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University of Toronto Press

Chapter Title: Conclusion

Book Title: Italian Neorealism


Book Subtitle: A Cultural History
Book Author(s): CHARLES L. LEAVITT
Published by: University of Toronto Press. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctv125jscc.9

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Conclusion

By 1949, the neorealist conversation was coming to a close. At least, that


was how the situation appeared to the editorialists at the Italian film
journal Bianco e nero, who in December of that year predicted that “la
discussione sul neorealismo è probabilmente giunta ad una fase deci-
siva e conclusiva [the discussion of neorealism has probably reached
its decisive and conclusive phase].”1 By most measures, this historical
prognostication would appear to have been spectacularly wrong-headed.
Discussions about neorealism did not cease after 1949; if anything, they
grew more insistent. That year saw the publication of the first major
monograph to address Italy’s post-war cinema comprehensively, Vittorio
Calvino’s Guida al cinema, which carried a preface by Vittorio De Sica,
and which announced the arrival of “una nuova tendenza artistica che
prese il nome di ‘neo-realismo’ e che oggi è considerata la tendenza
caratteristica del cinema italiano [a  new artistic tendency that took
the name ‘­neo-realism’ and that today is considered the characteristic
tendency of Italian cinema].”2 The following year, Anna Banti would
compose her study “Neorealismo nel cinema italiano” (Neorealism in
Italian cinema); Luigi Chiarini would deliver his “Discorso sul neorea-
lismo” (Discourse on neorealism); Carlo Bo would begin conducting his
Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Investigation of neorealism); and Bianco e nero,
the same journal that had predicted an end to discussions of neoreal-
ism, would publish Franco Venturini’s essay “Origini del neorealismo”
(The origins of neorealism).3 The five years to follow would see major
new studies of neorealism by Alessandro Blasetti and Gian Luigi Rondi,
Massimo Mida, Elia Santoro, Carlo Lizzani, Mario Gromo, Giulio Cesare
Castello, and Brunello Rondi.4
This is to say nothing of the ever-expanding and increasingly influen-
tial discussions of neorealism beyond Italy: in Hollywood and Moscow;
in Havana, Buenos Aires, and São Paolo; in Algiers, Rabat, and Dakar; in

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172 Italian Neorealism

Beijing, Tehran, and Mumbai; in Berlin, Madrid, and Paris. The intensity
and authority of the conversations that took place in the first and last of
these cinematic capitals led critics in Italy to assume, as early as 1948,
that their foreign counterparts, French and American in particular, had
themselves invented Italian neorealism through their rapturous recep-
tion of Italian films, a myth that persists to the present day.5 In truth,
international audiences and critics did not independently invent Italian
neorealism. They did, however, ensure its lasting prestige on a global
stage. Venerated both at home and abroad, neorealism has continued
to attract attention worldwide for the last sixty years. It has attracted so
much attention, in fact, that leading film scholars have found it neces-
sary to call for “a moratorium on the mention of neorealism” in order
to encourage the field of Italian film studies “to talk about something
else.”6 Despite that moratorium, the sheer mass of scholarship on neo-
realism has only increased in recent years, and has increased still fur-
ther with the publication of this volume. The very study you are reading,
then, may be taken by some as an additional sign that the 1949 editorial
in Bianco e nero was mistaken in its prediction of an impending end to the
neorealist conversation.
From another perspective, however, it may also be seen to provide evi-
dence in support of that prediction. I have argued for an interpretation
of neorealism as an all-embracing cultural conversation, one in which
contrasting, and at times opposing, positions came up for discussion
and debate. As we have seen, that conversation was beginning to change
considerably by 1949, when Cesare Zavattini, just one year removed from
Ladri di biciclette, came out strongly against the critical “honours, which
involuntarily limit [Italian cinema’s] horizons with the definition of neo-
realism.”7 Zavattini was reacting to a distinct shift in the discourse. A neo-
realist orthodoxy was beginning to take hold; difference was being driven
out. Perceptively picking up on the same conceptual rigidification, the
editorialists at Bianco e nero recognized, correctly, that an end to the con-
versation was in sight.
Conversations about neorealism would continue after 1949, of course,
and continue to the present day. The neorealist conversation, however,
had reached its conclusion. It is the difference between expressions of
and assertions about neorealism, between approaching neorealism as a
field of discussion and invoking neorealism as a standard of judgment.8
No longer an open question, neorealism became a fixed paradigm. It
was possible to push that paradigm to its critical conclusion in order
to pass “dal neorealismo al realismo [from neorealism to realism],” as
Guido Aristarco advocated for Italian cinema and Carlo Salinari for
Italian literature.9 It was possible, as well, to adapt the paradigm to

