Neorealist Narratives

Abstract

This chapter outlines how documentary and realist styles coalesced as a form of documentario narrativo in the Italian neorealist movement – the major new paradigm of slum representation which, according to the author, distinguishes the postwar period. As a hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, neorealism has especially appealed to filmmakers who aimed at telling stories about ordinary, often poverty-stricken people, despite insufficient budgets. The chapter argues that the neorealist mode of production travelled across national and even continental borders in the postwar era, reaching developing film countries and their urban centres in India, Brazil or Mexico, thus becoming one of the very first truly global film or ‘world cinema’ styles. The chapter provides a close reading of Los Olvidados (Buñuel 1950), a fictional story of a boy’s struggle for motherly love in a Mexico City slum. It asks in what way it effectively represents a variety of postwar films that have been, to a larger or lesser extent, influenced by Italian neorealism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of films that have, just like Los Olvidados, employed the narrative perspective of abandoned or homeless street children – a narrative device that is still often employed today (e.g. in Slumdog Millionaire).