Italian neorealism

Based on Wikipedia: Italian neorealism

In 1948, a bicycle thief in Rome became one of the most famous criminals in cinema history. He wasn't a villain—he was a desperate father trying to feed his family. The film that told his story, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, didn't feature glamorous movie stars or elaborate studio sets. Instead, it starred a factory worker with no acting experience, filmed on actual Roman streets still scarred by war. When the Italian government saw it, they were furious. A cabinet minister called such films "dirty laundry that shouldn't be washed and hung to dry in the open."

That dirty laundry became one of the most influential artistic movements of the twentieth century.

What Neorealism Actually Was

Italian neorealism wasn't a formal school with manifestos and membership cards. It was more like a collective exhale—a group of filmmakers who emerged from the rubble of World War II and decided, almost simultaneously, that the only honest response to what they'd witnessed was to show life as it actually was.

The movement had several defining characteristics. Films were shot on location rather than in studios, partly out of necessity—the Cinecittà studios in Rome had been heavily damaged during the war and were being used as a refugee camp. Directors cast nonprofessional actors, ordinary people playing characters much like themselves. Stories focused on the poor and working class, on survival and daily struggle rather than romance and adventure.

But the deeper innovation was philosophical. These filmmakers rejected the glossy escapism that had dominated Italian cinema under Mussolini's fascist government. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Italian studios churned out what critics derisively called Telefoni Bianchi films—"white telephone" movies, named after the gleaming white telephones that appeared in the luxurious apartments where their stories unfolded. These films depicted a fantasy Italy of wealthy sophisticates, completely divorced from the reality of most Italians' lives.

Neorealism was the opposite of a white telephone.

The Critics Who Became Revolutionaries

The movement's intellectual foundation was laid before the war ended, in an unlikely place: a film magazine called Cinema. The irony was considerable. The magazine's editor-in-chief was Vittorio Mussolini—yes, the dictator's son. The young critics who wrote for the publication were largely prevented from discussing politics directly, so they channeled their frustrations into attacking the vapid films their country was producing.

Among these critics were names that would soon reshape world cinema: Luchino Visconti, an aristocrat who would become one of Italy's greatest directors; Cesare Zavattini, who would write many of the movement's most important screenplays; and Giuseppe De Santis, who would go on to direct Bitter Rice. They argued that Italian cinema needed to return to the realist literary traditions of the late nineteenth century, to writers like Giovanni Verga who had depicted the harsh lives of Sicilian peasants and fishermen.

When Mussolini's government collapsed in 1945 and Italy was liberated from German occupation, these critics finally had their chance to put theory into practice.

The First Films

Film historians debate exactly when neorealism began, but most point to Visconti's Ossessione in 1943 as the first true neorealist film. It was a loose adaptation of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, transplanted to the Italian countryside and filmed with a raw, documentary-like quality that shocked audiences accustomed to studio polish.

But the film that announced neorealism to the world was Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City, released in 1945. Shot in the immediate aftermath of the German withdrawal from Rome, often using black-market film stock and whatever locations were available, the film depicted ordinary Romans—a priest, a pregnant widow, a resistance fighter—struggling against the Nazi occupation.

The film won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946, and suddenly the world was paying attention to Italian cinema in a way it never had before.

What made Rome, Open City so powerful wasn't just its subject matter but its style. Rossellini mixed professional actors like Anna Magnani with complete amateurs. He filmed in actual apartments and streets, many still showing bomb damage. The result felt less like a movie and more like a document—as if someone had managed to capture the occupation on camera as it happened.

The Human Face of Poverty

Over the next several years, Italian directors produced an extraordinary body of work focused on the lives of those who had been invisible in previous cinema. De Sica's Shoeshine (1946) followed two boys who shine shoes on Roman streets, dreaming of buying a horse together. His Bicycle Thieves (1948) traced a father's desperate search for his stolen bicycle—without it, he cannot keep the job posting bills around Rome, and his family will starve.

Visconti's The Earth Trembles (1948) adapted a nineteenth-century novel about Sicilian fishermen, filming in the same village where the original story was set and casting only local people. The fishermen spoke in their own Sicilian dialect, so thick that the film required Italian subtitles for mainland audiences.

