These words recall Bazin

These words recall Bazin’s remarks about Renoir, but go even further. Bazin recognized the dialectical play of revelation and withholding in Renoir, the image’s ability to suggest reality by what it hides of it. The neo-realists theorized a Reconstruction of all the formative elements of film and of the tensions between form and content that might manipulate the subject of the film or the spectator. Bazin picks up the call and, writing about Bicycle Thieves in 1949, says it "is one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema."²⁴

Some twenty years later, Godard ended Weekend with the words "End of Story. End of Cinema." In 1967, the neo-realist urge to break down the narrative forms and conventions of the entertainment film was still being evoked, although by this time, at the close of a decade of modernist filmmaking, the call seemed more likely to be heeded than it had been in the mid-forties. For when we look at neorealist film now, such statements as Morlion’s or Bazin’s seem more like wish-fulfillment than anything else. But to the Italian intellectuals of the time, and to Bazin in France who saw in their ideas not only a vindication of his own theories but a way to revitalize all of cinema, overstatement was necessary. It is the tradition of aesthetic manifestos to declare the death of the forms they challenge and to claim they begin the art anew. More important, the logic of the neorealists’ thinking was correct. If film was to become a tool, a way of getting at the lives of people whose lives never were the subject of cinema; if film was to be an eye, a way of looking at a world rarely seen clearly in cinema, then all the methods film had used to evade observation of this world had to be eschewed. Not merely must the white telephones go, and the entire class those telephones signified, but also the cinematic constructions that perpetuated their irrelevance must be repudiated.

"The basis of every good work of art," wrote Morlion, "is not what people think about reality, but what reality actually is."²⁵ The filmmaker must suppress his interpretive powers, his transpositional powers (to revert to Zavattini’s term), and eliminate the conventions that make the transpositions of reality possible. The neo-realists would return to zero (another call repeated by Godard). They would start with the photographic origins of film, its ability to record images of the world "objectively." In 1945, Bazin wrote: "For the first time between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man."²⁶ This insight would be scorned by most photographers and filmmakers. But its theoretical impact was enormous. Both Bazin and the neo-realists were looking at the cinematic medium as just that, a medium, a means of getting to the world and getting the world to us without intervening in it. "Reality is there, why change it?" De Sica said. The neo-realists believed that the cinematic image could be depended upon to reveal the world seen by the filmmaker if the filmmaker merely looked and kept his counsel, interfered as little as possible.

a fragment of concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity, whose meaning emerges only after the fact, thanks to other imposed facts between which the mind establishes certain relationships. Unquestionably, the director chose these "facts" carefully while at the same time respecting their factual integrity.... But the nature of the "image facts" is not only to maintain with the other image facts the relationships invented by the mind. These are in a sense the centrifugal properties of the images—those which make the narrative possible. Each image being on its own just a fragment of reality existing before any meanings, the entire surface of the scene should manifest an equally concrete density.²⁷

The image is a kind of monad, a part of reality that incorporates within itself the fullness and complexity of the world from which it is taken. Its initial "meaning" is only that it is, and the spectator revels in this fact. Further meaning accrues to it when it becomes part of a narrative by being connected to other "image facts."

Bazin did not know—or would not recognize—that this is very close to Eisenstein’s concept of the shot as a "montage cell" that achieves meaning only in relation to other shots.²⁸ However, the difference between their two concepts is telling. For Eisenstein the shot is only valuable in relation to the montage. For Bazin the phenomenon of narrative that occurs when one shot (and for the sake of simplicity I will equate "image" and "shot") is connected to others is almost secondary to the miracle of the shot’s ability to be a precise rendering of reality. Neither Bazin nor the neo-realists regarded the image as being in service to a larger montage structure. "The assemblage of the film must never add anything to the existing reality," Bazin says.²⁹ The image may give of itself to other images so that a narrative can exist, but it must retain independence and its own validity. And in practice, the neo-realist film does not draw attention to its cutting. While not quite in the Hollywood zero-degree style, its editing is invisible, as Morlion said it must be. Rossellini and De Sica in particular cut mainly to reposition the gaze, center it on the major event in the sequence or the major participants in a dialogue. Their cutting rarely adds information, but is functional in the very best sense, guiding our concentration without manipulating it. Closeups and point-of-view shots (in which we see the character and what the character sees) are used sparingly, and whenever possible the environment figures as strongly as the individuals within it. The image generates all the meaning it can; commentary is inside it.

A fine example occurs in Bicycle Thieves. Ricci, the central character, is in his first morning on his new job, pasting up posters on walls. A co-worker is showing him how to do it. With significant irony, they are putting up a poster of Rita Hayworth—a premier sign of forties Hollywood with all the connotations of glamor, artificiality, and contrivance that De Sica was attempting to abjure. The subject here is not glamor or contrivance, but an unassuming workman on his first job in a long time, learning his rather simple task. The sequence begins with the camera to the left of the characters, at a diagonal to them and the wall on which the poster is going up (neorealist characters, as I noted earlier, are always observed by walls, the urban boundaries of their lives). As Ricci’s co-worker shows him what to do the camera executes a simple dolly and pan toward him as he pastes Rita to the wall. The shot is framed by two ladders. De Sica then cuts unobtrusively to a more distant shot from the other side, again diagonal to the characters and the wall. The camera is far enough from them so that we can see two little boys on the street (whom we had barely glimpsed previously), beggars, one of whom is playing an accordion. The accordion player moves toward the ladder, and Ricci’s co-worker turns briefly to look at him. The little boy puts his foot up on the ladder and receives an unceremonious kick from the workman (who this time doesn’t even turn around). As the boy walks away, another man walks into the frame from screen right, moving down the diagonal in front of the men at their work. He is well dressed, a tidy middle-aged bourgeois with a pipe. As he walks along the wall, the boys walk after him, and the camera, as if taking a casual interest in this event, pans away from Ricci and his colleague to follow the man with the two children in calm pursuit. But "follow" is not quite accurate, for the camera does not dolly toward them and there is no cut to a closer position. It merely pans away from its central concern to observe this seemingly peripheral event. The accordion player plays. The other little boy tugs at the well-to-do man’s sleeve (a little further along the street we notice a man sitting in a chair by the curb). The well-to-do man ignores the boy, who turns and walks back to his friend. At this point there is a cut back to Ricci and his co-worker, who continues his instructions, the shot framing them in basically the same diagonal position as before. The two men then get on their bikes and the camera pans with Ricci as he heads off on his own, passing the two boys on the sidewalk.

The whole sequence lasts less than a minute. It gives us next to no information about "plot" and merely advances the narrative toward its first crisis, which occurs in the next sequence when Ricci’s bike is stolen. If such a series of events occurred in a literary work, it might be called "descriptive" or "atmospheric." But there is more to it than that. Here, we might term the sequence milieu gathering, the expansion from direct concentration on the central character to his immediate world. It is an expansion of the frame, but not in the measured, almost choreographic style of Renoir’s expansions of screen and narrative space. De Sica’s digressions are more casual; they assume the point of view of interested observer, concerned with the main character, but interested as well in the world that surrounds him. As observer, the camera attempts to be non-judgmental and nonprovocative as well. Its movements do not provoke us or confront the characters, do not lead us on or compromise them through a prearranged strategy, a reframing meant to excite expectation or anxiety. We are asked only to share an interest in the commonplaces of this particular world, which become less common by the simple and unexpected attention given them.

This careful neutrality is not present throughout the film, and De Sica does play upon expectations when, for example, Ricci and his tattle son Bruno search for the stolen bicycle in the marketplace. Anxiety is created when Ricci—and we—think Bruno may have drowned, and when father and son discover the thief and are surrounded by the people in his neighborhood. De Sica even indulges in a commentative montage. During their search, Ricci and Bruno stop at a restaurant. As Bruno eats his meager pizza he looks over his shoulder at the rich family at another table, and De Sica cuts between Bruno and that family's little boy stuffing himself with an enormous meal. Nor is the digression with the street urchins entirely innocent of narrative import and emotional preparation. It occurs at the high point of Ricci's life in the film: he has work. The beggars foreshadow his later situation, bicycle stolen, himself almost turned thief in desperation, walking the streets hopelessly.

In fact neither De Sica nor any of the neo-realists were pure in their execution, nor were they willing to take very great chances. Certainly not as great as, for example, Godard in Sauve qui peut (La Vie) (Every Man for Himself), where he pans or cuts from a central narrative event to anonymous people on the street. But this is not yet the moment for criticism. Godard could indulge in radical dislocations of attention precisely because De Sica had pointed the way. As I indicated, neo-realism was a delicate concatenation of theory and practice, and at this point I am more interested in ways in which the theory was successfully realized than in how it was compromised.

The beggars sequence in Bicycle Thieves summarizes the major goal of the movement for formal restraint: "During the projection of the film," Luigi Chiarini wrote about Rossellini's Rome, Open City in 1950, "the audience no longer sees the limits of the screen, does not sense a skillful artifice, and no exclamations are uttered about the virtuosity of the directors and actors. The images have become reality, not seen with lucid detachment as in a mirror, but grasped in their actuality and very substance. The formal presence of the filmmakers has dissolved in that reality.&quotf;³⁰ What was happening in the frame was more important than what the filmmaker might do with the frame or to the frame. The Hollywood style of the thirties did not concentrate on the image, but on the way the image could present stock characters in excessive situations, knitting these images into a smooth continuity that made up the narrative. The neo-realists did not defy continuity, but neither did they sacrifice the image to it. They allowed the image to create a world, casually, and with as little embellishment as possible. Even when the "everyday" is extraordinary, as in Rome, Open City, there is an attempt not to make it more than it is. Rossellini tries to restrain the image, holding it to the observation of poor people doing heroic things—resisting and fighting the Nazi occupation—rather than making them appear heroic. The heroism emerges from their acts and their deaths. No comment is made upon it because no comment is needed.

