Francesco Pitassio, Neorealist Film Culture 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema

Abstract

Barely has the afterglow subsided from the celebration of 70 years since the first appearance of neorealism in the wreckage of the postwar Italian film industry,1 than the heralds of its 75th anniversary appear.2 This recurrent urge to commemorate neorealism suggests that the movement acts to remind scholars that film once had a heroic phase, as an art form with a previously unparalleled public importance. Yet sceptics might be forgiven for considering the movement little more than a glorious failure, with ‘neorealism’ a barely coherent term for a group of films that can be counted on the fingers of both hands, and that fulfilled few of their makers’ hopes for a transformation of Italian society by a humanistic film culture. Francesco Pitassio offers an enthusiastic series of reflections on Italian cinema’s transformative moment, in what is perhaps the most ambitious single-author appraisal of the phenomenon in its entirety since Stefania Parigi’s Italian-language Neorealismo. Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra (a book that takes a similarly open definition of neorealism as Pitassio’s, its title translating as Neorealism: The New Postwar Cinema).3 As with Parigi, Pitassio has to confront a problem met by any scholar when dealing with one of the historic monuments of their field – finding something new to say about it. The task becomes more difficult still when one considers how successive waves of scholarship have eroded this monument’s distinctive features. As his introduction reminds us, one can no longer define neorealism in opposition to fascist-era cinema now that scholarship has established the intricate connections between the two. Meanwhile, to maintain that the distinguishing element of neorealism is the simple revelation of truth, as its admirers once did, nowadays simply sounds naive. And good luck with trying to argue for any consistency among figures as diverse as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti or Giuseppe De Santis, none of whom was happy about the label ‘neorealist’ anyway.