These films shared certain visual and narrative strategies. They avoided the self-conscious performances of traditional film acting. Characters were shown doing mundane things—walking, eating, working—in ways that felt natural rather than staged. When drama occurred, it emerged from circumstances rather than from melodramatic plotting.

Children appeared frequently, often serving as observers—innocent eyes witnessing adult struggles they couldn't fully understand. In Rome, Open City, the final shot shows a group of children walking back toward the city after witnessing an execution. They carry within them both the trauma of war and the hope for a different future.

The Documentary Impulse

Neorealist filmmakers borrowed techniques from documentary cinema. They minimized editing, preferring long takes that let scenes unfold in something close to real time. They used natural lighting whenever possible. They avoided the dramatic camera angles and expressionistic lighting that characterized Hollywood films of the era.

This approach served both aesthetic and ethical purposes. Aesthetically, it created a sense of authenticity—viewers felt they were seeing real life rather than a constructed spectacle. Ethically, it refused to aestheticize poverty, to make suffering beautiful in ways that might make it more palatable. The discomfort viewers felt watching these films was the point.

Some scholars have traced neorealism's roots to Soviet montage cinema of the 1920s, but there's an important distinction. Soviet filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein used cinema to depict collective struggle, masses of people rising against oppression. Italian neorealists were interested in individuals—specific people with specific problems, navigating a social system that seemed indifferent to their fate.

Why It Couldn't Last

By the early 1950s, neorealism was already fading. The reasons were both external and internal.

Externally, Italy was changing. The postwar economic miracle was beginning. Incomes were rising. People who had lived through genuine deprivation wanted escapism, not reminders of what they'd endured. American films, with their optimism and glamour, filled theaters while neorealist films struggled to find audiences.

The Italian government actively discouraged the movement. That cabinet minister's complaint about dirty laundry wasn't just rhetoric—there were real efforts to limit funding and distribution for films that portrayed Italy in an unflattering light. Politicians anxious to attract American investment and tourism didn't want the world thinking of Italy as a nation of poverty and desperation.

Internally, the movement's leading figures were evolving. Strict realism can be constraining; artists naturally want to experiment. De Sica made Miracle in Milan (1951), which mixed neorealist settings with allegorical fantasy. Visconti turned to historical spectacle with Senso (1954). Rossellini became increasingly interested in spiritual and philosophical questions.

Many film historians consider De Sica's Umberto D. (1952) the last true neorealist film. It told the story of an elderly pensioner struggling to survive in Rome with only his dog for companionship. When it was released to public attacks and poor box office, the movement effectively ended.

What Came After

But endings can be beginnings in disguise.

Federico Fellini had worked as a screenwriter on several neorealist films, including Rome, Open City. When he began directing his own films, he carried neorealism's DNA while transforming it into something new. His La Strada (1954) and Il bidone (1955) maintained the focus on marginal characters and location shooting but added a poetic, almost mystical dimension.

By the time Fellini made 8½ (1963), he had moved into pure artistic self-exploration—but you can still see neorealism's influence in his attention to faces, his sympathy for human frailty, his refusal to judge his characters.

Michelangelo Antonioni, who had worked closely with the French director Jean Renoir before the war, took neorealism in another direction. His films like Red Desert (1964) and Blow-Up (1966) retained neorealism's interest in environment and its spare, observational style but turned inward, exploring psychological alienation rather than economic deprivation.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's first film, Accattone (1961), showed strong neorealist influence in its depiction of Roman slum life, even as it added layers of mythological and Christian symbolism that Zavattini and De Sica would never have included.

The Ripples Across World Cinema

Neorealism's influence spread far beyond Italy. The French New Wave directors—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and their colleagues—explicitly acknowledged their debt to Italian postwar cinema. They borrowed its location shooting, its use of nonprofessional actors, its rejection of studio artifice. But where the Italians had been earnest and socially committed, the French added irony, playfulness, and self-referential cleverness.

In India, the great Bengali director Satyajit Ray saw Bicycle Thieves while working in advertising in Calcutta. The experience transformed him. He would later say it was the film that convinced him he could make movies about Indian life without the melodrama and musical numbers that dominated Indian commercial cinema. His Apu Trilogy (1955-1959), following a Bengali boy from childhood through adulthood, became one of the landmarks of world cinema—and it's impossible to imagine without De Sica's example.