If the word "realism" in film has any meaning at all it lies in this phenomenon: the refusal to make more of the image than is there, and an attempt to allow the fewest and simplest faces, gestures, and surroundings to speak what they have to say and then to move on. This is what neo-realism discovered and what was passed on to the next generation. Whether in the casual observation of the beggars in Bicycle Thieves; the brief look on Bruno's face of disbelief mingled with fear when he finds himself standing among clerics speaking German (a language with many connotations to a postwar Italian); the simple two-shots of Pina and her fiancé on the tenement staircase talking about their future in Rome, Open City; or the point-of-view shot from the fiancé being taken away in the German's truck, watching as Pina runs after him and is shot down, there is in the best of these films a desire not to embellish or do more to the characters or the viewer than is necessary. In Visconti's La Terra Trema, where great care is taken in composing images, where boats and harbor and the people who inhabit them are given an Eisensteinian grandeur, the visual care expresses Visconti's desire not for embellishment, but for honor. There is an admiration of these people and their struggle which does not make them more than they are; perhaps just what they are. Visconti is not dealing in the exaggerations of early socialist realism, the poster nobility of workers and peasants, but with a class of people in a particular geographical area (Sicily) to whom attention needed to be paid. The documentary urge inherent in much of the neo-realist aesthetic also leads him a step further; the rich images are accompanied by a voice-over commentary which, even though it often merely repeats or sums up what we have already seen or will soon see, also attempts to provide an extra objective perspective, a concerned voice to match the concerned eye that forms the images. But some contradictions begin to emerge. Within this documentary impulse, almost contrary to it, there Is a desire to go beyond creation of an illusion of unmediated reality. Visconti will not drop all aesthetic pretense. He observes his world, coaxes it into being, frames and composes it, regards it in the light of his own admiration and compassion, honors it, and finally monumentalizes it. There are images in the film that call for an aesthetic response, an appreciation of the way they are lit and composed. And the manipulation of the narrative, like that of the images, is designed to move us in particular ways.

In the end, the calls to remove subjective contemplation and mediation and reduce aesthetic interference, while necessary to the moral work of the neo-realists, were recognized as impossible to follow. The outstanding fact about the movement is that they were committed to making fiction films, not documentaries, despite the impulse toward documentary in their theory and occasionally in their practice. The subjective urge was always present, and finally recognized. Chiarini wrote: "Facts speak through the suggestive force of neorealism; not as brutal documentary, because absolute objectivity is impossible and is never ‘purified’ out from the subjective element represented by the director; rather, in the sense of the historical-social meaning of facts."³¹ In their urge to purify cinema, they never gave serious thought to using documentary, as had John Grierson in England during the thirties, or Dziga Vertov, who wanted to chronicle post-revolutionary Russia with his kino eye in the twenties. There was nothing for the postwar Italians to chronicle with documentary. There was no revolution and they did not find lyricism in work or sponsorship by government and business to create such lyricism as Grierson and his followers had. Instead they chose to dramatize and give structure to postwar events and to a class of people rarely considered worthy of narrative in the cinema. They invented characters, but allowed them to be played by individuals who were close to those characters in their own lives. They told a story but at the same time attenuated it, subordinating conventional continuity and character development to the observation of detail. Bazin wrote: "The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis."³² Just as the "image fact" achieves importance by the effect of its real presence, so "the concrete instants of life" contained by the image achieve importance beyond drama, beyond narrative even. Seeing an image of life itself is a dramatic event; it need not be manipulated into something greater than itself. The neo-realists sought a form that would attenuate the structures of fantasy in traditional film. The spectator would be offered small, unelaborated images built from the lives of a certain class of people at a certain moment and in a certam place. These images would, finally, request the viewer to recognize in them not "reality" but an attempt to evoke the concrete the immediate; they would request an attention and a willingness to trust the image not to betray either its subject or the spectator

In Paisan, the second of his three films on the war, Rossellini comes closest of all the major neo-realist filmmakers to making a fictional narrative that does not intrude upon subject and observer. The film integrates at least three approaches: it is a quasi-newsreel documenting the movement of American troops from Sicily northward to the Po; within this historical structure it presents six episodes, in specific geographical locations, sketching small dramas occurring between the soldiers and Resistance fighters and the people; and within these episodes it reveals, tersely and without embellishment, some attitudes, agonies, defeats, and victories, military and personal, that resulted from the deprivation of war and two foreign invasions, German and American.

The mise-en-scène throughout most of the episodes is one of catastrophic destruction and barrenness, of heaps of rubble or empty streets through which individuals pursue each other or search for those who have become physically or emotionally lost. In the Naples episode a black American MP meets a small boy, another of those street beggars who populate the neo-realist universe. The episode is built out of a series of small ironies and understandings. When they first meet, at a street fair complete with fire-eater, the soldier is drunk, and a group of young children try to rob him. The boy follows the soldier and the two of them visit a puppet show, which depicts the white crusader Orlando battling a Moor. The black American liberator watches a display of ancient racism and in his drunkenness attacks the white puppet. The boy leads him away through the ruined streets to a rubble heap where the two sit. The soldier plays a harmonica and talks of his fantasy of a hero’s welcome in New York, realizes it is a fantasy, and says he does not want to go home. He falls asleep, and the sequence ends in a manner typical of Rossellini’s approach through the film. The little boy shakes him, tells him rather matter-of-factly, "If you go to sleep, I’ll steal your shoes." The soldier sleeps. The image fades to black.³³

The episode concludes with the soldier finding the little boy again (although at first he does not recognize him), yelling at him, taking him home to the cave where he and many other children live, war orphans left to their own squalor. The soldier comes to a quiet understanding of the poverty that makes thievery an ordinary childhood activity. He does not take the shoes offered him by the little boy (which are not the ones he stole from him anyway) and simply leaves. The last shots are a closeup of the boy’s sad, scared face and a distant shot of the soldier driving off. Swelling music provides the only punctuation. Emotions are not wrung from us here, and the revelation of the city’s hopeless poverty that we share with the black soldier, which ironically reverberates with his own situation as a black man, remains understated. Rossellini need only suggest the horror that often proceeds from understanding, or, in more precise neo-realist terms, permit revelation to occur through observation of the individuals in their environment, and allow both them and us the reactions appropriate at the moment and place of the revelation. He need not expand on these self-contained and self-expressive images: the poor children in primitive conditions who must steal to live; the black American soldier, hero, drunkard, understanding the poverty, unable to have any effect on it. Recognition passes in the exchange of glances within the film and across the film to the audience, who are then left between the look of the child and the soldier in the distant jeep.

The film’s other episodes work in similar patterns. Some are a bit more melodramatic, such as the Roman episode, about an American soldier who spends the night with a prostitute he does not recognize as the woman he once loved. Or the Florence episode, in which an American nurse seeks her Partisan lover, only to discover he has been killed. But even here the personal drama is undercut by that essential neo-realist wonder at things observed. Again, Rossellini is most concerned with the way this piece of history looks, and the Florence episode is constructed primarily of scenes of the nurse moving through the streets of an open city. The urban landscape takes precedence over the woman’s search, and her discovery of her own loss is undercut by Rossellini’s re-creation of the physical emptiness and random violence of a wartime city, where a jug of wine is pulled across the street by a rope so the enemy will not spot the people, and a group of British soldiers sit on a hill viewing church architecture through binoculars.

In one episode, we are set up for melodrama and then denied it. The visit of a group of American chaplains—a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew—to a Franciscan monastery would ordinarily threaten (certainly in an American film) either a great deal of cuteness, choking sanctimoniousness, or a lesson in the virtues of brotherhood. But again, Rossellini refuses to extend significance or commentary beyond the demands of the moment. We learn that the Franciscans served the town during the war by caring for the peasants’ animals. The Americans wonder at the age of the monastery and offer the friars cigarettes and chocolate, as well as more substantial provisions. The friars in return show hospitality and, among themselves, great consternation over the fact that one of the chaplains is Jewish and another Protestant. When the friars confront the Catholic chaplain with their concern over the souls of the Jew and the Protestant, he quietly acknowledges it without sharing it. At dinner, the friars fast, "because Divine Providence has sent to our refuge two souls on which the light of truth must descend." The Catholic chaplain appears to hesitate at their remarks and then gets up to speak. It is just at this point that our expectations are denied. Our training in Hollywood melodrama would lead us to expect the chaplain to give a fulsome defense of his colleagues and a plea for understanding. Rossellini’s chaplain says: ". . . I want to talk to you. I want to tell you that what you’ve given me is such a great gift that I feel I’ll always be in your debt. I’ve found here that peace of mind I’d lost in the horrors and the trials of the war, a beautiful, moving lesson of humility, simplicity, and pure faith...."³⁴ Sanctimoniousness is replaced by understanding, conflict by acceptance, and embellishment is foregone.

