hey folks and Welcome to our first video on Italian neo-realism so Italian neo-realism is probably one of the most famous film movements it was a post-world War II film movement in Italy characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class often dressing the difficult economic and moral conditions of post-world War II Italy so the easiest way to categorize the films identified as neorealist is usually in subject matter these films tend to tell stories of people oppressed by situations beyond their control I also want to briefly address the name of this movement it's not just realism it's neorealism that Neo means new and there's not a lot of commentary in the secondary literature about why this movement is identified as new but indeed a number of commentaries mention the fact that Italian neo-realist Cinema is not only connecting to an emerging realist tradition within Italian literature but also hearkening back to a realist tradition in the 19 teens in Italian Cinema so Bert cardulo writes that Italian Neo realist Cinema is a realism that can quote be traced to the veristic style first cultivated in the Italian Cinema between 1913 and 1916 when films inspired by the writings of Giovanni verga and others dealt with human problems as well as social themes in natural settings so beyond the subject matter of Italian neorealist films there are a often cataloged number of aesthetic characteristics that Mark them aesthetic characteristics and conventions of production these films are generally low budget there's a lot of on location shooting by extension there's the use of natural light there's the heavy use of non-professional actors there are narrative conventions that loosen the strictures of classical Hollywood Cinema especially concerning causal motivation and closure and once again these stories tend to be about Ordinary People oppressed by circumstances beyond their control as with all of the major historical film movements the relationship between the standard characteristics and historical conditions is very connected we usually Mark the beginning of Italian neorealism at 1945 and that was an important year because it was the year that Mussolini was executed and Italy was liberated this is the end of World War II it's equally important to remind ourselves that under Mussolini the Italian movie industry made many historical epics and upper class melodramas often called White telephone films these were lavish Productions that could only be made in a studio and these white telephone films which were sort of like romantic comedies very light Fair were called White telephone because you could often see white telephones as part of the mizonsen sort of marking an upper class and interestingly one of the most important directors of neo-realism made a number of white telephone films Victoria decica who himself was a movie star an actor before making neorealist films also made a few of these white telephone films he was a seasoned actor and director so at the end of the war and the execution of Mussolini they could no longer make these films there was no longer a state-centered film industry and the chinachita studios which were the biggest and most elaborate film studios in Europe at the time were badly damaged during the war and could no longer support these lavish Productions in fact the studios became a refugee camp so Italian filmmakers were on their own with few resources the film industry was in disarray this created the conditions for filmmakers to have the freedom to go outside of the state-sponsored film industry and to take their cameras into the streets and into buildings so all you really had in terms of production companies at this time were small production companies that were free from censorship it wouldn't remain that way entirely but from 1945 to 1949. you could make films free of censorship there were also socialists in the Italian government from 1945 to 1947 which is important because Italian neo-reela Cinema is a left-wing movement okay so I want to briefly return to these aesthetic characteristics of Italian neorealism these characteristics are so canonical that they might be over emphasized so borwell and Thompson write in their book film history that the proto-neorealist film is often thought to be shot on location using non-actors filmed in rough offhand compositions actually however few neorealist films display all these features most interior scenes are filmed in carefully lit Studio sets sound is almost invariably post-dubbed which allows control after filming the voice of the protagonist and bicycle thieves for example was supplied by another actor while in some films performers were typically non-professionals more commonly non-actors mixed with such stars as Anna manyani and Adolfo brisi anamanyani is one of the stars of what some call the first neorealist film Rome Open City moreover they say the films are edited according to the Norms of classical Hollywood style scenes contain smooth camera movements crisp focus and choreographed staging in several planes and a sweeping musical score so what they're trying to say here is that while this movement is often associated with denying artifice there are still plenty of artifice in fact there is artifice used to create the impression of reality Robert Gordon in his book bicycle thieves along the same line says that most of bicycle thieves was shot on location but there was due Studio shooting also carried out not at chinachuta but at the Safa studios in Rome a much smaller Studio but a studio nonetheless and Mark Shield reminds us that neo-realist films were even by the most generous estimate always a minority of the film's Italian Cinema produced in any given year so I think when you might be learning about Italian neorealist Cinema you might be given the impression that from the years 1945 to 1953 all of the films produced in Italy looked like this and felt like this but that's really not the case this is still a minority of films that had a major impact on film history okay so now let's