University of Toronto Press

Chapter Title: Introduction

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.4

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 Introduction

This book was inspired by a conversation that never took place. I do not
mean to imply that conversations about Italian neorealism are somehow
lacking. To this day scholars and critics continually remind us how, in
the decade following the end of the Second World War, the innovations
of Italian cinema were met not only with global admiration but also with
widespread imitation, permanently reshaping how films were made and
understood worldwide.1 These commentators stress, as well, how related
developments transformed Italian painting and photography,2 architec-
ture and design,3 music and literature,4 with lasting repercussions for
all forms of creative expression. Citing diverse examples from disparate
contexts, they describe the distinctive ways in which the international
community drew inspiration from Italian writers, artists, and especially
filmmakers, helping to make Italian neorealism one of the most influ-
ential cultural currents of the modern age.5 It was not this ongoing crit-
ical conversation, however, but rather an imagined discussion that first
attracted my notice. Asked by an interviewer to reflect on the rise of
Italian neorealism, the director Vittorio De Sica, who deserved as much
credit as anyone for this development, invoked an originary silence at its
birth. “Non è che un giorno ci siamo seduti a un tavolino di via Veneto,
Rossellini, Visconti, io e gli altri, e ci siamo detti: adesso facciamo il neo-
realismo [It isn’t the case that one day Rossellini, Visconti, the other
directors, and I sat down at a table in the Via Veneto and said: now let’s
make neorealism],” De Sica told his interviewer. “Ognuno viveva per
conto suo, pensava e sperava per conto suo. E tuttavia il cinema neo-
realista stava nascendo come un vasto movimento collettivo, di tutti
[We were each living our own lives, with our own thoughts and our own
hopes. And yet neorealist cinema was beginning to take shape as a vast,
collective movement, of all of us].”6 De Sica sought to make clear that,
if their films had revolutionized cinema, if they had helped to birth a

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4 Italian Neorealism

neorealist movement, it was not because these three celebrated directors

had devised a plan to achieve some shared ambition. There was no plan,
there was no shared ambition, and there had been no conversation.
Many critics have seized on admissions like De Sica’s to emphasize the
difficulty, if not in fact the very impossibility, of defining this complex
cultural tendency. Neorealism, they maintain, was inevitably “malleabile,
elastica, cangiante, caleidoscopica [malleable, elastic, changing, kalei-
doscopic],” “un coacervo di posizioni e di linee ideologiche tangenti
[a  jumble of tangential ideological lines and positions],” “equivoca e
intimamente contraddittoria [confused and thoroughly contradictory],”
with an “assenza di qualsiasi coesione interna [absence of any internal
coherence whatsoever].”7 Stressing the absence of a neorealist program
or manifesto, they argue that the movement lacked any well-defined
conceptual boundaries.8 They often conclude that neorealism cannot be
considered a movement or a school at all.9 Little wonder, then, that few
can agree on which works rightly fall within the neorealist orbit. Some
purists argue that there were only five neorealist films.10 Other critics
take a more inclusive approach, broadening the canon to encompass
twenty-one,11 forty,12 sixty to eighty,13 or possibly eighty to ninety works.14
There is a similar dispute regarding neorealism’s periodization. Some
date its emergence to the end of the Second World War, locating its
conclusion sometime between 1948 and 1951.15 Others think it lasted
longer, persisting well into the 1950s, and perhaps as late as 1960.16
There are those, as well, who argue that the origin of neorealism needs
to be pushed back before the end of the war, to 1943, the year of Benito
Mussolini’s dismissal and arrest.17 Others extend the dating further still,
locating neorealism’s origins in the 1930s.18 The questions of definition
and periodization become all the more acute when one looks beyond
cinema. Whether references to neorealist art, architecture, and litera-
ture derive from a cinematic designation or instead denote specific and
perhaps even separate creative tendencies remains very much an open
question.19 Differing responses, and with them differing conceptions of
neorealism, have led to the formation of opposing canons, each headed
by authors and artists the other excludes by definition.20 It is never
entirely apparent, therefore, what is meant when notions of neorealism
are invoked. Indeed, while neorealism retains its place of prominence in
modern cultural history, there remains little agreement regarding what
neorealism is, and even some disagreement about whether neorealism
can be said to exist at all.
De Sica’s remarks offer a way out of this apparent impasse. If it is
true that he denied the existence of a neorealist manifesto, after all,
it is also true that he affirmed the existence of a neorealist moment,

