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Melodrama as Realism in Italian

Neorealism
Louis Bayman

Italian neorealism is a foundational realist cinema movement, but one that

has posed a conundrum for realist criticism because it is pervaded through-
out by melodrama. Because aesthetic theory (and common sense) defines
realism and melodrama against each other, the relationship between melo-
drama and realism in neorealist films has never been considered beyond
opposition. Yet in Italian neorealism, melodrama and realism interact and
at times even combine. I argue that examining this interaction is crucial to
understanding neorealism fully, and suggest that the continual recurrence
of melodrama and realism together necessitates a reconceptualization of
aesthetic theory.
Realism is not simply that which is ‘realistic’, nor is it one single set of
properties, but rather a claim (open to argument and dependent on the
conventions an audience is used to) that a particular artwork reaches closer
to an important, otherwise neglected, aspect of reality. Realism then is not
a fixed attribute, but a relationship between text, reality and audience that
changes as does the culture in which it operates. One constant has, how-
ever, emerged: that realism is defined against melodrama. Whatever differ-
ences separate the relationship between art and reality in the conceptions
of Lukács, Brecht or Bazin, one thing theory agrees upon is that realist aims
exclude melodrama. Why then have the two forms, melodrama and realism,
so much shared history? Why do they continually recur at the centre of the
same artworks? Do melodrama and realism have to be antithetical, or can
they be mutually reinforcing and illuminating?

Melodrama and realism: A historical relationship

Realism and melodrama share many important aspects. In the historical

analysis provided by Christine Gledhill (1987, pp. 14–33), they emerged
in the eighteenth century distinguished from tragedy principally by their
popular nature. Both melodrama and realism use a social typing of wicked
landlords/aristocrats/moneylenders against the virtuous poor. Authenticity

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L. Nagib et al. (eds.), Realism and the Audiovisual Media

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2009
48 Melodrama as Realism in Italian Neorealism

is key to both, with realism seeking to illuminate society’s motive forces,

and melodrama focusing on innocence tormented by wicked dissimulators.
The drama of both emerges from the confrontation of passionate emotions
marked as primal with external restrictions.
Raymond Williams’s stipulations for the historical origins of realism apply
equally to the simultaneously emerging form of melodrama (1976). Firstly,
they are socially extended, moving from tragedy’s portrayal of kings and
demigods to the ‘people’ (a nebulous entity, a construct of bourgeois hegem-
ony which broader masses can feel part of). By the end of the eighteenth
century, British drama was consciously adopting what Williams calls the
realist intention of extending the action socially to characters without high
rank. The dramatic purpose of this social extension is summed up in an
important phrase that Williams picks up on, to ‘let not your equals move
your pity less’ (Williams, 1976, p. 63). It is worthwhile noting how moving
the pity of the audience gives prominence to feeling in realism, which as
I shall detail below is sometimes artificially separated from melodrama’s
focus on emotion. Secondly, according to Williams, realism moves the
action to a contemporary setting, which, thirdly, is secular, with the under-
standing of tragic action in human terms seen as a ‘sentimentalization’ of
tragedy (Williams, 1976, p. 64), again, placing sentiment centrally. Finally,
realism has a moral lesson that the audience can apply to their own lives.
These factors  social extension, contemporary setting, secular terms and
personal morality  can be seen as a historical shift in the function of art
that encompasses both melodrama and realism.
Despite this historical affinity, criticism usually separates realism from
melodrama. Gledhill reviews the trend in British and American criticism and
journalism in the late nineteenth century to consider realism as displaying
the repression and rationalism thought of as refined masculine values,
distinguished from the perceived feminine and populist characteristics of
melodramatic sentimentality. These critics disavowed melodrama for its
excessive emotionality and use of cliché, which was thought to preclude
the rational understanding that, Gledhill claims, is the aim of realism
(1992, pp. 113–7). Although the class and gender bias is now outmoded
(and, as can be seen in the persistence of melodrama in late Victorian art,
the repudiation of melodrama was always partial and inconsistent), Gledhill
maintains that the principal aim of realism is the psychological comprehen-
sion of causes based on dialogue, character analysis and naturalism, and that
the primacy melodrama gives to emotionally charged effects counterbal-
ances this realist aim (Gledhill, 1992, pp. 137–41).
Yet, broadly speaking, melodrama, in cinema, is simply the pathos of the
expressive elevation of fundamentally ordinary feelings, whereas realism is
a recognizable attempt to bring representation closer to extra-filmic real-
ity. Fruitful lines of enquiry can emerge if we examine the compatibility of
these aims in a culture in which the relationships between melodrama and