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Conclusion 173

the norms of genre cinema in order to produce new, hybrid forms  –


­neorealist romance (neorealismo rosa); neorealist noir (neorealismo nero);
and neorealist mysteries (neorealismo giallo) – as Renato Castellani, Luigi
Comencini, and many other directors sought to do throughout the
1950s.10 Either possibility, however, would invariably be classified as a
departure from neorealist orthodoxy by a critical establishment which
insisted on increasingly restrictive conceptual boundaries. Neorealism
could either be adopted or opposed; it could not be altered. Innovations
were dismissed as deviations. The point was no longer to advance the
discourse of the neorealist conversation; it was to define the connota-
tions of the neorealist legacy. As a result, neorealism became static, cir-
cumscribed, conventional. It was fixed and thus it was finished. By 1951,
Giuseppe De Santis asked in the pages of the journal Filmcritica: “È in
crisi il neorealismo?” (Is neorealism in crisis?). In the next issue of the
same journal, Luigi Chiarini replied: “La crisi c’è” (There is a crisis).11
The crisis of neorealism did not go unopposed. Yet the resultant “bat-
taglia per il neorealismo [battle for neorealism],” which sought to revive
the neorealist legacy, served largely to monumentalize and thus further
entomb the movement it claimed to advocate.12 This unintended con-
sequence is perhaps most evident in the fight to protect neorealism’s
funding from the manoeuvrings of Giulio Andreotti, who justified his
efforts to shift Italian government support away from neorealism in large
measure as an attempt to protect Italy’s “dignità nazionale [national dig-
nity].”13 Mounting a counter-offensive, prominent figures in the Italian
film industry created the Movimento per la difesa del cinema italiano
(Movement for the defence of Italian cinema), whose 1948 manifesto
promoted Italian neorealism’s growing international prestige as evi-
dence of its significant contribution to the national cause.14 Neorealism
was not just good cinema, they insisted; it was good for Italy. Andreotti
effectively argued the opposite. The terms of the conflict were thus set.
They would become still more starkly delineated one year later with
the passage of the so-called Andreotti Law, which served, as we have seen,
further to hamstring neorealism financially. Opposition to this law and
to the cinematic trends it would set in motion led neorealism’s propo-
nents to adopt an ever-more inflated rhetoric. Witness Cesare Zavattini’s
1953 “Tesi sul neorealismo” (Theses on neorealism), with which the
screenwriter sought to rally artists and intellectuals to his cause, declar-
ing that “il neorealismo è oggi la nostra sola bandiera [today neorealism
is our only flag].”15 This was a far cry from Zavattini’s position of 1949,
when he had decried the limitations of the neorealist orthodoxy. What
had formerly appeared to be boundaries to his creativity now seemed to
be borders to protect. The implications were clear: neorealism was no