Throughout the film the images create and then seem to recede behind a simple historical presence, the fictive record of a particular moment. Again, this is not the Hollywood style of invisible form; we are quite conscious of the effect of withholding and foreshortening. Artifice is present, recognized, and self-effacing simultaneously. As viewers, we are aware of the restraint and its results, a continuous blocking of our desire for conclusiveness, for emotional statement, for closure.

Paisan is a difficult film to evaluate fully. The acting—which is hardly acting at all in a conventional sense—is erratic and so against our expectations of professional performance that it appears amateurish. The cutting, even more than in other neo-realist films, is perfectly functional, getting the narrative from here to there in the swiftest way possible. The structure of the episodes is so truncated that it produces an off-handedness that elevates incompleteness to the status of a structural necessity. But the attenuation and lack of climax is thematic as well as structural. The history covered by the film goes just up to the complete liberation of the country and does not even permit a final satisfaction from that event. The last episode concerns the joining of American and Allied soldiers with Italian Partisans against the Germans in the Po Valley during the last weeks of the war. It opens with the image of a body in a life preserver floating down the river, carrying a sign reading "Partisan," placed there by the Germans. The episode ends with Germans shooting their captives on a boat, the bodies falling one after the other into the river. In between these events is a chronicle of terrors: the liberation army surrounded by Germans on the Po marshes, peasants attempting to gather eels for food, a weeping child on the river bank, a Partisan shooting himself in his despair. Within the war film genre, this episode negates completely the conventions of individual heroism and substitutes a barely cohesive group struggle that is itself apparently hopeless. It is bearable only because we know that the Allies and the Partisans did win. The commentary over the floating bodies at the end tells us, "This happened in the winter of 1944. A few weeks later spring came to Italy and the war was declared over."³⁵ It is only within this context that the episode loses its connotations of futility and instead comes to express a grim persistence with a promise of victory emerging from loss.

Or more accurately, in neo-realist terms, it comes to represent itself, its images self-sufficient in their historical validity, demanding of us nothing more than an immediate comprehension of them. But when I say that Paisan or any other neo-realist film comes to represent itself, I am not suggesting that it is a self-referential form. The creation of a film narrative that comes to signify mainly the creation of a film narrative was the work of the modernist movement that followed neo-realism and was made possible by it. Such an operation could not have been further from Rossellini’s or his colleagues’ minds. What I am suggesting is that the foreshortened emotions created by the foreshortened structure of Paisan, their incompleteness and inconclusiveness , permit and indeed force the viewer to deal with them with a minimum of directorial assistance. Which may be why this film, more than any other of the period, is so unsatisfying within the context of our cinematic expectations, and most successful in the context of neo-realist theory. It refuses to do more than show, or demand more than that we understand what is shown. Beyond that there is the possibility for us to integrate the narrative with our understanding of the history its images reflect, a history of pain and loss, of deprivation and struggle, and of some kind of victory.

The players in this version of history have little personality or life beyond their presence in the narratives; what we see of them is as much as we ever learn about them. Rossellini gives us nothing in the way of past, future, or psychological background for his characters. The "Joe" of the first episode reminisces to an uncomprehending Italian girl of his home in America. The "Joe" of the second episode fantasizes a heroic homecoming for himself to an uncomprehending little boy. But in neither case do the thoughts and feelings of these characters provide the psychology or motivation we are used to finding in melodrama, and in neither case do their feelings lead anywhere. In the first instance, "Joe" is shot by the Germans when he lights a cigarette lighter to show Carmela pictures of his family. Carmela is herself killed when she tries to shoot the Germans. The drunken fantasies of the second "Joe" only lead to a realization of his unheroic life, and when he falls asleep his boots get stolen. Even the sentimentality latent in the Roman episode, in which a drunk American soldier doesn’t recognize the prostitute he has picked up as a girl he met and fell in love with six months earlier, is undercut. The pathos threatened when the prostitute attempts to re-create the past by slipping away from the drunken soldier and leaving him her old address, hoping he will come to her and recognize her as his former love, is left unfinished. The next day the soldier looks at the address and throws it away without recognition. Francesca is left waiting; the soldier drives off. Nothing more is made of it.

The "psychological realism" missing in Paisan is a basic component of film melodrama, Hollywood or European, so basic that melodrama is partly defined by its presence. It is the means by which characters are given a "life" and personality that appear to bear some relationship to the lives of the film’s viewers. The character talks, has memories, passes through events, indulges in introspection and confrontation, suffers, endures, triumphs, or dies, often triumphing in death. In short, the psychologically motivated character has experiences and memories which reveal a personality. But these are often exaggerated and stereotyped, mirroring not the concerns of real individuals in a real society, but the conventional attitudes and personalities of other "psychologically motivated" characters in the history of film. They may change from period to period and country to country, depending on changes and differences in reigning ideologies; they often reflect contemporary fantasies and change as the fantasies change. But despite what "psychological realism" may tell us about our fantasies and our ideology, it tells us nothing about the realities of the immediate world and immediate experience, which is why the neorealists tried to do away with it. For them situation takes the place of psychology, the type replaces the individual, the ordinary the heroic. What we know about a character is what we see of that character in action in his or her environment; no other motivation is needed.

Bazin, writing about the Florence episode in Paisan, says, "Attention is never artificially focused on the heroine. The camera makes no pretense at being psychologically subjective.... As if making an impartial report, [it] confines itself to following a woman searching for a man, leaving us the task of being alone with her, of understanding her, and of sharing her suffering."³⁶ If, Bazin might have added, we care to do so. This episode, like all the others in the film, gives us permission to move on and not be alone with the heroine, not identify with her. The spectator is not distanced from the characters as in a film by Resnais, Godard, or Fassbinder, filmmakers who want completely to cleanse their characters of psychological conventions and their audience of expectations. The neo-realists wanted only to avoid heaping upon the spectator cliched emotion extraneous to what was needed to understand the character in his or her immediate situation, and rather to allow audience response to flow from the "image-facts" and not a preconceived notion of character. In his war trilogy Rossellini comes close to conventional character psychology in the figure of Edmund, the child of Germany, Year Zero, who commits suicide after following the advice of a Nazi to kill his ailing father. But here the enormity of the crime and of the act of a child’s suicide goes well beyond the cinematic conventions of troubled children with troubled families in troubled times. Again the physical and political landscape merges with the individual and his actions in an almost allegorical interchange. The child is as ruined as his surroundings. When he is not in the tenement flat his family shares with others, he is walking the shattered streets of Berlin (an activity he shares with most neorealist characters), as lost as the country he represents. His suicide becomes Germany’s own and his actions are explained finally not by his own emotional nature, but by his function as a historical symbol. His life and death outrun their local narrative function and come to stand for a greater history. At one point in his wanderings, he is given a recording of a Hitler speech by his old Nazi teacher to sell on the black market. In the ruins of the Chancery building, Edmund plays the recording and Hitler’s voice echoes. We see an old man and a young child listen in some bewilderment. The camera pans the ruined cityscape as Hitler boasts of bringing the country to its glory.

Meaning flows from the relationship of word and image and history, and the ironies of Edmund’s life and his leap to death in a bombed-out building become, finally, more than can be contained within a mere psychological narrative. The "dailiness" the neo-realists sought expands in Germany, Year Zero not to some vague universal statement of innocence lost, but to a large and specific judgment about history Zavattini wrote:

Whereas in the past, cinema portrayed a situation from which a second was derived, and then a third from that, and so on each scene being created only to be forgotten the next moment today, when we imagine a scene, we feel the need to "stay" there inside it; we now know that it has within itself all the potential of being reborn and of having important effects. We can calmly say: give us an ordinary situation and from it we will make a spectacle. Centrifugal force which constituted (both from a technical and a moral point of view) the fundamental aspects of traditional cinema has now transformed itself into centripetal force.³⁷

The melodramatic urge-shared by the conventional war film as by most genres-seeks to force the trials of its characters outward into large statements of suffering and transcendence that are greater than history, sometimes greater than the characters themselves. Rossellini reverses the melodramatic urge of the war genre, collapses it into the immediate images of ruin in Germany, Year Zero, or the particular struggles and defeats in Rome, Open City and Paisan. History is drawn, with the spectator's gaze, into the images, which then communicate back to the viewer the place of the character in history, often subjected to history. Most neo-realist cinema operates on this principle: characters inhabit a ruined, collapsed world; their fight against it is momentarily and minimally heroic, like that of the Partisans in Rome, Open City, or the fishermen in La Terra Trema. Their struggle is an external one; little psychological torment is involved. The despair of Ricci in Bicycle Thieves or the old man in Umberto D. is not so much personal as it is social, a despair at not being able to gain an economic self-sufficiency. All of these characters lose by the end of the film, but in their loss there is the attempt to express a wider gain. The whistling of the Partisan children gathered around the executed priest at the end of Rome, Open City is the most commanding sign of life coming out of destruction in any of the films, and the executions of the Partisans at the end of Paisan suggest not a dismal end of struggle, but the necessary conditions of its victory. No glory is given to the deaths, but nothing is taken away from their function in the wider fight. And besides they allow us to hate fascism even more.

