Italian neo-realism

I’m doing a short course on post-war European film. I definitely need someone to hold my hand as I encounter Fassbinder and Bergman.

So, first lesson: Italian neo-realists, which was nice and comforting because I’m rather used to them. Pre-war the Italian film industry was well-funded: Cinecittà was founded by Mussolini and his son, Vittorio, in 1937. Lots of frothy, escapist films – the Hollywood-style telefoni bianchi films (quick flashback to Florence 1981, where I first heard of them) and solid film-making experience. Post-war: the surrender to the Allies by Italy, occupation by German forces, the slow, deadly grind by the Allies up from the heel to the north before the country was liberated. Cinecittà was used as a refugee camp for some time, film stocks (not to mention more basic stocks) were low, so film-makers had to be inventive. Neo-realism can be seen as a brief moment in post-war Europe that arose from particular circumstances. Shot on location, showing ordinary people and ordinary lives.

The films we looked at were not immediately popular at the time in Italy, but they were praised abroad and that tended to make Italians more interested in them. They were also a way (as all films are?) of presenting a picture of the country to the rest of the world. What was also interesting was to consider Hollywood’s influence even on these films: images that recalled Charlie Chaplin or adapting The Postman Always Rings Twice and moving it to the Po valley.

We looked at four films – just brief scenes with a little bit of context, which is not how I am used to watching a film. It seemed odd at first, but it’s perfect for analysing without getting caught up in the narrative and emotions.

Ossessione, Luchino Visconti, 1943

Initially banned by Mussolini. I have seen this film, but I realised that I hadn’t viewed it. So, opening credits laid over the view through a windscreen of a long, monotonous road between a river and featureless flat land. Lorry arrives in village, camera pans up and then down, following the new arrival as he enters a trattoria. Low shot of dogs, chair legs, human male legs; the camera follows the back of the man towards the kitchen; we see a pair of shapely female legs, a shoe dangling from one slim foot; the back of the man’s body obscures the rest of the woman’s body. Finally we see their faces – the two lustful protagonists of the film seen from each other’s point of view – in a way that is as manufactured and scene-setting as, say, Bogart and Bacall or Barbara Stanwyck descending the staircase in Double Indemnity. Just brilliant. I want to watch it again.

Roma Città Aperta, Roberto Rossellini, 1945

Fellini had a part in writing this. After Ossessione, the camera shots seemed very tame and static to me, but Rossellini had to use whatever film and techniques he could – including, apparently, clandestinely shot footage. It really is “slice of life” stuff, but I remember it as slightly melodramatic and the clips I saw didn’t persuade me that I wanted to watch it again.

Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948

Shot in Rome. I’ve seen this one twice, but the clips did make me want to watch it again. It used non-professional actors (some dubbed by other actors) and was shot on location. Workless working man in his environment: new apartments (apparently with no mains water) in a country rebuilding itself. (They’re similar apartments to those in La Dolce Vita that, several years later, seem to symbolise lost hopes. As I recall, there was too much mains water there.) I remembered the pawning of the sheets to get the bicycle out of hock, and the “adoration of the bicycle” before its first ride to work. I’d never appreciated the poetry of Rome awakening to a new day with the sun rising and the tide of workers flowing in. The balletic sequence of bicycles and ladders as the bill posters set out from the warehouse. Rather like Dickens (him again!), the film doesn’t miss the fine lines between social castes.

La Strada, Federico Fellini, 1954

This film I definitely must see, if only for more of Giulietta Masina’s wonderfully expressive face. The opening scene on the beach – a fatherless family so poor that they are at the end of the road with nowhere else to go. Little figures like marionettes against the sea. (Which, again, made me think of La Dolce Vita and the final scene on the beach. A reminder that Fellini came from Rimini.)