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174 Italian Neorealism

longer expanding its frontier; now it was trying to defend its territory.
As a result, Zavattini’s call to the ramparts attracted many adherents,
including the editorialists at Cinema Nuovo, who took up his position with
­particular zeal. “‘Il neorealismo è la nostra bandiera,’ ha detto Zavattini.
Noi vorremmo dire qualcosa di più: il neorealismo è l’Italia nella sua
espressione più viva, più profonda, più umana, più antica e insieme
contemporanea [‘Neorealism is our flag,’ Zavattini said. We wish to say
something more: neorealism is Italy in its most vital, most profound,
most human, most ancient and at the same time most contemporary
expression].”16 By that measure, the neorealist flag was akin to the Italian
flag and the fight for neorealism a matter of national defence. Against
Andreotti, who presented himself as the defender of Italian dignity, neo-
realism came to be championed as a cultural patrimony that embodied
Italy’s true identity.17 Neorealism had been transformed into a kind of
national mythology. For many, it remains so today.
Discussions of neorealism thus inevitably take on a symbolic weight
that far exceeds the cinematic or critical context in which they appear to
be situated. With great frequency, the films of the neorealist canon are
said not only to portray but also to embody Italy’s anti-Fascist struggle and
its post-war recovery, appearing to many, as Paolo Noto and Francesco
Pitassio polemically suggest, to provide “l’emblema più efficace e sinte-
tico della volontà di rinascita e riscatto nazionali [the most effective sin-
gle emblem of the will for national rebirth and redemption].”18 However
extravagant, this honour, this burden, continues to be conferred in a
scholarly as well a popular context. Argues one recent critic, “il neoreal-
ismo è la storia: [...] è la Resistenza, è il dopoguerra, è la Ricostruzione
[neorealism is history: (...) it is the Resistance, it is the post-war period,
it is the Reconstruction].”19 “Italian neo-realist films [...] seem to con-
tain something of a country’s ‘being and fate,’” maintains another.20 It
has been apparent for decades, in fact, that when neorealism comes up
for debate, what is being defended or derided is not just a filmmaking
style but a historical moment, a political ideology, a foundational myth.
Indeed, as Giovanni Falaschi has persuasively argued, it is neorealism’s
extra-textual resonances, its political rather than its poetic entailments,
that ensure its enduring legacy. Without denying its formal or thematic
innovations, Falaschi insisted that

se nel neorealismo si fosse vista solo l’attività artistica o letteraria o cine-


matografica, si sarebbe scritto di meno. Invece i critici se ne sono occupati
così diffusamente perché vi hanno visto ciò che il neorealismo effettiva-
mente conteneva, cioè una grande importanza politico-sociale e ideologica:
discutere del neorealismo ha significato dunque discutere sul nodo storico

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Conclusion 175

più importante dell’Italia contemporanea, il passaggio dal fascismo all’attu-


ale forma statale democratico-borghese.21

if neorealism had only been recognized as an artistic, literary, or cinematic


activity, it would have been written about less. Instead, the critics have de-
voted so much attention to it because they have recognized what neore-
alism effectively comprised: that is, something of great socio-political and
ideological importance. To discuss neorealism has therefore meant discuss-
ing the most important historical crux of contemporary Italy, the passage
from Fascism to the current bourgeois-democratic form of government.

As well as a perceptive description of the scholarly consensus, Falaschi


thus offered, perhaps unwittingly, an accurate diagnosis of the limitations
and distortions of what has been called the “institution of neorealism.”22
Invariably transformed by the ideological connotations with which it is
endowed, neorealism has become a fixed historical signifier, ensuring its
cultural importance but also constraining its potential significance.

“In the Name of Italian Neorealism”