look at some individual films briefly to understand what might count as an Italian neorealist film by all estimates these eight films right here might be considered the Canon of Italian neorealist Cinema they by no means Encompass all the films called neo-realist but they're probably the most heavily cited and they come from three directors lukino Visconti Roberto rossolini and Vittorio de Sica the film osecione from 1942 is an interesting one because it is sometimes called the first Italian neorealist film and it is not called that it's often called one of the most important Proto or pre-italian neorealist films it was actually in a review of osecioni that the term neo-realist was first coined ossione or Obsession is an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice which is an American Crime novel from the 30s and the movie was actually made three years before the notable film Noir 1946's The Postman Always Rings Twice from the United States so what's interesting is that the film is indeed an adaptation of a story that has plenty of melodramatic elements not what we would consider a neorealist it's about a Drifter who stops at a roadside in and falls in love with the end of owner's wife and they hatch a plan to kill the husband and they do but in Visconti's version he infuses the story with many elements consistent with a kind of realism he gives you time to appreciate the ordinary aspects of the character's lives and their material circumstances like there's this great moment about an hour and a half into the film after the man and woman have successfully killed the woman's husband and the new couple is taking on the work of running the inn and she enters the kitchen after a busy night and it's just filled with dishes and she just sits there she serves herself a bowl of soup and she sits down with the newspaper and then she just simply falls asleep she's exhausted she has not been liberated from the doldrums of her everyday life she is still very much stuck in this roadside Inn which is the thing that defined her existence that she was trying to escape and the fact that the film is so comfortable letting us sit with this moment that we might call undramatic is a touchstone of one of the characteristics of neorealism viscandy also amplifies the class tension in the story it's already there in the novel but we get plenty of moments in which the dialogue emphasizes it for example the wife explains very clearly that the reason she married the in owner is because she was poor and desperate and she and The Drifter Bond over their own poverty they understand each other so when this movie came out in 1942 Mussolini was still in power and when he saw it he proclaimed this is not Italy this film that depicts the working class this is not the Italy that he wanted to represent on screen the other film that gets attributed with starting Italian neorealism is Rome Open City this might be the official beginning of Italian neo-realism if you're so inclined to identify a beginning it's by Roberto rossolini from 1945. and it's a war drama set during the Nazi occupation of Italy in 1944 and it centers on a resistance fighter trying to escape Rome thematically it's very much about how Communists and Catholics come together for a common cause and you can see a similar emphasis on diverse groups coming together or at least trying to inhabit a world together throughout Rossellini's films his film Paisan is very much about that interaction between different groups especially in that film between American troops and the Italian people during the Allied invasion of Italy Rome Open City was kind of the big film that alerted the world to something new if oseoni was like a soft opening for Italian neo-realism Rome Open City was the loud opening it won the Palm Door the grand prize at the Khan film festival level and it launched rossolini into the spotlight equally important here is the film's production history which helped consolidate the major elements that we come to identify with neo-realism most of it though not all of it was shot on location famously rossolini bought the film stock for the film on the black market and developed it without the typical viewing of daily rushes and overall he had limited Financial backing he didn't have a lot of money so there was something Mythic about this film that was in content about an opposition to fascist rule but in its production also had the spirit of operating outside of State mandated and state-censored Cinema so if osecione and Rome Open City are probably the beginnings of Italian Uriel Cinema the two films that probably get the most attention and probably stand in most widely for this movement are Vittorio de sica's bicycle thieves and Umberto D equally important here is the screenwriter for both of these films Chase Ray zabatini who became a kind of spokesperson for neorealism he wrote something of an Manifesto of neorealism in 1953 so thinking of those two films let's look a little bit more closely at one of these aesthetic characteristics of Italian neo-realism the fact that they loosen classical narrative convention like causal motivation and closure so what do we mean by that well you can see those ideas developed in a concrete form and Chase Rice avatini's essay some ideas in the cinema remember he is the screenwriter for these famous films directed by decica and he begins his essay this way he says one shouldn't be astonished that the cinema has always felt the natural unavoidable necessity to insert a story in the reality to make it exciting and spectacular all the same it is clear that such a method evades a direct approach to everyday reality and suggests that it cannot be portrayed without the intervention of fantasy or artifice so in response to that question what makes neorealist Cinema real one answer is its desire to reject some of the artifices of classical storytelling at least this was the opinion of zabatini he continues with a kind of example he writes a woman is going to buy a pair of shoes upon this Elementary