cultural and artistic opposition to fascism, it is equally possible to see that, because such formulations could take place during the fascist period, either fascism or neorealism or both have to be differently understood. Antonioni’s writings on film in this period of fascism, war, Resistance, social and economic distress were untypical of the writing about film at this time and on the journals and newspapers he wrote for. There is no indication in any of his writings of the events that were taking place in Realism (2)179 Italy, or any