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Summary Art of Filmmaking Course & Lecture Notes Week 5
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Friday, 9 October 2020AFM Week 5 Notes
AFM
Italian Neoliberalism
(1942-1951)
- The term represented a younger generation’s desire to break free of the conventions of
ordinary Italian cinema.
- Some onlookers found that quality in French films of the 1930s, especially works by Jean
Renoir
- Today most historians believe that Neorealist filmmaking was not a com- plete break with
Italian cinema under Mussolini.
- Leaving the Studio
• Economic, political, and cultural factors helped Neorealism survive. Unlike the young
Soviet filmmakers, nearly all the major Neorealists—Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica,
Visconti, and others—came to the movement as experienced filmmakers.
• Neorealist mise- en-scene relied on actual locales, and its photographic work tended
toward the raw roughness of documentaries.
• The ability to postsynchronize dialogue permitted the filmmakers to work on location
with smaller crews and to move the camera freely.
- A New Model of Storytelling
• Although the causes of characters’ actions are usually seen as concretely eco- nomic
and political (poverty, unemployment, exploitation), the effects are often fragmentary
and inconclusive.
- The Movement’s End and Its Legacy
• When Italy began to prosper after the war, the govern- ment looked askance at films
so critical of contemporary society. After 1949, censorship and state pressures began
to constrain the movement
• Large-scale Italian film production began to reappear, and Neorealism no longer had
the freedom permitted by small production companies. Neorealist directors, now
famous, began to pursue more individualized concerns: Rossellini’s investigation of
Christian humanism and Western history, De Sica’s sentimental romances, and
Visconti’s examination of upper-class milieus
“De Sica and Rossellini”
- For Zavattini-De Sica, Human Reality is a Social Phenomenon
• This does not mean that they are not interested in the individual. Quite the contrary,
Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952) are self-evidently pleas on behalf of the
human being and his or her individual happiness, but the conditions of this happiness
are reduced to a series of factual “prerequisites”: unemployment and all its
consequences, the State and its economic hypoc- risies, etc.
1
, Friday, 9 October 2020
• For him, neorealism is first and foremost a realism of the relationship of the individual
to society.
- For Rossellini, a Moral Problem
• He must find the answer to a question that will give the world its moral or ethical sense
• This does not mean that Rossellini ignored social reality
• Rossellini gives us a faithful and objective rendering of the shock of a moral event in
the context of the social reality encountered by the individual
• Thus, Rossellini’s neorealism can tackle subjects that appear to be related to the
traditional ones of the novel, such as individual character analysis—and this is indeed
the case in Voyage in Italy (1953).
• Neorealism: “All the objective, subjective, and social elements of reality are in
neorealism never analyzed as such; they are contained in a block of events with all its
inextricable blurring: a block in time as well as in space, which spares us not one
second, not one gesture. Above all, there is this way in neorealism of taking the
opposite stance from that of analysis, of putting an end to the compartmentalized
description of man and of the world.” - Amédée Ayfre
- Zavattini Analyzes, Rossellini Synthesizes
• For Zavattini, through De Sica, the idea is to observe our fellow man from closer and
closer, to perceive the particular realities that make up his most trivial behaviors, then
to capture even smaller realities, as if with a microscope that would magnify human
activity more and more and progressively reveal a universe of consciousness, whereas
what we usually see there is only an old man tidying up his room or a young girl
grinding coffee.
• Rossellini, by contrast, would look at his characters from the large end of a telescope.
Of course, the distances I am alluding to here are figurative and purely theoretical, in
the sense that we have the impression of witnessing events from afar, without being
able to intervene, events whose causes we do not all discern and whose latent
progression suddenly bursts into heartrending complications, which are both inevitable
and unpredictable.
- Kindness and Love
• Awareness leads Zavattini to subdivide reality further and further, whereas it leads
Rossellini to emphasize the forces which hold that reality together and restrict man’s
tragic liberty from all sides
• Progressive approach to the Zavattinian protagonist, his quasi-microscopic
description, reveals a sympathetic intent that I would even call kindness
• Rossellinian distance—through the tension it creates between us and the protagonist,
through the denial of psychological participation that this distance implies—imposes
on us a relationship that can only be called love, but love that is not sentimental and
that one could go so far as to call metaphysical
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