Major Film Movements - Italian Neo Realism

Italian Neo realism is a national film movement characterized by stories set among the poor and the working class, filmed on location, frequently using non-professional actors. Italian Neo realist films mostly contend with the difficult economic and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy, representing changes in the Italian psyche and conditions of everyday life, including poverty, oppression, injustice and desperation.

Italian Neo realism came about as World War II ended and Benito Mussolini's government fell, causing the Italian film industry to lose its center. Neo realism was a sign of cultural change and social progress in Italy. Its films presented contemporary stories and ideas, and were often shot in the streets because the film studios had been damaged significantly during the war.

In the spring of 1945, Mussolini was executed and Italy was liberated from German occupation. This period, known as the "Italian Spring," was a break from old ways and an entrance to a more realistic approach when making films. Italian cinema went from utilizing elaborate studio sets to shooting on location in the countryside and city streets in the realist style. Neo realism became famous globally in 1946 with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City, when it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival as the first major film produced in Italy after the war. Italian Neo realism rapidly declined in the early 1950's.

Neo realist movies are generally filmed with nonprofessional actors. They are shot almost exclusively on location, mostly in run-down cities as well as rural areas due to its forming during the post-war era. The topic involves the idea of what it is like to live among the poor and the lower working class. The focus is on a simple social order of survival in rural, everyday life. Neo realist films often feature children in major roles, though their characters are frequently more observational than participatory. Vittorio De Sica's 1948 film Bicycle Thieves is a representative of the genre, with non-professional actors, and a story that details the hardships of working-class life after the war.

Some Major works are Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946) Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946) Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) The Earth Trembles (Luchino Visconti, 1948) Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)

BicycleThieves
Neorealism never got more real than in Vittorio de Sica's 1948 classic Bicycle Thieves. This study of poverty in postwar Rome is now revived in cinemas as a harsh realistic treat. Antonio is a poor man who is thrilled when he is at last offered a job; delivering and putting up movie posters. But he needs a bicycle, and must supply his own, so his wife Maria pawns the family's entire stock of bed linen to redeem the bicycle he had already hocked. 

On his first day at work, the unlocked machine is stolen and Antonio drops everything to go on a desperate odyssey through the streets of Rome with his little boy Bruno to get his bike back, pleading and accusing and uncovering scenes of poverty similar to theirs wherever they go. They create uproar in classic crowd moments: in the streets, in a market, in a church mass. Faces always gather avidly around the pair, all commenting, complaining and generally magnifying the father and son's distress and mortification.

The father is obsessed with finding a stolen needle in the urban haystack, obsessed with getting his job back. Again and again, he ignores his little boy while scanning the horizon for his bicycle. At one stage, he hears uproar from the riverbank about a "drowned boy". With a guilty start, he looks around. Do they mean Bruno? No: there he is, safe and sound. Later in the movie he is finally to be his father's savior, but in such a way as to render Antonio's humiliation complete. This is poverty's authentic sting: dullness and horrible loss of dignity. Bicycle Thieves is a brilliant, tactlessly real work of art.

Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He turned to directing in 1940, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film The Children Are Watching Us (1944), he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. It was also the first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established. After the box-office disaster of Umberto D. (1952), a relentlessly bleak study of the problems of old age, he returned to directing lighter work, appearing in front of the camera more frequently. Although Yesterday, Today and tomorrow (1963) won him another Oscar, it was generally accepted that his career as one of the great directors was over. However, just before he died he made The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film A Brief Vacation (1973). He died following the removal of a cyst from his lungs.

Major Films and Directors

8½ (1963): Federico Fellini

Bicycle Thieves (1948) Vittorio De Sica

Paisan (1946) Roberto Rossellini

Amarcord (1973) Federico Fellini

Blow-Up (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni

Rome, Open City (1945) Roberto Rossellini

Death in Venice (1971) Luchino Visconti

Mamma Roma (1962) Paolo Pasolini