But at this point, at the recognition that all neo-realist films end in images of loss, or at best endurance, we can discriminate some more between theoretical intentions and practical realizations. Let me repeat a statement by Zavattini: "It should . . . be clear, that contrary to what was done before the war, the neo-realist movement recognized that the cinema should take as its subject the daily existence and condition of the Italian people, without introducing the coloration of the imagination, and thereby, force itself to analyze it for whatever human, historical, determining, and definite factors it encompasses." Looking back on the movement when he wrote this, Zavattini announced clearly the shift from middle-class subjects and moralism to a more objective observation of the working class, "without introducing the coloration of the imagination." He is aware that it is only a bravura statement, and he admits that the narrative urge of the neo-realists is strong; "they tell stories and do not apply the documentary spirit simply and fully."³⁸ The essays from which these remarks came make up an apology. Neo-realism as a coherent movement was fading when Zavattini wrote them between 1952 and 1953, and there were many attacks upon it from both right and left. In his apology Zavattini's bad faith becomes apparent as he continues to support the theories of the movement against his own inability to see them through. As a practitioner, Zavattini the screenwriter, De Sica's collaborator, never shied from the coloration of the imagination or from attempts to use it to move the audience. And while he and the others were successful in breaking the "bourgeois synthesis" of traditional cinema, they were not successful in analyzing "whatever human, historical, determining and definite factors" were encompassed by "the daily existence and condition of the Italian people." They showed that existence and showed it well; they rarely analyzed it. While they went far in creating an "intensity of vision . . . [in] both the director and the audience" and "a dialogue in which one must give life, reality, its historical importance, which exists in each instant,"³⁹ they rarely dealt with history in such a way as to indicate that their characters might control it rather than only suffer it. They permitted the spectator to see a particular world, but never to see past it. They sometimes suggested, but never clearly presented, possibilities for change in that world.

Nor were their attempts to revise narrative structure complete. For all they did accomplish, they could not, or would not, move away from an essentially sentimental attachment to their subject. The desire for objective observation never replaced sympathy for the characters, a sympathy which manifested itself in the communication of the social-political despair the characters suffered. Images which in theory were meant to be intense observations of daily existence were, in fact, perhaps by the nature of that daily life, images of pathos. The wanderings of Ricci and little Bruno in Bicycle Thieves, their frustration at every turn, the sequence in which Ricci thinks his son has drowned after he has cuffed him in anger, the threats against Ricci by the crowd protecting the thief, Ricci's own attempt at stealing a bike, Bruno's reproach, and their final walk, hand in hand into the crowd, all constitute a pattern guaranteed to arouse our sadness and frustration and make our emotions echo the characters'. Melodrama is just barely avoided in Bicycle Thieves, as it is in Rome, Open City, by the refusal to allow the characters to suffer psychologically and by keeping the movement of the characters and their story simple, without predictable curves of passion, and anchored in the physical and historical environment the images create. Rossellini does make special demands on our reactions in the death of Pina, the torturing of Manfredi, and the execution of Don Pietro in Rome, Open City. In that film he is perhaps too close to the realities of fascism to be able to distance himself from its terrors, and not yet aware that an identification with and emotional reaction to viewed pain and suffering can preclude an understanding of it.⁴⁰ He learned this quickly, and Paisan attenuates direct emotion almost completely. De Sica and Visconti never learned it.

This structural difficulty, the inability to separate their own emotions and ours from the characters they create, is compounded by the neo-realists' insistence on using children as the fulcrum on which to turn these emotions. It is easy to understand the attraction, for children are the most visible and obvious sufferers in any political, economic, and social disaster. They are helpless and therefore wronged the most. To see these wrongs through them, from their perspective, or at least with them as central participants, is to perceive the scope of these wrongs most immediately. The problem—and it is unclear whether Rossellini and De Sica were aware of it—is that the use of children results in a special pleading which, at its worst, becomes cynicism, a vulgar way to assure audience response. The neo-realists fortunately missed being vulgar; they did not miss a certain cynicism and a great deal of naivete. Eric Rhode, one of the few historians not captivated by neo-realist children and able to see the faults of the movement as a whole, accuses the filmmakers of committing moral blackmail. His analysis is important enough to be quoted at length:

Through his portrait of Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, [Bertolt] Brecht had implied that all claims to charity are a form of licensed thievery. He had recognized how in an unjust society the exploited can exploit the exploiters in a way that traps everyone into some form of guile. De Sica and Zavattini are not willing to accept responsibility for this conception of society. They reduce everyone to a childlike state, as though everyone were a child in the sight of God. Their childlike perception of the minutiae of daily life tends to be passive, for all its delicate precision. They cling to the surface of things, and in their clinging assume a perpetual complaint. Brecht had understood that once adults slip back into childlike states of mind and displace responsibility for the community elsewhere, they prefer to complain rather than take action when the community fails to satisfy their needs; and since these needs are seldom satisfied, they tend to imagine that their lives are ordained by some malignant power.⁴¹

Though De Sica and others used children to focus their view of society and our emotional reaction to it, I do not agree with Rhode that they assume a childlike perception themselves, nor do I think their perception to be passive. The passivity in their films exists elsewhere. I do agree, however, that the omnipresence of children is a way for them to avoid a certain responsibility. A child, by all the definitions of middle-class morality, is helpless and in need of constant protection by either parents or charity. The neo-realist child gets none from the latter and only as much from the former as the parents can spare in their own desperate attempts at survival. The desolation continually observed by the neo-realists' cameras is not only unabated, but seems unabatable, as does the poverty that is created by and inhabits the desolation. Within this desolation the children suffer mutely and serve as witnesses and as surrogates for our point of view. Here is where Rhode's perception is acute, for in attaching our point of view to the suffering child, the neo-realists put us in a state of passive and helpless contemplation. De Sica and Zavattini are the main offenders, but even Rossellini, whose children in Rome, Open City are active participants in the Partisans' fight, overplays his hand and our perception by giving them a greater role than they deserve and we need in order to understand the situation. None of these filmmakers acknowledged Brecht's principle of sustained, distanced analysis in the work of art, an analysis that disallows emotional identification and passive acceptance of events by the audience. And so their stated desire to see the world clearly and without conventional cinematic preconceptions came into conflict with their inability to withdraw themselves from a sometimes cliched sympathy for the helpless. The result was that the neo-realists ultimately failed the people they portrayed by being unable or unwilling to create for them victory over their situation (even in Rossellini's war films the victory is only alluded to), and failed their audience by too often allowing them to sentimentalize rather than analyze character and situation.

Early in their careers, and perhaps only because of their antifascism, the neo-realists seem to have had leftist sympathies which drew their attention to the poor and abused. They were not, however, revolutionaries. Though they changed the aesthetics of Western cinema, they did not call for a change in the structure of Western society. What was more, the aesthetic they promoted countered the idea of change. It demanded they observe, but not alter what they saw; it constrained them from offering their characters much more than pity and sentiment. A notion of passivity is built into neo-realist theory, and as a result the filmmakers only allow their characters and their audience to reap the rewards of passivity: more pain, more poverty, softened somewhat by a notion of stoicism and endurance (on the part of the characters) and sadness, understanding, and not a little bit of superiority (on the part of the audience).

In the twenties, Eisenstein could create film that was revolutionary both in form and content; he had the force and support of a historical revolution behind him. There was no such support in postwar Italy only the grimness of a ruined country with an uncertain future. ,Suffermg overtook celebration, and the filmmakers who emerged to document this moment were more taken by the suffering than by anythin else. After all, suffering of this stature had never before been documented on film, certainly not without softening and an artificial leap to a change in fortune. Committed to the retention of simple but eloquent details, to an unadorned but compassionate image, the neo realist filmmaker was not free to alter them or to express anythin more than what he saw. It was, finally, a self-defeating cycle, and it can be seen operating in a most troublesome way in Visconti's La Terra Trema. This film was to be the first part of a great neo-realist revolutionary trilogy about the social and political struggles of fishermen, miners, and peasants living in the poverty-ridden south of Italy The project was started with financing from the Communist Party and in its original conception had a revolutionary thrust and a notion of the poor triumphing over their oppression that might have taken the film beyond the usual neo-realist observations of passive suffering Visconti did not follow through on this original concept, partly be cause his ideas changed as he was shooting and partly because the project never worked out as intended.⁴² Only the first part was made and m its time suffered because of its pace, its length (over three hours), and, in Italy, its dialogue. Visconti used a non-professional Sicilian cast who spoke their own dialect, largely incomprehensible to the rest of the country (which is one reason a voice-over commentary was added). For some time after its initial screenings, the film was available only in a cut, greatly reduced version. But seen whole, and despite (or because of) its changed intentions, it can be taken as a summa of the movement. All the immediate textbook concerns of neo-realism are attended to. The film is shot on location and acted by the inhabitants of the location, who play roles close to their own lives. Visconti shows a careful eye for the rich but simple detail that defines these lives and renders movingly the looks and gestures, light and texture of their world.

His images are made with extreme care, and the use of deep focus and silhouette, the lights of boats at sea, the sweeping pans of land and ocean, all indicate an admiration, even a celebration of what is seen. It is not an idle formalism (this crept into Visconti's work soon enough), but, as I noted earlier, an attempt to draw attention, to honor the place and its inhabitants. This attitude can be glimpsed in some sequences of Bicycle Thieves, where De Sica honors his working men not with nobility, certainly, but with a sense of purpose and control, as in Ricci's first morning of work, when he and Bruno join other men in the streets just after dawn, going for their buses, dominating the landscape and the early light. Visconti goes much further than De Sica.