situation it is possible to build a film all we have to do is to discover and then show all the elements that go to create this adventure and all that have been now dailiness and it will become worthy of attention it will even become spectacular but it will become spectacular not through its exceptional but through its normal qualities it will astonish Us by showing so many things that happen every day under our eyes things we have never noticed before so these are the kinds of things that zabatini writes in his essay he famously says that he wants to make a movie a 90-minute movie about a guy in which nothing happens what's important to note is that he acknowledges that none of the movies that have been made at this point in 1953 including the movies that he has written have risen to this ambition of undramatic Storytelling a storytelling that gets at the banal dailyness of everyday life without injecting drama but he does say that Umberto D kind of gets the closest so even if these films don't achieve the heights of undramaticness that zavatini talks about let's look at the ways in which they approach it so let's talk about banal events chance events and dead time one of the film theorists and film critics who talked about this element of Italian Neo realist Cinema most eloquently is probably Andre bazan who's writing on these films is probably one of the reasons that these films are so influential so he talks about this particular moment in bicycle thieves which I think is really important he says in the middle of the chase this is part of the chase in which the main character and his son are trying to track down the man who stole his bicycle he says in the middle of the chase the little boy suddenly needs to piss so he does a downpour forces the father and son to shelter in a Carriage Way so like them we have to forego the Chase and wait till the storm is over the events are not necessarily signs of something of a truth of which we are to be convinced they all carry their own weight their complete uniqueness that ambiguity which characterizes any fact so bazan is noting that the film takes the time to give us these details which don't seem to have an overt narrative function rather they interrupt the flow of narrative the boy needs to go to the bathroom during this chase that chase is what matters to the story and so he just stops to go to the bathroom his going to the bathroom does not trigger an important narrative event it just interrupts the flow of narrative in a similar but more noticeable way it starts to rain and the movie just kind of stops our protagonist and his son just wait under the ledge for the rain to stop they're not gathering information they're not exchanging dialogue that develops The Narrative they're simply waiting and importantly The Narrative is stopped by something that is outside of their control whether it is a contingency of the world it is not part of a causal chain and when you watch this sequence you can just feel the weight of time passing as the protagonist and his son are just observing the world passing by them a very similar sequence happens in decica's subsequent film Umberto D Umberto D is an even more ambitiously non-dramatic film than bicycle thieves it's about an old man who's just retired who's trying to get his pension but he can't and we're just following the Devolution of his life in the wake of poverty there's a secondary character who is the old man's maid she too has her own problems she's pregnant but she's not sure who the father is and there's a moment in the film where we simply watch the maid wake up and do her daily chores and the way that the film depicts those chores exemplifies for Andre bazan this non-dramatic anti-narrative nature he writes the camera confines itself to watching her doing her little chores moving around the kitchen still half asleep drowning the ants grinding the coffee the cinema here is conceived as the exact opposite of that quote art of Ellipsis to which we are much too ready to believe it devoted desika and zabatini attempt to divide the event up into still smaller events and these into events smaller still so by Art of Ellipsis the Zan is talking about the tendency in Hollywood films and conventional narrative films to allide the things that we just assume characters do but which are not important to the narrative right we assume that our characters wake up in the morning and have their cup of coffee before they go out on their important Journey but we don't show those events that they don't matter to the narrative but in this sequence we are watching those daily ordinary things that people do in a kind of real time in a kind of dead time it's true that the maid will be revealed to be kind of contemplating her pregnancy during these chores but bazan is more interested in the fact that primarily we are just watching her do these chores another aspect of this Italian neorealist non-dramatic nature or this anti-classical nature is a lack of narrative closure and causality so boardwill and Thompson summarize this quite nicely they say an Italian neo-realist films scene B is apt to follow scene a simply because B happened later not has seen a made it happen the bulk of bicycle thief or bicycle thieves is organized around the search for the bicycle and traces the chronology of the day from the morning through lunch to late afternoon so along the same lines Martin Scorsese called bicycle thieves simply a situation unfolding The Bicycle Thief is basically just the gradual unfolding of a situation and sometimes if you look at The Narrative of the film it might seem to have a very classical premise the film is indeed about a man whose bike is stolen and as a result he's unable to do his job and his job matters because he's poor and he needs to feed his family and the entirety of the film is him and his son searching for the bicycle you might think of it as a quest to solve a problem find the person who stole your bike win the bike back and live happily ever after that would be the sort of classical