Bimal Roy, another Indian director, was so influenced by Bicycle Thieves that his film Do Bigha Zameen (1953) essentially transplanted its story to rural India. A peasant loses his land and must go to Calcutta to earn money; like De Sica's protagonist, his survival depends on keeping a job that requires transportation—in this case, a rickshaw rather than a bicycle.

Brazil's Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s drew heavily on neorealist techniques to depict poverty in the favelas of Rio and the drought-stricken northeast. The Polish Film School, emerging after the death of Stalin allowed for more artistic freedom in Eastern Europe, adapted neorealism's methods to explore Polish history and society.

Even British cinema felt the impact. The "kitchen sink realism" of the late 1950s and early 1960s—films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey—applied neorealist approaches to working-class British life.

The Precursors

No artistic movement emerges from nothing. Neorealism had predecessors that its practitioners freely acknowledged.

The verismo literary movement of late nineteenth-century Italy—Giovanni Verga's novels and stories about Sicilian peasants and fishermen—provided both subject matter and philosophical grounding. Verga's belief that literature should depict life without romantic embellishment directly informed neorealist aesthetics. When Visconti adapted Verga's novel I Malavoglia as The Earth Trembles, he found he barely needed to update it; the conditions of Sicilian fishing communities had changed remarkably little in sixty years.

French poetic realism of the 1930s—particularly Jean Renoir's films—offered a visual vocabulary. Renoir's Toni (1935), shot on location with nonprofessional actors telling a story of immigrant workers in southern France, could almost pass for an early neorealist film. Both Visconti and Antonioni had worked with Renoir, and his influence on the movement was enormous.

Some historians point to even earlier precedents: Nino Martoglio's Lost in Darkness (1912), which depicted the slums of Naples; Mario Camerini's What Scoundrels Men Are! (1932), the first Italian film shot entirely on location; the documentaries of Francesco De Robertis in the early 1940s.

Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo (1935) tells a story remarkably similar to neorealist narratives—a father wandering with his sons, searching desperately for work—and uses many of the same techniques. Whether the Italians knew Ozu's work is unclear, but the parallel development suggests something about the universal appeal of this approach to cinema.

The Argument About Innovation

Film historians continue to debate how revolutionary neorealism really was. Some argue it was less a groundbreaking movement than a revival and refinement of earlier approaches—the verismo tradition, French poetic realism, documentary techniques that had existed since the birth of cinema.

Others counter that neorealism's achievement was precisely in synthesizing these influences into something coherent and applying them with unprecedented rigor to contemporary social conditions. The individual elements may not have been new, but their combination and their moral urgency were.

What's beyond dispute is the impact. Before World War II, world cinema was dominated by Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, by the studio systems of other major film industries. The story of film was largely a story of elaborate productions, controlled environments, professional performers.

After neorealism, an alternative existed. Filmmakers anywhere in the world could look at Bicycle Thieves or Rome, Open City and see that powerful cinema didn't require massive budgets or elaborate infrastructure. A camera, some film stock, real locations, and nonprofessional actors could create works of art that resonated with audiences worldwide.

This democratization of cinema—the idea that authentic filmmaking was possible outside the studio system—became the foundation for independent and art cinema movements that continue to this day.

The Golden Age

Critics and scholars often call the neorealist period the "Golden Age" of Italian cinema. It's a term that can obscure as much as it reveals—Italian cinema produced remarkable work both before and after the late 1940s. But there's something to the designation.

For a brief period, Italian filmmakers achieved something rare: they made films that were simultaneously artistically innovative, socially engaged, and internationally acclaimed. They showed that serious cinema about ordinary people could find audiences around the world. They proved that the aftermath of catastrophe could generate not just trauma but creative renewal.

The movement lasted barely a decade. Many of its key films were attacked by critics, ignored by audiences, or suppressed by authorities. Its leading figures all eventually moved in different directions, abandoning strict neorealism for other artistic approaches.

And yet.

Every time a filmmaker picks up a camera and heads to the streets rather than the studio, every time a director casts a nonprofessional actor because their face tells a story no trained performer could, every time a movie chooses to show poverty and struggle without either sentimentalizing or sensationalizing it—neorealism lives on.

That bicycle thief is still searching the streets of Rome. And we're still watching.