But in La Terra Trema visual splendor and the observation of novel detail begin to exercise more control over the narrative than does a sense of social and political revelation. Visconti succeeds in documenting the town and inhabitants of Aci-Trezza—more than documenting it, organizing the buildings, the coastline, the fishermen and their families in images that finally overwhelm them. "The documentary moment prevails over the ideological," Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes, and the picturesque prevails over the documentary. Meanwhile the revolutionary intent that Nowell-Smith cites as the initial driving force of the film gets turned into a moving neo-realist affirmation of enduring humanity. The film at times approaches, in Nowell-Smith's words, "an anthropological cinema in which the anthropologist sets the scene and comments on its significance, but retires from the picture when it is actually being taken so that his presence is no longer felt."⁴³ And so a problem arises. Visconti tries to have things two ways: he attempts to make a visual record of a place and a way of life, unencumbered by an authorial presence; and he attempts to apply an authorial presence through the voice-over commentary and by forming this record into a narrative of rebellion and failure. His desire to document a people and their environment, his decision not to depict a successful revolution, his intrusion into the narrative to guide our emotions result in a powerful but conflicted work.

The film traces the fortunes of a poor fishing family who attempt to make themselves independent of the padroni, the omnipresent bosses, wholesalers in this instance, who take the results of the family's difficult labor, pay them poorly for it, and then sell it at a large profit. The early part of the film observes the Valastros' work at sea, their family life, their bitterness at being unable to sell their own catch. Visconti's commentary, spoken throughout the film, tells us of their poverty and anxiety and their few simple pleasures. We are presented with a cycle of work and domesticity interspersed with innocent flirtations, all of which is knitted together by a voice-over narrator who speaks for the people, asking how they could be content with their exploitation. One member of the family, the older brother 'Ntoni, is not. Against the protestations of his conservative grandfather, he leads a small rebellion. The fishermen gather after the catch; 'Ntoni throws the wholesalers' scales and baskets into the water and is promptly arrested by the police. The wholesalers realize that, without the fishermen to catch fish for them to sell, they will not make money. They have 'Ntoni released from jail.

At this point Visconti begins to evade the difficulties in the situation he has created. 'Ntoni, freed, persists in carrying out his struggle for liberation from the owners, and in so doing confronts the unwillingness of his fellow fishermen to join him. He takes the dangerous step of mortgaging his family's house to get the money he needs for his independence. Visconti observes the neighbors' suspicions and their playful mocking of the Valastros; he is sensitive to the shifts in class attitudes. In their momentary wealth, with money from their house and a good catch, the Valastros become the rich and are suspected by the other workers. Both 'Ntoni's girlfriend and his sister's boyfriend express an insecurity about this sudden wealth. It is just here that the "anthropologist" is at his most subtle, and here that the would-be revolutionary filmmaker withdraws and the melodramatist enters, leaving his characters, their situation, and the audience to fend for themselves against the intrusion of cinematic convention. The Valastros reach a high point of success. They have a good catch They manage to get help from their neighbors in salting the fish. There is laughter and music. ‘Ntoni and his lover run happily through the countryside to make love at the shore. Every message sent out by the activity on the screen begins to arouse a single melodramatic expectation: a disaster is inevitable. Visconti cannot help doubling the expectations set up by the images: the narrator emphasizes the couple’s happiness, an emphasis that sets up an inevitable response. The happiness will not last.

Visconti dissolves from the couple to the windy dock. The men return to the sea. They go off in the* boats and the screen fades to black. The image fades up on a pan of the harbor and town, ending on a bell ringer. The narrator tells us that the sound of the bell in Aci-Trezza makes hearts sink, for it means a storm is approaching. The pattern is obvious. The storm comes; the family at home are deeply worried. We are shown images of women in black, silhouetted against the shore, looking out expectantly to the turbulent sea. The Valastros survive physically, but their boat, and therefore their livelihood, is ruined. One of the wholesalers tells ‘Ntoni he will pay for all this. In truth Visconti, the owner of the narrative, will make the family, and us, pay dearly. The decline in fortune from this moment is precipitous and direct. The wholesalers cheat the family, a brother leaves home with a stranger to work in the north, a sister takes up with a town official, ‘Ntoni finds companionship with the town drunks be cause they are the only ones who will not laugh at him. The family’s house is sold; they end up in rags. "All that is left of the Valastros," says the narrator in a remark that suggests Visconti may be luxuriating in the fall of his characters, "are their eyes with which to cry." ‘Ntoni must humiliate himself before the wholesalers he once tried If beat, beg for work before a boss who sits beneath the fading but still clear imprint of Mussolini’s name on the wall. The film ends with the’ Valastros settling into their broken-down new house and ‘Ntoni re turning to the sea, understanding that his failure was due to a lack c solidarity among the fishermen, but indentured to the padroni morethoroughly than before.

Mussolini's name on the wall above the wholesaler is an important emblem, meant as a contrast to the hammer and sickle seen on the wall outside the wholesalers' office and elsewhere. Visconti alludes to the two political orders, one indicating repression, cruel and arrogant power, the other a communal spirit, the strength of the fishermen together, working for themselves. But with the prominence of Mussolini's name over the boss's head, Visconti seems to suggest that the pull of the right is strongest, that repression will continue and a successful communal struggle is not about to occur. He does not say or indicate why he thinks this and allows the political substructure of the film to be diminished by the melodramatic curve that takes over the narrative. The characters are pulled away from the possibilities of political struggle and given over to that most simple and diverting of dramatic conventions, fate. Like so many of their cousins in other neo-realist films, the Valastros suffer and lose. Their spirits are unbroken, but save for 'Ntoni's important understanding that only in unity can the fishermen face the wholesalers, they are without direction or hope.

Though I have said that one of the most important elements of neorealism was its attempt to counter melodrama—the fixed curves of loss and sacrifice and unearned emotional response that had become the supporting pattern of most commercial cinema—I have now to modify that argument and say that though Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti would have liked to move into an anti-melodramatic mode, they succeeded only on occasion; the conflict between their desire to create an observed social-political reality and their attachment to old forms of sentimental storytelling was never resolved, for a variety of reasons. Predominant among them is that these filmmakers often confused one concept of "realism"—an attempt to explore the actual conditions of people, hoping, perhaps, that from the revelation of these conditions might arise a notion of how to change them—with a literary and cinematic convention of "realism" that holds a narrative to be "realistic" if it is sad and if its characters come to an unhappy or unresolved end. They also felt obliged, as I indicated earlier, to follow out the logic of their aesthetic. If neo-realism was to concern itself with the observation of existing conditions, and that observation revealed a seemingly insuperable and stagnant poverty, then that was what had to be shown.⁴⁴ To have dramatized change would have injected into the fiction a subjective impulse contrary to the dictates of observation.

The resulting conflict was often more than the films could bear. The neo-realists may have hoped their films would work dialectically, that their exposure of poverty, suffering, and endurance would suggest possibilities for change in the social structure. But this dialectic rarely operated successfully. For what is ultimately communicated in most of the films is not hope but, to apply Nowell-Smith's comments on Visconti, "a deeply rooted pessimistic fatalism" which pulls too strongly against "a more optimistic intellectual conception of the possibilities of human action" that the filmmakers might want to suggest.⁴⁵ No one and nothing helps Ricci when his bicycle is stolen. He goes to a community center after the event for help. On one side of the hall is what appears to be a Communist Party labor meeting, in which a speaker tells the gathering of the need for more jobs. Ricci's personal needs are rebuffed by the speaker. At the other end of the hall some people are rehearsing a show, making entertainment at this most serious point of Ricci's life. The Party will not help him, and only a friend, a garbage man who is rehearsing, steps forward with the promise of aid. The next day the garbage man and another friend briefly help Ricci look for his bicycle, but he is soon left alone with his son in a hopeless and humiliating venture which winds up only in a general affirmation of humanity—a powerful affirmation, to be sure, but also an easy one to make. Nothing specific is offered for the particular case of Ricci and his family or those like him. Similarly, at the end of Umberto D. De Sica and Zavattini's old man (abused old age here takes the place of abused childhood) who is unable to live on his government pension and has been thrown out of his lodgings, contemplates suicide, but finally, with his little dog, surrounded by children in the park, decides to go on. For what and how is not made clear. Again an affirmation of life takes the place of an analysis of how such a life can be affirmed. We are not permitted to despair, but neither are we given any concrete reason not to.

This notion of the need to endure hardship and despair with hope comes out of another conflicting strain in the neo-realist endeavor, the attempt to merge a leftist understanding of class and social structure with Catholic faith.⁴⁶ Behind the neo-realist aesthetic lay the belief that an openness to the world would lead to revelation; that the filmmaker need only gaze into the book of God’s creatures to discover the truths of humanity. Bazin writes that De Sica’s strength lies

in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is in loving them in their singular individuality. "My little sister reality," says De Sica, and she circles about him like the birds around Saint Francis. Others put her in a cage or teach her to talk, but De Sica talks with her and it is the true language of reality that we hear, the word that cannot be denied, that only love can utter.⁴⁷

In two instances the religious simplicity that Bazin found in the neorealist endeavor was literally expressed. Rossellini made a film about Saint Francis in 1950, and in 1964, after the movement was long over, Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. In both instances the spectacle and exaggeration that are part of the American genre of biblical cinema are replaced by a simplicity and matter-of-factness (bordering on the childish in Rossellini’s film) that subordinate awe to the ordinary and build significance from what the viewer may make of the events rather than how those events are made. The artfulness of Pasolini’s film lies in the rigorousness of its adherence to neo-realist principles and its sense of documenting the biblical text with the simplest of black-and-white cinematic images.