Hollywood version of the film but that's not what happens by the end of the film his actions have amounted to almost nothing he even attempts to steal somebody else's bike which is an event that his son sees and of course it's for this reason that the Italian title bicycle thieves as opposed to the original American Title Bicycle Thief is important to retain because it's often understood that it refers to both the guy who stole our protagonist bike and the fact that the protagonist himself became a thief so what matters here in terms of the film's rejection of classical narrative structure is this lack of closure he doesn't get his bike back giving us a happy ending but it also doesn't end tragically with a death we just imagine the struggle continuing when the film closes and also the film gives us these details that suggest that the man's struggle is just one of many it's made clear that the young man who stole our protagonist bike is also struggling financially he's been trying to get a job and so when our protagonist turns to theft and forces us to realize as it might force him to realize that he is no different from the original Thief because they're both put into this condition through forces outside of their own control in the beginning of the film when the man and his wife are trying to make some money all they can do is Pawn their bed sheets it's such a small detail but it's really useful one it's not something we usually consider a luxury it's like a necessity that one could technically live without and when they go upon the sheets the camera tilts up so you can see just how many other sheets might have also been pawned by people in a similar Circumstance the film is so bent on rejecting a good versus evil protagonist versus antagonist structure so you can realize that the antagonist is in fact A system that has put this man out so another example of this lack of closure this lack of causality this dwelling in ordinariness and dead time you can see in a movie like Germany year zero the third of rossolini's Trilogy boardwell and Thompson Wright in Germany year zero Edmund the boy protagonist who exemplifies the moral confusions of the defeated Germany flees his family and wanders the streets of Berlin the film's Final 14 minutes follow him through a single night and the following morning concentrating on random events Edmund watches a prostitute leave her client plays Hopscotch on the empty streets scuffs through the rubble of buildings tries to join other boys in a soccer game and drifts around the city and of course if you've seen this film these non-events lead up to the boy's suicide so while ending a film with the child suicide is of course not negating the conventions of closure the events leading up to the suicide certainly do they are non-dramatic they do not Revel in the boy's emotional turmoil in fact you can't really see much that's going on underneath the surface and that's one of the aspects of this film that makes it so disturbing the last aesthetic characteristic that I kind of want to mention which is related to this idea of dwelling in dead time loosening causality is Italian neorealis Cinemas integration of the material world when I say integration of the material world I mean to emphasize that Italian neorealist Cinema is Cinema and it's photographic Cinema and one way of defining realism in cinema as distinct from realism in the other Arts has to do not only with the kind of stories that you're telling or the kind of details that you're emphasizing but also the way that you use a camera to pick up the world so there's a great example of this in the beginning of bicycle thieves this is the second scene of bicycle thieves the protagonist has just got his new job and he's meeting his wife out in the streets he explains that he's just gotten a new job but he can't take it because he doesn't have a bicycle she explains in this sequence that hey you shouldn't have Pond your bike and he says hey we had to eat so this is indeed a scene that gives us the information needed to motivate him pawning the sheets to get the bicycle back but equally important here is how this is staged this is not only staged outside with broken down architecture but notice how the wife is carrying two buckets of water throughout this entire sequence she is struggling with these buckets of water and this one particular moment she actually struggles to carry those buckets of water down a steep hill and he goes to help her I think this is an ingenious way to integrate the weight of the material world into a sequence right it emphasizes the drudgery of this ordinary task without drawing attention to that drudgery in the dialogue but not only that but the drudgery of the ordinary task is integrated into the performance because the actress is actually struggling with two buckets of water so there's kind of a breakdown between documentary and fiction the character is struggling with water because the actress is struggling with water and the character struggles on the Steep terrain because the actress struggles on the Steep terrain so I think it's important to consider the formal Innovations of Italian year real estate Cinema not just in narrative when we get less emphasis on an absorbing chain of causally related events where does our attention go to the bodies of actors and also to the material details of the world that were being shown often a world that is not artificially constructed but is in fact the actual streets and buildings post World War II and this idea of cinematic realism emphasizing the material world has sort of been with us ever since Italia neorealis Cinema so much emphasis in film studies when we're discussing realism is about bodies and matter which are the kinds of things that a camera has a direct connection to it's for this reason that for a number of realist oriented film theorists like Andre bazan there is an inherent connection between realism as a mode of filmmaking and the medium of film okay that's all I have for Italian Cinema and I'll see you next time