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 Introduction 5

and with it a neorealist movement: “a vast, collective movement, of

all of us.”21 In his telling, as in the accounts of several of his contem-
poraries and colleagues, neorealism cohered not because it was born
from a common program but because it emerged in response to a com-
mon climate.22 Italian artists and intellectuals may have held opposing
beliefs, pursued divergent objectives, and offered contrasting and even
conflicting proposals, but they did so inspired by common concerns
and shared challenges. De Sica’s statement thus suggests the possibil-
ity of an underlying unity to the neorealists’ apparent disunity, what
Pierre Bourdieu would call a “consensus in dissensus,” which is to say
a connection founded upon “the accepted questions on which they
are opposed.”23 One might even conjecture that such questions com-
prised the core of neorealism itself. This is the provocative implica-
tion of a comment by the screenwriter and critic Tullio Kezich, who
recalled that, even as neorealist films began to attract global acclaim, in
Italy “[l]’accento cadeva sui dibattiti. Erano essi, più che i film, l’apice
della nostra attività. I film si sarebbero potuti anche non vedere [our
emphasis was on the debates. These, more than the films, represented
the height of our activity. You didn’t even have to see the films].”24
Kezich took the point rather too far, perhaps, but in his exaggeration
he revealed something of the truth. If Italian neorealism was “a vast,
collective movement,” as De Sica argued, this was because it was the
scene of significant discussions and debates, because it was the subject
of a cultural conversation.
That statement is admittedly paradoxical, since De Sica sought to
defend neorealism’s existence despite what he saw as the absence of
a neorealist conversation. The great Italian directors, he insisted, had
never met to discuss and coordinate their film projects. Cinephiles may
regret that such a conversation never took place. What might De Sica,
Rossellini, and Visconti have discussed in Rome in the immediate after-
math of the Second World War? What plans might have emerged, what
new ideas might have taken shape, from their exchanges across a café
table in the Via Veneto? In truth, however, there is little need for such
speculative questions because, as Kezich’s remark reveals, a conversation
did in fact take place – a conversation that was far more inclusive, far
more extensive, and far more combative than the one imagined by De
Sica. It was a conversation carried out in the cafés of Rome, and in those
of every other Italian city as well, but also in the cultural pages of the
daily newspapers; in film journals and literary reviews; in editorial offices
and case del popolo; at artists’ exhibitions and on film sets; in novels, short
stories, poems, and memoirs; in theatres and at the cinema; in lecture
halls and radio broadcasts; even in the houses of Parliament. That

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6 Italian Neorealism

conversation was Italian neorealism. “La storia del neorealismo è  [...]

la storia di un dialogo [The history of neorealism is (...) the history of a
dialogue],” explained the film critic Gian Luigi Rondi; neorealism was
“un insieme di voci [many voices combined],” declared the novelist Italo
Calvino.25 This study is an attempt to listen to those voices, to describe
their dialogue, to understand their conversation.

“A Confusion of Language”

Scholarship on neorealism has often taken the opposite tack, aspiring

not to study the conversation but rather to silence it. There have been
frequent exhortations, in fact, to do away with the commentary that has
always surrounded neorealism and to “start from the texts,” consider-
ing the neorealist canon unburdened by the cultural and historical dis-
course to which it has given rise.26 Let the artwork speak for itself, it
is argued, so that the essence of neorealism can emerge through the
attentive, unmediated analysis of neorealist artefacts. More than thirty
years ago, in an essay entitled “Neorealismo senza” (Neorealism with-
out), Leonardo Quaresima offered what remains the most compelling
call to separate the texts from the accumulated prejudices of previous
generations, exhorting his readers in the following terms:

Proviamo a isolare la nozione [del neorealismo] sottraendola alle incrostazi-

oni del discorso critico purista e essenzialista. Proviamo a vedere che cos’è il
neorealismo senza l’ideologia del neorealismo, l’ideologia che ne fa ­espressione
ufficiale della nascita da un punto zero, l’ideologia che stabilisce questo
collegamento sulla base della purezza di cuore del movimento [...].27

Let us try to isolate the notion [of neorealism] by removing from it the
­incrustations of purist and essentialist critical discourse. Let us try to see
what neorealism is without the ideology of neorealism, the ideology that makes
it into an official expression of [post-war Italy’s] birth from zero, and the
ideology that establishes this connection [between neorealism and nation]
on the basis of the movement’s purity of heart [...].