But Bazin’s meditation has nothing to do with films that have a religious subject matter per se. He is indeed attempting to find in neorealism a Catholic openness to God’s work in nature and a faith that faith itself will reveal the divinity in the world. It is a faith that simply will not work, for it turns insight away from the political and social nature of existence into quietism and into hope with no basis in reality. Anger is dissolved into sentimentality. The neo-realists politicized the image, made it reveal the sufferings of a class; at the same time they insisted that their revelations could not go beyond what was seen by the compassionate eye, which had to remain passive in the face of those sufferings. The strains became too much and the neorealists became less and less able or willing to sustain the contradictions inherent in the form and content of their work. In 1950, Zavattini and De Sica made Miracle in Milan, in which one of the finest neo-realist environments, a squatters’ city in an urban wasteland, generates a narrative of the triumph of naivete and wish-fulfillment. A young man, innocent and good to the point of simple-mindedness, leads his people out of poverty and the clutches of an industrialist who wants their oil-rich land only with the aid of ghosts and angels. The poor literally fly to heaven, "towards a kingdom where good morning really means good morning."⁴⁸ Neo-realism becomes neofantasy, "simply a fairy story and only intended as such," says De Sica.⁴⁹ His intentions may not be questioned; but his images may. They are, some of them, among the best-realized cityscapes in the movement. Early in the film there are renderings of gray buildings and streets (photographed by G. R. Aldo, who was cinematographer for La Terra Trema) that look forward to the style Antonioni would develop in the late fifties and early sixties. But by this point in his career De Sica seems unwilling to trust the validity of his images and needed to transcend them with optical effects and a narrative growing out of a childish fantasy that betrays extreme pessimism, as well as the reactionary belief that the poor will only find their reward in another life.

The rapid decay of its original impetus in the early fifties indicates that neo-realism was perhaps a genre after all, a specific concatenation of form and content that responded to historical and social events and was guided by theories fraught with contradictions. When the situation created by those events changed, disappeared, or was radically altered, and when the contradictions could no longer be contained, the genre changed. It had become repetitive or—in the case of Miracle in Milan—silly; its form and content simply used each other up, and the filmmakers wanted to go on to other things. Finally, too, the state had its word and censored what was left of the movement. In the late forties, the audience for Italian film was excellent abroad, but poor at home. The movement came under political attack—by the left for not providing a strong enough model for analysis and change, by the right for being too left, and by the center coalition government in power for keeping away Italian audiences and portraying Italy in a bad light abroad. The government won. Italy joined NATO and, as a recipient of aid from the Marshall Plan, was enjoined to control and if possible do away with any activity that might be taken for left-wing. In 1949 the Christian Democrats placed Giulio Andreotti in charge of the film industry with powers to subsidize only those films that were "suitable . . . to the best interests of Italy." Statements made by government ministers at the time indicate the direction being taken— the direction indicated in Miracle in Milan—toward a cinema of passivity and pacification:

Film is merchandise. If the government has the right to control the export of vegetables and fruits to make sure that they are not rotten, it also has the right, and the duty, to prevent the circulation of films infected with the spirit of neo-realism.
Film is escape, relaxation, forgetfulness for the poor. The people have need of bread and circuses.⁵⁰

A Hollywood mogul could not have better expressed these reassertions of traditional cinema, the balm and embalmer of a society.

However, the fact remains that, as a collective movement, neorealism was already on the decline as the government asserted its authority over it. Its three major practitioners were all anxious to move on, particularly into international production, where fame, profit, and escape from government restrictions might be better realized. Their films were already popular abroad, and Rossellini sealed this popularity by scandal—first with "The Miracle" (1948, one part of a film called L’Amore), which brought down the anger of the Catholic Church and various legions of decency in the United States, and then by an affair with Ingrid Bergman which resulted in a series of romantic and melodramatic films. One of them, Voyage in Italy (1953), was of major importance to the French New Wave and to Michelangelo Antonioni. I will return to it in the next chapter. Visconti, whose Ossessione could be said to have started the movement, moved the furthest beyond it. By the time he made Senso in 1954, his direction was clear: it is a large-scale, color costume drama, its English-language version co-written by Tennessee Williams and co-starring the American actor Parley Granger. His appearance is part of a peculiar phenomenon in fifties Italian film. The neo-realist imperative to use non-professional players went through a transmutation. Professional Italian actors began appearing in the Italians’ post-forties films, but with them, and in major roles, came various actors from America, their voices dubbed into Italian and giving performances better than they ever managed at home. Anthony Quinn plays Zampano and Richard Basehart plays the clown in Fellini’s La Strada (1954); Basehart appears with Broderick Crawford in the same director’s II Bidone ( 1955 ). Steve Cochran, who usually played a gangster in American film, became one of Antonioni’s first lost, wandering figures in Il Grido (1957). In the sixties and seventies American actors of greater stature appeared. Burt Lancaster became a sort of alter ego for Visconti, first in The Leopard (1963) and then in Conversation Piece (1975). In Bertolucci’s 1900, Lancaster was joined by Donald Sutherland and Robert De Niro. At its inception, this phenomenon seemed to offer those directors who were still working in the neo-realist mode a way of using unfamiliar faces while still having actors with some training. Also, by casting these Americans as Italians, the filmmakers created a conflict of styles and personality that offered rich material to manipulate.

But in Visconti’s case, Granger’s appearance in Senso may be the result of a desire for a pretty face rather than an unusual mix of acting styles, and the film makes clear Visconti’s move into glossy international production. It would be an easy judgment to say that the rapidity with which Visconti left neo-realism indicates his small commitment to it. But that would be to misjudge the style of his forties films. The images of Ossessione and La Terra Trema demonstrate a greater desire for eloquence, for overstatement, than do those of his contemporaries. His is an essentially operatic spirit, dependent on large gestures, opulent design, and melodramatic movements.⁵¹ In the forties these lay below the surface of his films; the subjects and forms of neo-realism did not permit them freedom. But when these forms broke down in the fifties, Visconti was freed. In Senso, a contessa meets her Austrian lover at the opera; indeed, they have their first confrontation with the opera stage in the background. This is a film of great passions, betrayals, and tear-stained faces; its only relationship to neo-realism occurs in the occasional exteriors where characters walk down barren wartime streets (the film is set in 1866 amidst the Italian fight against Austrian rule). Visconti was to deal with a variety of subjects in his work, but Senso established his approach—his decadence, if you will—manifested in his need to pump up his mise-en-scène and stuff the cinematic space he creates with opulent detail that overwhelms the characters, who in turn overwhelm themselves with melodrama. I do not use the word "decadence" lightly. Visconti continually worked against his best political instinct—almost all his historical films deal with the rupture caused by the coming to power of the middle class in Italy—by an indulgence in spectacle which is never quite fulfilling enough for him. It is quite possible to reduce the structure of some of his later films, like The Damned (1969) and Death in Venice (1970), to a series of zoom shots among decaying characters and situations, zooms that neither select nor reveal, but only pile on non-signifying details in operatic proportions.

Others of the original neo-realists did not move quite so far beyond their original tenets. De Sica, however, pretty much let his sentimentality and a sense of sexual exploitation get the better of him. His 1960 film Two Women, written by Zavattini from an Alberto Moravia novel, attempts to recapture the wartime milieu and images of uprooted wanderers. But it is largely undone by the gratuitous exploitation of its star, Sophia Loren. It is a vindication of the original neorealist desire to avoid star players, for rather than become part of the mise-en-scène, which is what the neo-realists wanted their players to do, Loren in this later film is the mise-en-scène. All space is organized around her, more accurately around her physical and vocal presence, and all other observations are dominated by her. Only Rossellini managed to keep close to the notion of observation, of allowing the camera to create the illusion that it was attentive to a given and ongoing situation. After his cycle of films with Ingrid Bergman in the fifties, Rossellini undertook a variety of projects, including a documentary on India, until in the mid-sixties he began a series of histories for Italian television: The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (a film which got commercial theatrical distribution outside Italy), films on St. Augustine, Socrates, Pascal, the Medici, the Apostles—a modern cinematic encyclopedia. These films pretend to be not so much recreations of history (although that is of course what they are) as observations of the making of ideas, filmed in long, gentle shots, the zoom lens (a kind that is Rossellini's own invention) moving from person to person in each particular sequence with a casualness that is both spontaneous and ceremonial. The camera gazes and inquires, permits the characters to expound while locating them in an environment that indicates historical time and place without extravagance.

These films are, among other things, responses to Visconti's histories (as well as to Hollywood costume drama).⁵² They present discourse—coherent, defined expression—rather than aria, a sense of possible location rather than grandiloquent decor, and above all display a calm distance from their subject. They do not have the passion of Rossellini's forties war trilogy, though their dramatic reserve is in a direct line from Paisan. Politically they are committed to a centrist position, accepting the "great ideas" and events of the past with very little analysis or question about their social genesis (again the neorealist premise of observation overtakes the need for understanding what is observed). At the beginning of The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, Rossellini shows a group of "common" people working and chatting by the riverside as a group of court doctors ride by on their way to treat the ailing cardinal. The people talk about royalty, the difficulty they have in finding doctors for their own ills, and about the way life went on after the British chopped off their king's head. They represent the same kind of endurance and ongoing-ness shown by the poor in the forties films and demonstrate the same lack of inquiry about that condition on the part of the director. But although these films reveal the same uncertain commitment to political understanding that the neo-realists suffered at the peak of their movement, they remain the closest to the original neo-realist tenets, respecting the images they create and the audience who observes them.⁵³ Rossellini maintained a talent for being both withdrawn from and engaged with his material at the same time, creating the illusion that he is allowing events to play out freely before his camera.

