Contrary to other major movements such as new wave or the free cinema British, innovative, even revolutionary currents, against the state of cinema of those days, neorealism was not a planned act. Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Cesare Zavattini and Luchino Visconti never met in the editorial office of a media outlet or in a trattoria of Trastevere to plan an artistic, social and political assault. Something that Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and company did do in England, the angry young people who finally portrayed the kitchen sink of their country, and who went so far as to write a manifesto of wills. And something that Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette also carried out, formed in their ideology around the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.
Neorealism is not constituted, it emerges. Neorealism is not planned, it simply emerges thanks to (or because of) a series of political, social and industrial circumstances, all of them tragic, around the final days of the Second World War, the decline of Mussolini’s fascism and the economic and moral poverty of a ruined country. It was then that, between 1943 and 1948, a handful of directors created a series of wonderful films that seemed to talk about the same thing in a similar way: the sacrifices of the people; children as observers of their elders’ difficulties in living; the portrait of sexual desire until then prohibited by fascist censorship; the ethical cataclysm in the minds of citizens who, between hunger and desolation, no longer knew if they were coming or going after resisting or collaborating with Nazi power. When it premiered Rome, open city In 1945, the magazine life He claimed that the film had contributed to Italy beginning to recover the nobility lost during Mussolini’s government. It was precisely this work by Rossellini that ended up imposing the name “neorealist”, coined by a critic, Umberto Barbaro, on titles such as The shoeshine boy and bicycle thiefby De Sica, Paisa and Germany, year zeroby Rossellini, and The earth shakes, by Visconti. Historical works that, in any case, did not have a unitary style since some were close to documentaryism and others to the search for solidity of the story.
For all these reasons, talking about neorealism today can have a point of fallacy. Or maybe not so much. What remains of the movement that x-rayed a country, transformed subsequent world cinema with its forms and its substance, but failed to change Italy, mired since those days in an almost perpetual political crisis? We ask ourselves this because these are days when, mistakenly, people have once again talked about neorealism after the international premiere of the successful Italian film We will always have tomorrow, directed by actress Paola Cortellesi (more than five million viewers in the transalpine country; more than 150,000 in Spain and rising, after almost two months in theaters). And also because, this time with discretion, since mid-May the severe, devastating and at the same time beautiful Rome, open city, Paisa and Germany, year zero.
Of course, if neorealism survives in any film, it is not, no matter how much some have cited it, in We will always have tomorrow, a popular film in its entirety and with many virtues, but which could almost be considered the antithesis of the movement, despite its black and white and its post-war setting, with its beatings of women through dances, its surprising turn dramatic ending, its melodramatic touch and a certain schematism in its light humor. “When someone, be it the public, the State or the Church, says: ‘Enough of poverty, enough of films that reflect poverty’, they commit a moral crime. He refuses to understand, to find out. And by not wanting to find out, consciously or not, he escapes from reality,” said Cesare Zavattini, one of the fundamental scriptwriters of a movement that took the cameras outside because the film studios were destroyed, that took advantage of the ruins of streets and buildings as royal decoration, which often used non-professional interpreters, which established an open criticism against the indifference of the authorities, and which placed the transition from the individual to the community as its central core.
In Italy, neorealism was exhausted or transformed after 1948, after the arrival of the Christian Democrats to power and the promotion of a more commercial cinema from the Undersecretary of Cinematography commanded by the later famous Giulio Andreotti. So, the beautiful austerity of works like bicycle thief It began to be decorated with a point of artifice in the shapes of others such as Two women (1961), to cite two titles by the same director, De Sica, in which this evolution is extremely noticeable. Of course he lived on in titles like Rocco and his brothers (1960), by Visconti, even in the stimulating pink neorealism, unfairly reviled in its day by some critics already from its nickname, for introducing comedy into the postulates of truth, despite the fact that those works by people like Mario Monicelli and Luigi Comencini (the great war, Everyone home) could be as harsh or harsher, even with laughter, than some of their older sisters.
Meanwhile, its influence on cinemas around the world was total. In India, with the work of Satyajit Ray and his Apu Trilogy. In many of the new cinemas, from Eastern Europe to Brazil. In Italy itself, with the works of, among others, the Taviani brothers and Ermanno Olmi. In the New Hollywood of the seventies, mainly in the Jerry Schatzberg of The Scarecrow and Panic in Needle Park. And even in Spain, despite censorship, with works like Grooves (1951), by José Antonio Nieves Conde. More than three decades of neorealist influence, as can be seen, in countries and in historical periods marked, as occurred in neorealism, by collapse and attempts at moral rearmament.
So where can we find the neorealist mark in today’s cinema? Not in any black and white film that talks about Italian reality. Nor in that look of bourgeois remorse that seems to inhabit Rome, by Alfonso Cuarón, which was also said to be neorealist. That is not the essence. The key is in films that can provoke phrases like that of Andreotti in the power of their respective countries after the premiere of the overwhelming Umberto D (1952), by De Sica: “Dirty rags are cleaned at home and are not aired outside.” That is, in some of the best films by the Chinese Jia Zhang-ke (Pickpocket, unknown pleasures, Ash is the purest white); in the work of Abbas Kiarostami and his best disciples in Iran; in Andrei Zvyagintsev and his chilling vision of contemporary Russia in Leviathan; in the documentaries of the Italian Gianfranco Rosi, Sacred GRA and fire in the sea, about poverty on Rome’s ring roads and the horror of refugees on the island of Lampedusa. A resistance, a renewed fight. Without a priori, without dogmas, without condescension, without (excessive) formalisms. In an open, critical way and always on the path towards authenticity. In the words of De Sica: “Neorealism was born in us, in our spirit, in the need to express ourselves in a different way than fascism and a certain type of North American cinema had forced us.”
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