There is something admirable in Quaresima’s stance, in his refusal indis-

crimately to adopt the conventional wisdom, in his desire to look care-
fully, analytically, at works of art whose cultural status has often seemed
to preclude critical reconsideration. Yet there is something deeply prob-
lematic as well.
Put simply, there is no way to approach neorealism free of critical
cant, no neutral position to which one can appeal. Quaresima and other

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 Introduction 7

like-minded scholars say “start from the texts,” to which one must invaria-
bly ask, “which texts?” The five neorealist films acknowledged by the pur-
ists or the ninety that more ecumenical critics would countenance? Shall
we consider only those films released between 1945 and 1949, or shall
we expand the selection to include those from the 1930s to the 1960s?
Shall we include poems, novels, songs, paintings, sculptures, and perhaps
even buildings and neighbourhoods as well, and if so which ones? Any
choice on these matters entails precisely the kind of ideological interven-
tion Quaresima wished to avoid. This is true even of the small set of films
believed – but believed by whom? – to be the most canonical exemplars of
Italian neorealism. In the interview cited above, for example, Vittorio De
Sica invoked by name two of his most respected neorealist contemporaries,
Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. In so doing, he may have wished
to offer a kind of common ground, a neorealist core comprising a pair of
cinematic luminaries with an established corpus of films firmly ensconced
in the neorealist firmament. Yet even the most influential films of these
eminent directors have had their neorealist credentials questioned. It has
been said that Visconti “invent[ed] neorealism in his first film, Ossessione,”
but also that Ossessione, released in 1943, “cannot be called, without qual-
ification, a work of neorealism.”28 It has likewise been argued that 1948’s
La terra trema, Visconti’s next film, represents “il vertice poetico di tutta
l’esperienza neorealista [the poetic peak of the entire neorealist expe-
rience],” yet serious doubt is cast on such claims by those who maintain
that the film “si colloca al di fuori del neorealismo [is positioned outside
of neorealism].”29 Rossellini’s status seems no less debatable. Although
it has been claimed that “[l]a nascita del neorealismo in Italia avviene
soltanto con Roma città aperta [the birth of neorealism in Italy happened
only with Roma città aperta],” Rossellini’s first post-war feature, it has also
been asserted, with equal force, that “Roma città aperta doesn’t really fit the
definition of neorealism.”30 To this latter judgment one can only respond
with a question: Whose definition of neorealism? It is a question that can-
not be answered satisfactorily through a close reading of the texts, how-
ever detailed the analysis and however large the corpus.
If neorealism was a cultural climate, if it was a cultural conversation,
then it will not be possible to make definitive claims about the neorealism
of Roma città aperta, or of any other contemporary text, without concom-
itantly analysing the neorealist context. It may not even be possible to
declare with any degree of certainty what constitutes the text and what the
context. Such a priori distinctions, which are implied in every call to “start
from the texts,” necessarily restrict neorealism, often confining it to only
one form of invention, one mode of expression.31 In truth, the refusal to
accept those restrictions, the refusal to acknowledge the barriers between

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8 Italian Neorealism

different forms of expression, different modes of discourse, or different

spheres of influence, was one of the defining characteristics of the neore-
alist moment in Italian culture. The novelist and editor Natalia Ginzburg
recalled that moment in the following illuminating terms:

Era, il dopoguerra, un tempo in cui tutti pensavano d’essere dei poeti, e

tutti pensavano d’essere dei politici; tutti s’immaginavano che si potesse
e si dovesse anzi far poesia di tutto, dopo tanti anni in cui era sembrato
che il mondo fosse ammutolito e pietrificato e la realtà era stata guardata
come di là da un vetro, in una vitrea, cristallina e muta immobilità. [...] Ora
c’erano di nuovo molte parole in circolazione, e la realtà di nuovo appariva
a portata di mano; perciò quegli antichi digiunatori si diedero a vendemmi-
arvi con delizia. E la vendemmia fu generale, perché tutti ebbero l’idea di
prendervi parte; e si determinò una confusione di linguaggio fra poesia e
politica, le quali erano apparse mescolate insieme.32

The post-war period was a time in which we all believed ourselves to be

poets and we all believed ourselves to be politicians. We all imagined that
we could – and in fact we should – take everything as the subject for our
poetry, after many years in which it seemed that the world was muted and
petrified, as if we were seeing reality behind glass, in a vitreous, crystalline,
and muffled stasis. [...] Now there were many words in circulation again,
and reality again appeared to be close to hand. Those of us who had been
fasting for a long time therefore took to the harvest with delight. And the
harvest was communal, because everyone wished to take part. And there
was a confusion of language between poetry and politics, which seemed to
have been mixed together.

In Ginzburg’s telling, post-war Italy was reshaped by the interaction – some

would say the contamination – of previously distinct discourses.33 As pol-
itics and the arts rapidly opened themselves up to new concerns and
new contestants, there arose a kind of festive tumult, a moment when
everything seemed possible and everything felt connected.
Rather than working to isolate neorealism from the post-war confu-
sion, this study attempts to interpret neorealism as a function of the
many connections that constituted the post-war cultural conversation.
I thus refrain from the kinds of artistic and intellectual taxonomy that
have tended to limit neorealism to one strand of that discourse or one
voice in that conversation. Despite the frequent acknowledgments of its
aesthetic hybridity and even its inherent obscurity – despite the declara-
tions that it is “conceptually nebulous,” “indefinibile e sfuggente [inde-
finable and elusive],” characterized by “una discreta dose di equivoci [a

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 Introduction 9

fair amount of misunderstanding]” – there have been repeated attempts

to distil a singular stylistic or theoretical essence that can define Italian
neorealism.34 Often such efforts take the form of a list of supposedly
identifying traits, such as the one put forward by Alberto Farassino:

Considereremo quindi per ora come “opera neorealista” un tipo di film

che comprende ampiamente le principali e ben note istanze neorealiste,
dalle riprese in esterni, o comunque fuori dagli studi, all’uso di attori non
professionisti, dalla contemporaneità del soggetto all’attenzione del reale
alla disinvoltura nei confronti delle regole convenzionali di messinscena,
recitazione e linguaggio, dalle esigenze morali calate nel racconto e nel
lavoro cinematografico e quelle autoriali di espressione e interpretazione
del mondo.35

Let us describe as a “neorealist work” a film that largely takes up the pri-
mary and best-known neorealist traits, from shooting on location, or oth-
erwise outside the studios, to the use of non-professional actors, from the
treatment of contemporary themes to an emphasis on the real and indiffer-
ence towards conventional rules of staging, acting, and language, from the
moral demands that are placed upon the story and the cinematography to
the authorial demands of expression and interpretation.

Tellingly, while such lists are sometimes treated authoritatively, as if they

could indeed claim to define their intended subject, Farassino prefaced
his with significant caveats. After all, he was one of the more outspo-
ken opponents of what he called the “concezione purista e ‘operista’
del neorealismo [purist and ‘text-based’ conception of neorealism],”
which would seek rigidly to adopt such a catalogue of creative choices as
a means of definition.36 In its place, he called for a more comprehensive
accounting, one founded on the belief that

la definizione più adeguata [del neorealismo] sarebbe quella tautologica

e paradossale che suonerebbe così: “Il cinema neorealista è il cinema ita-
liano dell’epoca del neorealismo.” In altri termini, forse più accettabile: il
neorealismo appare oggi non una tendenza limitata e elitaria collocata nel
mondo del pensiero, del sapere, del fare estetico e del discutere ideologico
ma un affare di vita quotidiana, qualcosa che (e che sia questo il realismo
del neorealismo?) riguardava la vita di tutti e che dai film passava alla realtà
e viceversa, senza subire sostanziali trasformazioni.37