One figure, Federico Fellini, who is closely associated with the neorealists, has hardly been mentioned so far, even though he is the best known Italian filmmaker outside his country. There has been such a great deal written on him already (more than the complexity of his work will bear) that I want to make only a few remarks. Fellini belongs, like Antonioni, to the second wave of Italian filmmakers, who began their production in the fifties. However, he began his work with the forties group, collaborating with Rossellini on the scripts of Rome, Open City and Paisan. He co-directed his first film, Variety Lights (1950), with Alberto Lattuada, a minor neo-realist filmmaker not very well known outside Italy, who turned to and is still making comedies that are occasionally exported. Three of Fellini's fifties films—I Vitelloni, La Strada, and Nights of Cabiria—stand as signposts out of the movement proper and into ways of expanding and revising the genre so that it could ultimately spread its influence to other styles, other concepts of filmmaking. I Vitelloni, for example, is not concerned with the poor, but with a group of young men in a small town. Sons of lower-middle-class parents, they avoid work, avoid action, circling the town square and its streets, one of them marrying and learning painfully to be faithful to his wife, one finally leaving the town and its apathy. Visually, the film's exteriors are among the best examples of the hard-edged black and gray neo-realist style. The nighttime sequences show the influence of American film noir (examples of which were by this time just getting to Europe). Unlike his forties predecessors in Italy, however, Fellini does not define his characters exclusively by their environment. More than in Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero, it imposes on the characters, rather than reflecting their social and economic condition. It contains them, it even frightens them. The would-be writer of the group, Leopoldo, looks for support to a visiting artiste, one in a long line of Fellini masters of ceremony-cum-ringmasters-cum-fakers. Out in the dark, windy square, Leopoldo begs this man to help him be somebody, to take him out of this boring town where nothing ever happens. The old man, quiet, mysterious, non-committal, leads Leopoldo through the dark and down to the harbor. But the night, wind, and shadows are too much for Leopoldo, as are the promises of the unknown that they hold. He runs off, the old man laughing after him.

Environment begins to take on something of the symbolic here, and while there is only a hint of this in I Vitelloni, the symbolic snared Fellini in his later work, until finally environment became decor, smothering character without revealing it. But here restraint holds, and Fellini refrains from attempts to investigate psychology and turn memory into set design, willing still to observe behavior with graciousness and a certain distance. The episodic structure of I Vitelloni enables him to be flexible, to move into and away from his characters, collect incidents in the lives of his young men that are funny and poignant, but non-judgmental. At the end of the film, one of them gets up the courage to leave the town. Urged on by a young boy who works at the railroad station (Fellini modified the function of the neorealist child; here and in later films the child or the child-like is a source of innocent understanding, often allowing an adult character insight into his own jaded life), Moraldo boards an early morning train. As it pulls out, shots of him are intercut with retreating traveling shots of his friends at home, in bed—an expressionist sequence of sorts, extrapolating Moraldo’s state of mind and revealing the situation of all concerned. It compares the activity of one of the characters with the passivity of the others without eliciting from us any strong approval or disapproval. We are not forced into a confrontation with the characters, and the film ends with the railroad boy who, smiling, walks the rails back to town—an intermediary figure who diffuses our concentration and separates us from the action.

This is the last film in which Fellini permitted even this much distance to exist. A need for psychological investigation and for huge statements about large emotions overwhelms his later films. La Strada and Nights of Cabiria remain rooted in neo-realism, in the observation of the poor and disenfranchised wandering in a desolate landscape. But the landscape recedes as carefully premeditated characters in finely tuned melodramatic narratives move forward and demand emotional response. Bazin, attempting to defend Nights of Cabiria, writes, ". . . we . . . now . . . see the characters no longer among the objects but, as if these had become transparent, through them."⁵⁴ In fact, character begins to separate from objects, and soon the two will fight unsuccessfully for Fellini’s—and the audience’s—attention. Fellini becomes concerned with significance which, in the films from La Strada through 8 1/2 (1962), means probing desperate characters and insisting that the audience share their emotional turmoil. Unlike Ingmar Bergman (perhaps Fellini’s only rival in international movie fame), Fellini does not permit his characters a fearful and obsessive introspection. He is close enough to his tradition to observe them from the outside in.⁵⁵ Gelsomina, in La Strada, is defined by Giulietta Masina’s expressive face (full of ticks and reactions borrowed partly from Charlie Chaplin, partly from Jane Wyman’s performance in the 1948 American film Johnny Belinda), by the character’s poverty and physical isolation, by her association with children and animals, and of course in contrast to the brutish Zampano, the itinerant strong man who treats her worse than an animal. But Fellini exaggerates his images, gives them a great deal of emotional force. He makes them plead with us for our attention and reaction. Gelsomina distracts us from her place in the landscape. The relentless cruelty of Zampano turns him into an abstraction—and in fact it is the process of abstraction, the pull on the characters out of their situation into something of a lecture on brutishness and innocence, that constitutes both the success and failure of the film.

In La Strada, Fellini develops an important extension of neo-realist possibilities. By forcing his images and creating confrontations informed by ideas that reach for great significance—the transcendence of innocence in the face of lumpish brutality—he is giving character and landscape a connotative dimension and a moral structure. He is also personalizing his characters more than the forties neo-realists would have done, and with curious results. The neo-realist character is neither a stereotype nor an abstraction, but a representative, a figure of his or her class. While the characters in both La Strada and Nights of Cabiria have class attributes, the abstraction process is one of declassification, removal to the status of impassioned idea or, perhaps more accurately, of moral marker in a landscape of despair (a purple phrase adequate to Fellini’s intentions). The political morality of the neo-realists was embedded in their choice and treatment of character and place; Fellini adds to this his abstract morality, and we are asked to make the tally. He wants moral perception and judgment where the neo-realists wanted observation and comprehension; on top of that he wants profound emotional reactions. The melodrama that always threatened neo-realist narrative is now indulged in without embarrassment. The lonely, abused Gelsomina befriends a clown, a man as foolish and innocent as she, but unlike her, willing to stand up to Zampano. The strong man kills him. Gelsomina becomes more pitiable than before and is abandoned by Zampano, though not before he shows some expression of guilt. After a passing of time, Zampano wanders through the streets of a town and hears someone singing music associated with Gelsomina. A woman hanging wash on a line tells him Gelsomina is dead. A devastated Zampano pretends not to be moved. He does his strong man act, but the camera itself refuses to participate. As a punishment, and to point up Zampano's aloneness, it retreats to the exterior of the circus ring as he goes through the mechanics of his performance. But this retreat from proximity is not sufficient. The roaring, brawling animal must show some notion of humanity, some salvation. He returns to the sea at night (the persistent, if not terribly original, Fellinian "symbol" of rebirth), sits on the sand and begins to sob, then falls on the beach, clutching the sand the way the clown he killed clutched the ground in his death throes. The camera pulls back and up—this time not leaving him alone but exposing him fully to our gaze—music swells, and we are left wrung dry.

There is no denying the power of this; there is also no denying, on rational reflection, that we are being manipulated, that Fellini has rejoined an earlier and persistent cinematic tradition, the very one the neo-realists attempted to alter. Certainly he felt he was dealing with more important subjects than those undertaken by Hollywood melodrama, though in fact they are the same subjects—the struggles of good and evil, innocence and corruption, the place and worth of the self in a cruel world—presented in a more abstract, apparently more sophisticated form. But only apparently. The forms of melodrama and their demands for unmediated emotional response are largely the same regardless of the particular subject. Fellini finally abandoned the neo-realists' call for observation and a measure of disengagement, he closed up the spaces of engaged observation and reentered the arena of grand emotion and moral generalization. He continues in this area through La Dolce Vita (1959), where his concern is with a rich, middle-class urban milieu, which (like all such milieus examined by sixties European filmmakers) is without values, compassion, or direction. He flirts briefly with some modernist effects of memory and perception in 8 1/2, a film that marks the end of his creative period. In it he tries to give form to his own personality, erect a model of his own experience, and succeeds because here the film's spectacle, its fragmented structure of memory and desire, permit some distance, allow it to become more a reflection upon memory and desire than merely a story of a set-upon film director who can no longer get his projects off the ground. The film has the energy of discovery, of form being invented and images elaborated. But the self-indulgence intimated in the film was not held down. In his following works, Fellini moved into the artifice of spectacle, the fantasies of memory, which became more insular and repetitive as he proceeded.

Fellini's decline is not without its lessons about film history. Unlike many of the filmmakers who followed in the wake of neo-realism and extended its possibilities—directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Truffaut and Godard—Fellini slipped back to a melodramatic mode via expressionism, an autobiographical expressionism in which the structures of memory and fantasy are limned out with history relegated to a backdrop and nostalgia elevated above analysis. He returns to a romanticism that insists that the productions of the artist's life and imagination must be of interest simply because they are the productions of the artist. The images of such films as Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, Amarcord, Roma, The City of Women are meant to be valid simply because they are Fellini's images. But this redundancy, like all such, has a gap in its center. The demand for attention is based only on our supposed curiosity about the workings of a single, and not singular, imagination. Otherwise, these films respond to nothing. In his later films he wishes to create worlds that express some profound psychological truths, but manages to make images that only correspond to his own fantasies and—when the spectacle is stripped away—unexceptional memories. The endless movement of grotesque faces within the landscape of a world-cum-carnival must be taken on faith. Bad faith.

