realist film movements neorealismo (2) films of vittoria de sica

Realist Film Movements

Neorealismo (2)

Films of Vittoria De Sica

Neorealismo as Personal Film

• Classical American films - studio bound; genre bound; star bound

• Films made according to the studio’s production interest and plan; genre’s requirements; and the demand of stars.

• Neorealismo - personal films reflecting film makers’ personal concerns. Neorealists’ PERSONAL CONCERNS and INTEREST

are …

Neorealismo as Personal Film

• Ordinary lives in the post-war era;

• Social issues - unemployment, immigration, poverty, social and moral decay, political corruption

• Lives of ordinary people in ordinary situation

Realism in Neorealismo

• Influence of French lyrical (poetic) realism

• Films in the 1930s by Julian Duvivier, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean Vigo and others

• They did in cinema what some realist painters and writers had already done.

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Valpinçon Bather (1808)

• Academy Painting

• Jean-Louis David, Marat Assassinated (1793)

• History Painting

• Jean-Paul Marat, a Swiss-born radical journalist. He was murdered in a bathtub by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, in 1793.

• Gustav Courbet, The Meeting, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1854) ‘Le Réalisme’

Jean-François Millet, L’Angelus (1859)

Honoré Daumier, Le Wagon de troisiéme classe (1864)


• What is realism in literature?

‘… more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter [in literature].’ (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, p.491)


• Jean Renoir, La Bete humaine (1938)• Based on Emile Zola’s naturalist novel, it is a

story about an engineer who murders his wife’s godfather.


• Jean Renoir, Toni (1935) • Based on a police dossier, it is about a crime of

passion. An Italian immigrant worker in a Provencal quarry is entangled in complicated love affairs and jealousy.


• Marcel Carne, Le Jour se leve (1939)

• A foundry worker is forced to murder a man who betrayed and tricked him.


• A captain of a canal verge in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante


• Subject matters – ordinary people who are in ordinary situation but fail to gain ordinary happiness.

• Stories of ordinary people in authentic settings

• No idealization, no flattery, not larger-than-life portraying

Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Vittorio de Sica (1902-1974)

• A matinee idol turned into a film director.

• The collaboration with Cezare Zavattini lead to the three great neorealist films


• Sciusciá (Shoeshine, 1946) – two boys save money by delivering black-market goods to buy a horse. They are caught and sent to overcrowded boys prison. One boy betrays the other and after their release the latter kills the former by mistake.


• Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) - a man in Rome finds a job after two years’ waiting on the condition that he has his own bike. It is stolen on the very first day in his job. He searches it all over Rome with his son. In desperation he himself turns to a bicycle thief.


• Umberto D (1952) - a retired civil servant, pensioner, finds difficult to make end meet in ridiculous inflation. He is kicked out of his apartment and has to abandon his dog, his only possession and companion.


Elements which made Ladri di biciclette a ‘realist’ film in its day

① the subject matter

② the narrative strays

③ the use of non-actors and location shooting

④ no facile solution to the problem illustrated

⑤ other aforementioned techniques


• Lamberto Maggiorani was a factory worker found by De Sica.

• No solution to unemployment is presented - the ending is open-ended as our life is.

Ceare Zavattini

• Screenwriter, director, painter, writer and theorist

• Collaborated with Vittorio De Sica in Sciusciá, Ladri di biciclette and Umberto D

• Teacher at Centro Sperimentale di Cinema

• Critic at Bianco e nero

Ceare Zavattini

• ‘A well-know American producer told me, “This is how we would imagine a scene with an airplane. The plane passes by … a machine gun fires … the plane is crashed. And this is how you would imagine it. The plane passes by … the plane passes by … the plane passes by once more.” … He was right. But we have still not gone far enough. It is not enough to make the aeroplane pass by three times; we must make it pass by twenty times.’

• Cezare Zavattini, ‘Some Ideas on Cinema’

Cesare Zavattini

• ‘The dream of Zavattini is just to make a ninety-minute film of the life of a man to whom nothing ever happens.’ (Andre Bazin on Cesare Zavattini)

• The duration of actual time is equal to that of film’s narrative time.

• ‘Little-man’ principle’ – ‘a hole in the wall of a family house in order to peep inside.’

realist film movements neorealismo (2) films of vittoria de sica

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