Put simply, the conversation about neorealism has all too often become
a conversation about something else entirely. In filmmaking terms, neo-
realism has tended to function as a MacGuffin: instead of being consid-
ered on its own terms, it becomes a mere plot device in an unfolding
narrative of Italian political history, for instance, or the desired object
in ­teleological accounts of the history of world cinema. In this latter
form, neorealism is usually made to represent the ideal of artistic inde-
pendence, a virtuous alternative to the hegemony of a supposedly venal
and corrupt Hollywood. For filmmakers in Cuba, Argentina, India, and
beyond, Italian neorealism has often functioned as a model for a national
cinema capable of resisting Hollywood’s imperial influence.23 There is
something to this story. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World
War, American business interests flooded the Italian market with more
than six hundred Hollywood films.24 Despite this inundation, which rep-
resented a real threat to an Italian film industry still reeling from the war,
filmmakers like De Sica and Rossellini succeeded in creating a handful
of films that gained immediate recognition worldwide, and in which crit-
ics have often located a successful exemplar of resistance to Hollywood,
a “cinema of contestation.”25
Here, the archetypal and oft-cited example is Vittorio De Sica’s hard
bargaining with the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, who had
offered to finance Ladri di biciclette on the condition that Cary Grant

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176 Italian Neorealism

star in the role of Antonio Ricci, an offer De Sica flatly refused. In most
accounts, this refusal is reported as a testament to De Sica’s principled
allegiance to neorealism, especially in light of his subsequent decision to
cast the unknown Roman factory worker Lamberto Maggiorani instead
of Grant, a bankable commodity, as the lead in his film.26 Such accounts
miss the mark, however, insofar as they ignore De Sica’s counter-offer, in
which, as the director recounted in an interview at the time, he had asked
Selznick for permission to cast Henry Fonda, AcademyAward–nominated
star of John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, settling on
Maggiorani for the role of Ricci only after Selznick had turned down this
request.27 De Sica’s bargain was thus far from the blanket opposition to
Hollywood influence that many would wish to make it out to be. Indeed,
not only De Sica’s film but all of neorealism may better be understood as
engaging in a productive dialogue with the cinema of Hollywood.28
Yet many of neorealism’s supposed champions drown out this dia-
logue in their rush to conscript the movement in a revanchist battle not
only against Hollywood but against popular culture tout court.29 In Italy
in particular, veneration of neorealism has often accompanied a severe
critique of the alleged depravities of contemporary culture. To cite one
representative instance, in his introduction to Camillo Marino’s 1984
study Estetica politica e sociale del neorealismo (Political and social aesthetics
of neorealism), the art historian and critic Luigi Serravalli lambasted the
“cretinizzazione dell’intero popolo italiano [cretinization of the entire
Italian populace]” in order to dramatize his claim that

un paese così ha il bisogno supremo di superstiti come Camillo Marino,


in nome del Neorealismo italiano che (qualunque cosa esso sia stato) può
­essere letto, proprio oggi, come un diaframma potente e cosciente contro la
barbarie e la diseducazione, lo sfruttamento e l’analfabetismo di ritorno.30

a country in this situation profoundly needs survivors like Camillo Marino,


to speak in the name of Italian neorealism, which (whatever it might have
been) can be understood, even today, as a powerful and conscious barrier
against barbarism and miseducation, exploitation and rising illiteracy.

For a certain kind of cinephile, it would seem, whatever ails Italy, neore-
alism is the remedy. Those less convinced of this analysis may question
whether the proposed cure is in any way adequate to the diagnosed dis-
ease; they may be inspired, as well, to cast a sceptical eye towards the
diagnosis itself.
Some scepticism should likewise be extended to the repeated clam-
ouring for a neo-neorealism, a renewal of Italian cinema and literature