I risk here the accusation of being a "realist" of the most fundamental kind, somewhere close to Siegfried Kracauer, perhaps, whose Theory of Film promulgates the myth of an ideal cinema that passively records an "ongoing" world without changing what it sees.⁵⁶ But this is quite the opposite of what I am getting at. The film image does have a presence and immediacy and a perceptual status that seem to parallel the way we look at the world itself. But it is an image and not the "reality" of our day-to-day perception. ". . . The secret of film," writes Christian Metz, "is that it is able to leave a high degree of reality in its images, which are, nevertheless, still perceived as images."⁵⁷ Neo-realism never mistook the image of reality for reality itself, and in fact wished to make the image an eloquent device that would be valid in the way it communicated behavior, emotion, action and reaction, history and place. No matter what kind of film, image is artifice and there is never any confusion on the spectator's part about this fact. The question of major importance concerns the degree to which the image makes the spectator aware of its status as a made object. The neo-realists wanted their images to reveal a world ignored by conventional cinema and to present that world unmediated by cinematic stereotyping. They depended upon the artifice of the camera eye to transcend artifice and create a version of reality more stark, immediate, and accessible than that of the past. They questioned the "reality" of American and American-influenced film because it was a reality that did not examine its illusory nature and did not provoke the spectator to examine assumptions about the world or the methods of observing the world cinematically. Fellini is a filmmaker who forgot these questions and the answers. While he remains deeply committed to the artifice of the image, he forgets that this artifice is meant to generate meaning. A gap is created between his introspections and the viewer's desire for his images to communicate something. In the end nothing is revealed but commonplaces. In his later films, the neo realist urge to reveal and question has disappeared beneath an irrelevant (and sometimes—as in Orchestra Rehearsal and The City of Women—reactionary) subjectivity.

The complexities of artifice, the extent to which the filmmaker requires the spectator to be aware that the image is a construct—a special and specially perceived version of reality—will concern us in some detail in the next chapter. Here I wish to indicate some of the immediate results and influences of the neo-realist movement and the effects it had on various cinemas, including American. Partly by coincidence, and partly by direct influence, a movement toward "documentary realism" started in American film in the mid-forties. Filmmakers began shooting on location, and in such works as Elia Kazan's Boomerang! (1947), Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, and Jules Dassin's The Naked City (both 1948) the expressionism of film noir is modified by a more subdued relationship of character and surroundings. Place is established as a defining presence. None of these films were anything like what the Italians were doing at the same time; they share only the desire to get out of the studio. But in the hothouse world of Hollywood filmmaking, where any exterior shot in closer proximity to a character than the knees up was done in the studio against a rear-screen projection of a background, this desire to look at the world was of great importance—short-lived importance, for American filmmakers retreated back into the studio in the fifties. But when the studios ceased operating as self-sufficient entities, filmmakers returned to the streets, and the look of American cinema changed The neo-realist influence was in the far distance, filtered through the influence of the French New Wave, but a link was present.

Neo-realism's influence in Europe was more complete and impressive. In England, the tentative and short-lived beginnings of cinema independent of Hollywood, dealing with the cultural and social concerns of the country, were patterned after the work of the postwar Italians. The so-called kitchen sink school, including such films as Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1958), Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Tony Richardson's Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963), turned, like the Italians before them, from middle-class subjects to the working class; they observed characters in relation to their environment in hard gray tones, and through their images attempted to get their audience to examine a part of the culture that their cinema had hitherto ignored or treated with moral condescension. The English version of neo-realism ran into similar thematic and formal problems as had the Italian. The films were unable to get either close enough to or far away enough from their characters to effect a radical change in the conventional ways characters were understood. They tended toward the melodramatic, even the hysterical, in their evocation of the pain and frustration of stagnant lives, and more often than not took that stagnation as so much of a given that frustration was played upon as an emotional asset. The British neo-realist characters are rarely permitted even those signs of endurance and reintegration into the sad flow of life allowed the Italian. The British filmmakers, working largely from scripts drawn from novels or plays, could not, it seems, break out of the individualist tradition of psychological realism. Their films are largely character studies, and in attempting to join the tradition of the motivated, introspective, suffering hero with the neorealist urge to create characters who must be understood from a social rather than a subjective perspective, they set up a tension that was finally unresolvable. Their working-class characters, set within the environment of the industrial midlands of England, are frozen by that environment and by their class. They rail against it, fight against it, pretend to stand over and against it, but cannot or will not overcome it. (Let us stand back from the fiction: they cannot or will not be allowed to overcome it, for as in traditional melodrama, audience reaction is earned by their failure rather than by victory or assertion.) The characters’ joys are minimal, their suffering intense.

Albert Finney’s Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is obsessive in his attempts to impress his vitality onto a monotonous factory life and to negate any preconceptions people may have of him. But in the end he stands with his girlfriend on a hill overlooking a new housing development, on the brink of slipping into the moribund life he has fought. The vitality of these working-class heroes is always denied, not merely because of the impossibly oppressive economical and social system that surrounds them, but because of their psychological make-up, or rather the psychology made up for them by their creators, which denies them any possibility for change or escape. Frank Machin, the Richard Harris character in Anderson’s This Sporting Life (a film which mixes a flashback time structure influenced by Alain Resnais with an operatic style of gesture and delivery borrowed from Visconti), endures and perpetuates a masochism and self-hatred figured in the brutality of the slow-motion soccer game that ends the film and encapsulates his life. In those instances when self-hatred should turn into defiance, it is turned inward rather than imposed upon the world that created it. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the Tom Courtenay character, imprisoned in reform school, given special treatment because of his athletic ability, stops just short of winning a race because it would mean yielding to the wishes of the authorities. It is a powerful and frustrating ending for the film, and perfectly enigmatic. No reason is offered for the character’s self-defeat other than some vague motivations of pride, stubbornness, and, again, masochism. The "realism" attained by such frustration is created only in its opposition to a conventionally happy ending; social realities are presented not in an attempt to understand them, but as a narrative device. In British neo-realism, class is made a background to the study of unusual characters.

It may be unfair to single out British cinema for special criticism. It has carried on a decades-long struggle with American influence and American money without, to this day, being able to discover a successful means of independent production.* Its "neo-realist" movement was just one of many false starts toward the establishment of an independent’ national cinema. That it adopted to a greater extent than did the Italians a melodramatic, psychological approach can,

Although, with the government now providing some assistance through the National Film Finance Corporation and the British Film Institute Production Board, there is an opportunity for independent production to gain a foothold at least.perhaps, be explained by the direct influence of American cinema as well as the confusions suffered by the middle-class intellectual writers and directors approaching what was for them a new subject matter But while the films are not complete successes, they are important as documents of the spread of the neo-realist influence: a "new" cinema in England presented itself in a neo-realist mode.⁵⁸

The same happened in India, whose first internationally recognized film (from a country whose internal film production was the highest in the world) was a neo-realist work. Satyajit Ray’s PatherPanchali (1955) brings to bear on its local subject a feeling for country landscape worthy of Griffith and Renoir, and an observation of a family struggling with poverty constructed with less sentimentality but with all the intensity of De Sica, who was a direct influence.⁵⁹ Like De Sica, Ray works through the point of view of children, though without De Sica’s special pleading. Pather Panchali and the films that follow it and make up a trilogy—Aparajito and The World of Apu— are concerned most of all with building images of faces and landscape, of faces in a landscape, and with detail, textures, and spatial relationships that define events more quietly than sentimentality and melodrama. The films have the value of anthropology for viewers unfamiliar with the rural Indian landscape and its inhabitants, and Ray observes with something of the anthropologist’s eye the detail and the intricacies and painfulness of family relationships.

In a sense, Ray’s early films make use of neo-realist technique in a "purer" form than did those who originally developed it, a phenomenon that may be explained by the fact that he had a chance to contemplate the form as those in the heat of its development could not. We see this "purity" again in another film that is part of the beginning of a new movement. Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Vidas Secas (Barren Lives), made at the beginning of the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil in 1963, is a grim and unelaborated fictional documentation of a family living, desperately, on the sertão, the dead plain of northeast Brazil. Once again we see a response to the elaborate fictions of American cinema in a simple, unadorned study of the progress of wretchedness and poverty, images that do not yield to the softening of cliche and, like the best works of neo-realism, offer hope only through the revelation of intolerable lives—revelation that might be a prod to action. Dos Santos wrote: "Neo-realism understood that within a capitalist society it is possible to practice, through cinema, a humanistic, transforming mode of thought. That was the great lesson of neo-realism.... And Cinema Novo is the application of the method in Brazil."⁶⁰ Vidas Secas, along with works like Ruy Guerra’s Os Fuzis (1963), was a major statement of the need for aesthetic and political change, as were the Italian films of the forties. Brazil in the sixties, like Italy in the forties or Britain in the late fifties, was unaccustomed to having film image a despairing poverty, a family’s endless and hopeless wandering of an endlessly inhospitable landscape. As in Italy, the new movement met political opposition. Unlike that in Italy, it developed into a highly experimental and deeply political mode, particularly in the films of Glauber Rocha, whose experiments extended the limits of neo-realism, but remained rooted in it.

Continue Chapter One