‘A Poetics of Refusals’: Neorealism from Italy to Africa

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. When referring to the Italian film movement of the 1940s and 50s I will use “Neorealism,” with a capital N. Otherwise, “neorealism” is the more general term (often used anachronistically by critics to describe other films with a somehow comparable style). 2. Peter Bondanella has taken critics and film historians to task for focusing only on the realism and social commentary within Neorealist films at the expense of the artifice acknowledged by filmmakers (34, 95). 3. Several critics claim that “neorealism” was first used in a cinematic context in 1942 to describe Ossessione, either by critic Antonio Pietrangeli (Bawden 498) or by film editor Mario Serandrei in a letter to Visconti himself (Monticelli 72). 4. See, for example, Manthia Diawara. “Popular Culture and Oral Traditions in African Film.” Bakari and Cham 209–18. 5. For a detailed analysis of Sembene's use of reflexive techniques in Black Girl, see Landy.