the most appropriate definition [of neorealism] would be tautological and

paradoxical, and would go like this: “Neorealist cinema is the Italian cinema

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10 Italian Neorealism

of the era of neorealism.” In other words, and perhaps more acceptably: ne-
orealism today appears to be not a limited and elitist tendency belonging to
the world of thought, of knowledge, of aesthetic practice, and of ideological
discussion, but rather a quotidian affair, something that concerns the lives
of all people (and might this be the realism of neorealism?) and that passes
from film to reality, and vice versa, without undergoing substantial changes.

By this standard, neorealism was something both more significant and

less determinate than an amalgamation of formal touchstones. For
Farassino it was a “fenomeno complessivo [totalising phenomenon],”
a way of inhabiting, understanding, and representing the world in its
entirety, just as for other like-minded critics it has seemed a “quadro
­culturale [cultural framework],” “una ‘civiltà’ [a ‘civilization’],” “uno
stato d’animo [a state of mind].”38 These descriptions suggest, as the
more restrictive definitions do not, the inclusivity, the plurivocality, the
universality of the neorealist conversation. This book will seek to expand
on, and to extend, the insights they have made possible.

“A Vast, Collective Movement, of All of Us”

In the chapters that follow I attempt to provide the most expansive

description yet compiled of the neorealist conversation. I do so with
the conviction that neorealism is best approached not through any
one medium, any one form of artistic realization, but rather through
the dialogue in which all of those diverse forms of expression took part.
I thus attempt to chart the network of representations that, throughout
the age of neorealism, linked all forms of creative production in a gen-
erative exchange. My investigation explores the shared discourse with
which Italian artists and intellectuals collectively engaged, the horizon
of expectations under which they pursued their various creative and crit-
ical activities, and the common conceptual structures with which they
articulated and evaluated their variegated cultural projects. It is a central
tenet of this book that the cultural conversation necessarily includes all
of the films, novels, poems, plays, paintings, sculptures, songs, essays,
reviews, and debates which together shaped and reflected their histor-
ical moment. Unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, by normative
definitions, or by critical conventions, this study thus aims to redescribe
that historical moment by reinterpreting its expansive cultural discourse,
whose distinctive voices and characteristic statements I take together to
constitute Italian neorealism.
I begin in the first chapter by analysing neorealism’s conceptual his-
tory, conceived in its most extensive sense as stretching from the 1890s

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 Introduction 11

through the 1950s. Employing a critical semantics, I follow the develop-

ment of neorealism as a cultural category by tracking the spread of the
term neorealismo and its cognates through the diverse fields of Italian
creative enterprise, accentuating the terms’ changing linguistic pur-
chase over time. What emerges is an enduring cultural discourse, dif-
fuse and syncretic, which spanned decades and traversed all forms of
creative expression. I have chosen in this initial chapter to adopt as case
studies two works – Elio Vittorini’s 1945 novel Uomini e no and Luchino
Visconti’s 1948 film La terra trema – whose textual operation and critical
reception reveal with particular clarity symptomatic aspects of neoreal-
ism’s emergent cultural operation. Together, then, these two texts serve
to exemplify the specific developments that characterize the expansive
description of neorealism that I develop in chapter 1, and that provides
the basis for the three chapters to follow. In each of those subsequent
chapters, moreover, I follow the methodological pattern set in the first,
identifying two indicative works to illustrate the dynamic processes I seek
to highlight within neorealist discourse.
In each instance, these exemplary texts have been chosen as case stud-
ies because they can be understood to express with particular clarity the
issues under discussion. To put this another way, they can be recognized
as active participants in the neorealist conversation, and it is in this sense
that they are analysed. I seek to describe how these texts were shaped by
the major issues that occupied Italian culture and society, and how they
took up, reflected, and performed the conditions of their own creation,
not just at the level of narrative content, but also in their form, in their
language, in their structure. Yet I do not wish to imply that the texts I
have chosen are somehow unique, or uniquely privileged, in their neo-
realist status. Visconti’s La terra trema may have been called a “summa”
of Italian neorealism, but so too was Luigi Zampa’s 1947 Vivere in pace,
released one year before Visconti’s film; Vittorini may have explored
notions of neorealism in his critical essays of the 1930s, only to see the
term applied to his own creative output of the 1940s, but the same is
true of Francesco Jovine.39 There is no inherent reason why one set of
exemplars is to be preferred to the other, and I might just as readily have
explored the themes of my first chapter with reference to Zampa and
Jovine, or indeed to any number of potential case studies, including but
by no means limited to those I examine in the chapters to follow. To the
extent I am correct to identify each chapter’s themes as representative of
neorealism, these should be – and I argue they are – identifiable across
Italian culture. I have tried through my chosen exemplars to suggest
something of the breadth of that culture, drawing not only on some of
the most canonical neorealist films but also on others that have received