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Conclusion 177

to be achieved through the conscious reclamation of post-war cultural


archetypes, a project whose adherents in the critical establishment and
popular press have exerted significant influence for at least the last
thirty years. In effect, a handful of recent films – Ricordati di me (Gabriele
Muccino 2003); Certi bambini (Antonio and Andrea Frazzi, 2004); Quando
sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005); Centochiodi
(Ermanno Olmi, 2007); Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008); Il Divo (Paolo
Sorrentino, 2008); L’uomo che verrà (Giorgio Diritti, 2009) – have been
seized upon by critics as evidence of a supposed revival of neorealist
glory. Some of these films may indeed have borrowed from their neo-
realist predecessors and may therefore benefit from comparative anal-
ysis. Yet this need not lend any credence to the questionable claim that
the innovations of contemporary Italian cinema must necessarily echo
those introduced by filmmakers seventy years ago or that, as a recent
introduction to the topic put it, “in order to re-invent and regenerate
itself Italian cinema had to take a step back and return to la via maestra,
that of neorealism.”31 Invoked in this way, neorealism appears to be lit-
tle 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.32 In their search for the
MacGuffin, some seem to have lost the plot.
Others seem to have fashioned neorealism into an idol. As early as 1968,
in fact, Gian Carlo Ferretti had reason to lament that the tendentious
defence of the neorealist legacy “ha finito [...] per tradursi [...] in una
sorta di ‘beatificazione’ del neorealismo [wound up (...) ­becoming (...)
a kind of ‘beatification’ of neorealism].”33 Ferretti’s choice of words is
notable, signalling a rather stunning transference. Neorealism, Ferretti
was saying, had become an object rather than an expression of devout
faith. Revered, idealized, sanctified, it had been invested with a notional
power that significantly outstripped its already substantial artistic influ-
ence. In the critical imagination, then, neorealism would seem itself to
have become something of “un oggetto di culto [an object of worship].”34
As Stefania Parigi aptly puts it, “una lunga serie di narrazioni [...] hanno
finito per conferire un’aura sacrale e monumentale a quell’antica sta-
gione del cinema italiano [a lengthy series of narratives (...) has wound
up granting a sacred and monumental aura to that long-ago period of
Italian cinema].”35 From Tullio Kezich’s call for a return to the “sacro
fuoco neorealista [sacred neorealist flame]” to Carlo Lizzani’s attempt
to deliver his self-described “decalogo neorealista [neorealist deca-
logue]” to Lino Micciché’s invocation of neorealism’s “sacri patres De Sica
Rossellini Visconti,” in fact, there is a distinctly evangelical tenor to more
than a few neorealist apologies.36 One need not question neorealism’s

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178 Italian Neorealism

historical importance or its cultural significance in order to find all this


more than a little problematic. The ostensible incarnation of post-war
Italian history, the manufactured archetype of anti-Hollywood cinema,
the ersatz deity of an enduring aesthetic creed, neorealism seems to per-
meate the critical consciousness in ways that all too often obscure its
cultural complexities.

Neorealism Now

Before the alleged revitalization of the neorealist legacy in the new mil-
lennium, before the academic instauration of the neorealist canon in
the 1980s and 1990s, before the ideological re-evaluation of the neoreal-
ist project in the 1960s and 1970s, before the political contestation over
the neorealist crisis in the 1950s, the cultural contours of Italian neo-
realism assumed an altogether different shape. Neither the stronghold
guarded by its traditionalist defenders nor the impediment assailed by its
iconoclastic critics, neorealism emerged in Italy as a creative exchange
between artists and intellectuals who espoused dissimilar views, worked
in disparate media, and pursued diverse goals. The common adoption
of the term neorealism to characterize this exchange served for a time to
reveal the substantial unity underlying the period’s creative diversity and
artistic hybridity – a unity that the present study has sought to recover.
To that end, my analysis has been guided by an understanding of neo-
realism as a cultural conversation, a coherent field of discourse in which
discussion and debate worked to shift the confines of creativity and to
revise the terms of artistic expression. It has been guided, as well, by
the awareness that those terms must invariably exceed the limits of this
or any study, constrained to illustrate by example, to offer summaries
or samples in place of the totality of a historical culture. It is my hope,
therefore, that others will continue the discussion, corroborating or
complicating the claims I have put forward after considering some of
the many contributions I have had to leave aside. My study is far from
exhaustive; that was never my aim. I have sought only to make it easier
to listen attentively, perceptively, to a conversation that has all too often
been distorted by history, by mythology, and by ideology. I cannot help
but believe that Italian neorealism still has much left to say.

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