II.

Neo-Realism in Italian Cinema

After the fall of Mussolini in 1943 and liberation in 1945, an entirely new cinema came into being in Italy: Neo-Realism. With the studios at Cinecittà turned into a refugee camp, film-makers took to the street to tell stories about the Resistance or the pain of post-war everyday life. Neo-Realism emerged into public view with Roma, Città Aperta (Rome, Open City) by Roberto Rossellini, shot during the last months of World War II and released in September 1945, but the seeds of the movement had been germinating for a long time and it had a notable precursor in Ossessione (1943) by Luchino Visconti. Visconti went on to make La Terra Trema (1948; The Earth Trembles), a massive epic about the harsh life of Sicilian fishermen, while the director/scriptwriter team of Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini made Sciuscià (1946; Shoeshine), about two boys living off their wits in post-war Rome; the world-famous Ladri di Biciclette (1948; Bicycle Thieves); and Umberto D (1952), the story of a pensioner and his dog. Rossellini followed the success of Roma, Città Aperta with Paisà (1946), a film in six episodes about the Allied advance through Italy, and Germania Anno Zero (1948; Germany Year Zero), set in the ruins of Berlin.

Neo-Realism, though widely acclaimed and hugely influential, particularly abroad, enjoyed mixed fortunes with the public at home. La Terra Trema was released only in a cut version, with its Sicilian dialect dubbed into standard Italian; it did badly at the box office. Umberto D fared even worse. More popular were films such as Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso Amaro (1949; Bitter Rice), which mixed social content with elements of crime melodrama, and whose camera lingered on the thighs of the young Silvana Mangano striding through the rice fields. Faced with poor distribution and with outright hostility from a government concerned with the image of Italy being projected by their films, the Neo-Realist film-makers changed course, seeking success in the resurgent commercial cinema and in what was shortly to emerge as the international art film.