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12 Italian Neorealism

comparatively little critical or scholarly attention, and examining those

films alongside two novels, a play, and a poem, all of which, I maintain,
contributed substantially to the neorealist conversation. Since my analy-
sis addresses itself to that conversation, I hope it can be of interest even
to those readers unacquainted with one or more of the texts I have cho-
sen as case studies. At the same time, I hope these case studies will be
seen as not only informative but also innovative by readers long familiar
with the texts I have analysed.
In the second chapter, I bring together analyses of Giuseppe De Santis’s
1947 feature film Caccia tragica and Italo Calvino’s 1947 partisan novel Il
sentiero dei nidi di ragno in order to address the vexed question of neoreal-
ism’s periodization. Although in the first chapter I identify an extensive
neorealist genealogy dating back to the nineteenth century, and locate
neorealism’s conceptual crystallization in the 1930s, in those that follow
I adopt a more limited chronology, for reasons I set out in chapter 2. It is
a chronology shaped by post-war Italy’s complicated relationship to the
Fascist ventennio, the period from 1922 to 1943, when Benito Mussolini’s
Fascist Party governed Italian society and when neorealism emerged in
Italian culture. The central question addressed in the second chapter,
then, regards how to relate pre-war and post-war articulations of Italian
neorealism, and, more to the point, how to recognize the distinctiveness
of the latter without denying the relevance of the former.
Chapter 3 takes up the related issue of neorealism’s characteristic por-
trayal of the historical crises of post-war and post-Fascist Italy. As its name
reveals, neorealism denotes a determined claim to represent reality – a
reality that, in the period of neorealism’s greatest cultural prominence,
was shaped by the Second World War and its aftermath. The cultural con-
versation that attended Italy’s challenging post-war recovery understand-
ably gave rise to an ample critical vocabulary with which to scrutinize and
theorize the representation of a complex historical reality. This chapter
focuses on that theoretical vocabulary, which was used to express a series
of intricate strategies for structuring the depiction of recent history.
Drawing on a substantial critical debate, and exploring the implications
of that debate as it was reflected in two key texts  – Leopoldo Trieste’s
1946 play Cronaca and Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Ladri di b­iciclette  –
I investigate the conceptual tools with which neorealism sought to give
historical meaning to the portrayal of individual experience.
In the fourth and final chapter I seek to draw out the implications of
neorealism’s distinctive representation of history. That representation,
I argue, reveals a key tenet of neorealist faith, the abiding belief that art
could facilitate not just historical reconciliation but also national redemp-
tion. This belief animated the post-war Italian cultural conversation and

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 Introduction 13

reshaped Italian cultural politics in its image. Reconsidering the political

significance of that belief, I examine two of its most powerful expres-
sions, Alfonso Gatto’s 1944 poem “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto” and
Aldo Vergano’s 1946 film Il sole sorge ancora, in order to make the case for
a more ambitious description of neorealism’s professed social function,
one that emphasizes its defining aspiration to address and even to coun-
teract a cultural crisis. To the extent that it was communicated beyond
cinema, beyond the arts, beyond politics – to the extent, in other words,
that it was the explicit or implicit subject of the neorealist conversation –
it was this aspiration that made neorealism, as De Sica put it, “a vast,
collective movement, of all of us.”

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