Postwar European Cinema: Neorealism and its Context, 1945-1959

Context

• In 1945, much of Europe lay in ruins…
• Millions dead, cities obliterated, financial devastation, etc.
• Europe would have to start again, but according to what principles?
• Socialists and Communists believed that social revolution could start from scratch in this “Year Zero”
• US and USSR dominated the postwar scene, entering into the Cold War…
• US influence through “Cultural Imperialism”
• Advertising, fashion, mass media, pop culture, etc.
• Films! (post-WWII)

Context Cont...

• During the war, flow of US films to most European countries had ceased
• Nurtured local industries and indigenous talent
• Post-WWII, US strove to reintroduce their films back into European countries
• Hollywood films as excellent propaganda against Communist and Fascist tendencies
• US film influence in Germany post-WWII
• At least 50% of film screenings were US films
• Germany also had Heimat (“homeland,” village romance) films, war films, biographies, Trummerfilm (“rubble films,” reconstructing Germany), etc.
• Some Nazi-era filmmakers (Leni Riefenstahl) were forbidden to work, but most were rehabilitated under Allied policy
• “This continuity with the Fascist era, and the largely complacent film culture that it spawned, would be attacked by young directors of the 1960s, who called for an end to Papas Kino (“Papa’s Cinema”) (318)

Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935)

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations (Riefenstahl, 1938) & Olympia Part Two: Beauty of the Festival (Riefenstahl, 1938)

Resisting US Domination

• Quotas set on American film imports to withstand US domination
• Restrictions on American firms’ income
• Governments financed film productions
• International cooperation and co-productions
• European technological innovations
• Lightweight cameras with large magazines and reflex viewing
• French Pan Cinor zoom lens
• Specialized film exhibition and film archives between numerous nations
• Film Festivals to showcase a nation’s “film culture”

Italian Neorealism (INR)

• Most important filmmaking trend between 1945 and 1951
• Not exactly a unified movement
• Previous Italian films were known for their magnificent studio settings and Hollywood-like filmmaking
• What does “Neorealism,” opposed to “realism,” mean…?
• On-location settings
• Real locations that are/were affected by WWII
• Crumbling buildings, bullet holes, barbed wire, etc.
• Not adaptations (of fictional material), but real-life stories

The Last Days of Pompeii (Maggi, 1908) & Quo Vadis? (Guazzoni, 1913)

Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)

INR Continued…

• Natural lighting
• Cheap handheld cameras, cheap crews, and cheap celluloid
• Non-professional actors
• Documentary style/feel
• Humanist, philosophical, and political
• Loose script and dialogue
• Anticlimactic, unresolved plots
• Critical examination of recent history
• “Popular front”
• Notable filmmakers
• Luchino Visconti
• Roberto Rossellini
• Vittorio De Sica

Postwar Modernism (Objective Reality, Subjective Reality, and Authorial Commentary)

• Objective Reality (INR & Art Cinema years later)
• Truer to life than most classical filmmaking
• Reveal unpleasant realities of class, horrors of Fascism (Mussolini), war and occupation, etc.
• Avoided Hollywood’s tight plots and seamlessness
• Scenes where “nothing happens”, open-ended, unresolved narratives, long takes, stylistic acting choices, minute reproduction of the acoustic environment, etc.
• Subjective Reality (less INR and more Art Cinema)
• Psychological forces that make the individual act in particular ways (thoughts, dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, etc.)
• More evident influence from German Expressionism, French Impressionism, etc.
• Authorial Commentary (less INR and more Art Cinema)
• Intelligence outside the diegesis (the film’s world) is pointing out something about film’s events…
• Film medium itself could become self-reflexive/meta, pointing out the artifice - the fictional construct of film itself
• Ambiguity… (avant-garde directors like Luis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau, Jean Epstein, etc…)

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

Ossessione (Visconte, 1942)

Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945)

Short Doc on Neorealism and Rome, Open City

Lucia (Solas, 1968) & City of God (Meirelles & Lund, 2002)

The Cool World (Clarke, 1963) & George Washington (Green, 2000)

Bamako (Sissako, 2006) & Children of Men (Cuaron, 2006)

Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Zhao, 2015) & The Other Side (Minervini, 2015)

Art Cinema (more to come…)

• Popular film traditions still existed
• But now, European films start to become more interested in less traditional fare
• Younger generation
• Social and intellectual life on the rise
• Modernist tradition, “shock of the new”
• Experimentation and innovation in literature, painting, music, theater, etc.
• Revitalized from the 1920s modernist impulses from German Expressionism, French Impressionism, Soviet Montage, etc.
• Eventually leads to Italian Neorealism and French New Wave (among many other “New Waves” around the world…)

Il Grido (The Scream) (Antonioni, 1957) & L’avventura (The Adventure) (Antonioni, 1960)

8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)