Italian Neorealism: Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti

Posted on Jan 23, 2025 in Physics

Roberto Rossellini

Neorealism Trilogy:
- Germany Year Zero
- Paisan
- Rome Open City
There are many kinds of neorealism. Everyone has his own. Mine was a moral position, an effort to understand myself inside a phenomenon.

Characters: Giorgio the engineer, Don Pietro the priest, Pina and Francesco, Marcello their son, Giorgio’s ex-girlfriend Marina (betrayed the resistance in exchange for drugs and fur coats)
Scene when Pina got shot: “Few scenes in cinema have the force of that in which Magnani, arms outstretched, races towards the camera to her death.”
The good characters are set sharply apart from the corrupt ones by their belief in a better tomorrow.
As the priest died of shots, the camera focused on the children and the dome of Saint Peter’s Cathedral, representing hope.
Not a traditional neorealism film since it employed professional actors and set up scenes.
Vertical city: surveillance and resistance; horizontal city: movement and opposition.

The true subject is not merely a realistic view of the Allied invasion. Instead, he aims at a more philosophical theme: the encounter of two alien cultures, Italian and American.
Paisan: a friendly form of address by Italian and American.
No comradeship. Carmela and Joe had a language barrier. Joe showed her a picture with a lighter but got killed. Carmella got blamed and killed too.
Joe, the black soldier from the USA, lost his boots. They were stolen by a boy in a poorer family.
Fred and Francesca. The entire sequence is an ironic commentary on the hope and optimism that Open City had expressed only a year earlier.
Nurse Harriet and Guido the painter. Again, an attempt to bridge the gap between two cultures ends in death and unhappiness.
Sixth, final story. Dale, the American liaison officer, was involved in the daily no-quarter-given struggle between the partisan and Nazi soldiers. Camera skill: the camera stays low just as the partisans crouch beneath the reeds along the riverbank to avoid detection by the Germans.

Was made the year Rossellini’s first son died (the reason for a young protagonist).
Characters: Edmund the boy, his sister Eva, their sick father, brother Karl, Herr Enning the Nazi school teacher.
Edmund’s tragedy stems from Nazi Germany and also a lack of a father figure for a moral code.

Bazin defined neorealism as defined by aesthetics and called it a cinema of fact and reconstituted reportage that contained a message of fundamental human solidarity fostered by the anti-fascist resistance. On-location shooting, nonprofessional actors.
Italian neorealism appeared at a particular moment in the development of cinema: it has obvious links to the events that unfolded in Italy and Europe during and immediately after WWII.

Trilogy of solitude:
Rossellini’s style is a way of seeing; De Sica’s style is a way of feeling.
Was the most popular actor and singer.
Mise-en-scène, used stage design to tell a story.
The actors’ ignorance is an advantage, not a handicap. Raw material that can be molded at will. It’s almost impossible for a professional actor to forget what he already knew.

Ricci and his son Bruno.
Mise-en-scène style, realistic elements like on-location shooting, social themes, nonprofessional actors with an extremely complex plot aimed at moving the sympathies of the audience.
Large budget for the film.
De Sica defined filmmaking as transposing reality into the realm of poetry.
Basic facts of life: solitude, loneliness, alienation of the individual within the amorphous and unsympathetic body of humanity.
Sense of isolation: extreme depth-of-field shots.
De Sica suggests that the only remedy is the support and love Ricci receives from his family (his son offered Ricci his hand).

Cross, irritable, and grouchy old man, who unlike Ricci, doesn’t have the support of family, and most of his friends have already died.
Umberto is more afraid of losing face than appearing poor in front of others.
Dilemma similar to Bicycle Thieves: is social reform incapable of curing human solitude?
Very mobile camera: brings shots in moving vehicles like trolleys and taxi cabs (through keyholes and mirrors too).
Umberto’s insignificance in Italian society portrayed by an extremely high-angle shot down at the pensioners.
Ungrateful landlady who was kept alive by Umberto’s surplus ration coupon. Listens to opera not to appreciate it but to confirm and improve social status.
Umberto scolds the maid for her carelessness right after she told him that she told her boyfriend she’s pregnant and got abandoned. He was insensitive to the maid’s problem while expecting others to recognize his own problems.

Gino and Giovanna killed Bregana.
In one particularly memorable scene that anticipates a major theme of neorealism, Ossessione‘s central female character enters her wildly messy kitchen, serves herself a bowl of soup, and sits down with a newspaper only to fall asleep, slumped over wearily in the midst of the confusion. At several moments like this one, Visconti slows the pace to give the viewer an even more penetrating glimpse into the routine of his characters, and in doing so, roots the narrative squarely in the life of his characters.
In another scene, the three are eating when Bregana comments that a local landowner has been shot from behind by a worker, believed to be the result of the worker’s love for the landowner’s wife. In this way, Visconti foreshadows Bregana’s own death and illuminates the study of class tension that is woven fluidly into the film. Soon afterwards, Bregana submits to his wife’s physical and verbal responses to cats outside crying or due to the heat (in heat.) He fetches his shotgun and leaves. Shortly after his exit, the adulterous lovers huddle close and hear gunshots, thereby hinting at the doom also reserved for two lovers “in heat.”
Irony.

Made during the height of the Italian economic miracle.
Focus upon the migration of southern Italians to northern industrial areas (dramatic clash of different value systems: southern peasants with family honor and loyalty, contemporary morality linked to the industrial society of northern people).
Rosaria and five sons (established one, Cincenzo).
Each son is a different response to the immigrant experience.
Simone raped Nadia. Becoming a boxer is a traditional route for minorities to advance.