BOOK DATA: Charles L. Leavitt IV, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. $85.00 cloth. xi + 313 pages.Neorealism is the most well-trodden field in Italian film history, so to say something really new about it is no mean feat. Charles Leavitt’s book, the result of painstaking original research (seventy pages of endnotes, fifty of bibliography with around one thousand items), changes a widely accepted view of when the term neorealism entered critical discourse and proposes a different way of looking at it. Neorealism, he argues in the introduction, should be understood not so much as a particular set of works in various artistic fields but as a “cultural conversation,” a lively exchange of ideas and values between critics and practitioners of those arts, which began much earlier than is normally believed (7).Chapter 1 traces the start of this “conversation” as far back as the 1890s and shows the term to have been in widespread use by the 1920s and 1930s, not just in Italy but also in France, Belgium, and Britain, in other words well before the period—the late 1940s and early 1950s—generally considered the high season of neorealism in Italy. Alberto Moravia’s first novel, Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), published in 1929, was referred to as neorealist (20–21); Umberto Barbaro in 1930–31 wrote about the “German neorealism” of Alfred Döblin in literature and Otto Dix in painting (19). Alberto Cavalcanti wrote in 1937 about “the neorealist movement in England” (28). While some earlier studies, such as that of Gian Piero Brunetta, had already shown the term was circulating between the world wars, none had demonstrated how wide and how international that circulation actually was. In this respect alone, Leavitt’s book marks a major scholarly advance over that earlier work.Equally important is Leavitt’s demonstration, still in chapter 1, of how, both in those critical discussions of the interwar years and also in some key works produced after World War II, neorealism was seen not as a continuation or revival of nineteenth-century realism or naturalism, a throwback to Balzac, Flaubert, or Zola, but as a step forward into a new realism, as exemplified by Proust, Joyce, and Woolf, for whom the reality captured was at once subjective (inner workings of the mind, ebb and flow of consciousness and feeling) and newly objective. In form and style, therefore, neorealism involved a fusion of realism with the experimental techniques that a later criticism would call modernism. The “neo” in neorealism meant just what it said.Leavitt demonstrates this fusion of realist and modernist techniques in two case studies: of Elio Vittorini’s novel Uomini e no (Men and Not Men, 1945) and Luchino Visconti’s film La terra trema (1948). The latter, often acclaimed as the gold standard of the new realist cinema for its location shooting and nonactors speaking their dialect, had a literary source as a loose adaptation of Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (1881) and relied, like Joyce’s Ulysses, on Homeric mythic parallels (the rapacious wholesalers are like the Cyclops) and formal experimentation.Leavitt’s assertion that neorealism was above all a “cultural conversation” is connected to his backdating of its origins. He maintains that the desire to locate a neorealist aesthetic, with a particular set of formal and stylistic devices, within particular works is misplaced—because where neorealism existed was not within the works themselves but in the discourse surrounding them, the critical metalanguage, which, he shows, developed well before the 1940s. He does not dispute the view that the “conversation” had its most intense phase in the five years 1945–49, but he shows that during that phase the meanings of “neorealism” also started to be narrowed. After 1948 it began to harden into a critical orthodoxy, to be either attacked or defended depending on whether one stood with it or against it, and this hardening increased in the early 1950s, by which time the creative phase of neorealism was effectively over. “No longer an open question, neorealism became a fixed paradigm . . . static, circumscribed, conventional. It was fixed and thus it was finished” (172–73).As for the later critical discussions of neorealism—from the 1960s to the present—not only were its meanings often oversimplified, but also the term frequently, though not always, came to be a kind of football kicked around in political and cultural debates that were always about something other than the works themselves: national identity, the transition from fascism to democracy, good (realist) versus bad (nonrealist, trashy, or commercial) art. Indeed, remarking on the alleged “revival of neorealist glory” ascribed by some critics to films made after 2000 by Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino, and Marco Tullio Giordana, Leavitt argues in his conclusion that “neorealism appears to be little more than a brand identity, used to sell new products by drawing on a half-remembered sense of Italian cinema’s past greatness and a superficial lamentation for Italy’s faded virtue” (177).One of the most contested questions in the later debates over postwar neorealism, particularly those that began in the 1960s, was whether it represented a decisive break with the culture of the fascist period or had deep continuities with that culture. Regarding cinema, the revisionist position, put forward by critics on the left, was that the continuities were deep: in the structure of the film industry, in many of its key personnel, in modes of film production, and even to some extent in film style, so that Italian cinema was not effectively refounded in 1945. Leavitt tackles this debate in chapter 2. He argues, sensibly, that there was no clean break in 1945 and that most critics and artists at the time never claimed that there was, and that there was nonetheless a real turn within neorealism after 1945, when the preceding cultural conversation was inflected by a new discourse, that of a shared humanist ethos and a strong commitment to cultural renewal after fascism. In chapter 3 he shows that after 1945 there was a new deployment of “chronicle” (cronaca), the reporting of everyday facts and events, as the basis of historical narration.Leavitt’s meticulously researched and carefully argued study will become a major point of reference for future work on neorealism. There are, to be sure, a few things it does not do, and does not set out to do. First, though he demonstrates that the neorealist conversation was decisively shaped by developments in the arts internationally, from modernist literature in Europe and the United States to Soviet cinema and British documentary, he says little about the non-Italian participants in the cultural conversation that constituted neorealism. The conversation he reconstructs is almost entirely between Italian critics, writers, and filmmakers. The French critics who did much to shape the debate on cinematic neorealism after 1948, notably André Bazin and Georges Sadoul, are not even mentioned.Second, though he stresses the “intermedial character of artistic exploration” after 1945, he does not say much about arts other than literature and cinema (36). There are passing references to Renato Guttuso and Aligi Sassu, and the dustjacket reproduces a canvas by Armando Pizzinato, but neorealism in painting, or in sculpture, photography, and visual art criticism, which a few other studies have addressed, is not really explored.Third, although he mentions the evolving political situation in postwar Italy, and the anti-neorealist activities of Giulio Andreotti as undersecretary of state for cinema, he does not name explicitly what drove the narrowing down of the neorealist conversation after 1948–49, even though to many contemporary and later commentators it had a name: the Cold War. It was the Cold War that made impossible future depictions of an idealized fusion between Catholicism and Communism, such as that in Rome, Open City (1945), and polarized and impoverished the critical debate.