Some of the best pieces of film are ones that depict the very real experiences of life; historic and inspired. While this can ultimately be argued as most film, there is a particular time period where the visceral concept of human nature and innate feeling are investigated. With the culmination of World War II came a new type of cinema from Europe. Not only the French New Wave in the late 1950-1960s, but Italian Neorealism of the mid 1940s and early 1950s.
No Film School presents a video essay and brief history on the Italian Neorealism film style that came out of Italy following World War II. Prior to the telling of grittier stories, Italy’s film industry under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini followed the style of Telefoni Bianchi. These films reflected the screwball comedies of American cinema in the 1930s, following guidelines of social conservatism, promoting family values, respect for authority, rigid class hierarchy, and country life. These qualities fell perfectly inline with the fascist regime.
Following the downfall of the fascism however, Italian Neorealist filmmakers, of whom many began as film critics, would make films that were the exact antithesis. A film like ‘Obsession’ (1943) directed by Luchino Visconti, showed a vignette of working class Italy and was a loose adaptation of the novel ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice.’ The same novel would also have its American adaptation in 1946, directed by Tay Garnett and starring Lana Turner and John Garfield. Today the American adaptation is classified as an example of film noir. The commonality between the two is the depiction of raw grit of human living.
The most famous Italian Neorealist film, as the video essay concludes, is obviously, ‘Bicycle Thieves’ or ‘The Bicycle Thief’ directed by Vittorio De Sica (1948). As the film follows the circumstances of a man who must find his bike or lose his job and the ability to provide for his family, the video essay details the facts of the drama, as De Sica hired nonprofessional actors, to make the experience more visceral and real. The actors had been in circumstances as the ones depicted in the film, if not exactly. As the form waned by the early 1950s, Italian audiences began to look to films of optimism, like those of American cinema during the time. While this change in cultural digest of cinema moved on, the lasting impression the form left still gives us glimpses into a past never to be forgotten.