Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (Short Cuts)
Mark Shiel
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 1904764487
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City is a valuable introduction to one of the most influential of film movements. Exploring the roots and causes of neorealism, particularly the effects of the Second World War, as well as its politics and style, Mark Shiel examines the portrayal of the city and the legacy left by filmmakers such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. Films studied include Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and Umberto D. (1952).
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wartime Russia using real footage and intense combat sequences which mimic the documentary authenticity of newsreel both in their images and in their use of richly textured sound to suggest the cacophony of war. There is clearly a relationship between them and Rossellini’s representations of the ravages of war on people and places in Paisà and Germany Year Zero and it is tempting to read Rossellini’s realist representation of war as a critique of war, the fulcrum of which is an army chaplain who,
the emotional security it can provide while not reinforcing myths of the family as an ideal form of social organisation and moral anchor. The family seems to function – but only just. It has the semblance of unity, especially in the early part of the film before the theft of the bicycle: the Riccis’ tenement home is poor but apparently safe and warm; Antonio 57 SHORT CUTS helps his weary wife, Maria, carry water from a nearby well; and mother, father and son go together in sorrow to the
the former, and the Communists and Socialists, in the latter case, although the ascendant power of the United States always made its strong preference clear for capitalism and liberal democracy and had a very real presence and influence on Italian life through the Marshall Plan for the economic and infrastructural reconstruction of Europe (1948–52). Inevitably, this struggle also raged in the cinema where Italian neorealism and Hollywood cinema stood as opposite, divergent models of what popular
Left-ists experienced disillusion with the status quo which they faced in the 1970s and this disillusion informed their critique of neorealism, underestimating the profoundly challenging and controversial impact which many neorealist films exercised on Italian and international society in their day and the great empowering and radicalising influence of neorealism on cinema worldwide. In the larger historical perspective of the second half of the twentieth century, the flourishing of neorealism in
Architecture. London: British Film Institute. Re, Lucia (1990) Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reich, Jacqueline and Piero Garofalo (2002) Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rocchio, Vincent F. (1999) Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rohdie, Sam (1990) Antonioni. London: British Film Institute. ____ (1995) The Passion of