Life As It Is: The Neorealist Movement in Italy (2007)

There is a general consensus out there
that there were seven

key works masterworks, if you like,

produced
by the Italian neorealist movement,

which is a term
that not everybody likes to use.

And those seven films were produced
by three filmmakers.

Roberto
Rossellini's Room, Open City and 45

Germany Year Zero in 1947.

And of course, Paisa and then

Vittorio de Sica's three films Shoeshine

Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D

produced between 1946 and 1952.

And then Luchino Visconti's la territory

The Earth Trembles produced in 1947.

Those seven films are the ones
which have gained

the most critical attention over the years
and are united by

certain stylistic tendencies
which near realism has become famous for.

This is certainly the case
with Bicycle Thieves,

which to a great extent came to epitomize
the technical or the stylistic

tendency of Italian neorealism
and its new approaches to storytelling.

Among the
most important stylistic characteristics,

I would say, are a certain approach
to visual representation.

One thinks, for example, of the sense
of bringing the camera

to engage with reality to a great extent
by rejecting filming in a studio

and moving outdoors to film on location.

And also, of course, dedication
to telling the stories of ordinary people,

by which I mean people of a lower class,
or at least people

who, if they were of a good class,
are somehow in a situation of crisis

and they are experiencing poverty,
deprivation and crisis.

People
who are living in conditions of oppression

and of lack
in this devotion to the masses.

And this sense of the need
for social reform.

Italian neorealism
was one of those movements in which people

thought that the medium
could really contribute to society, which.

Would also program
the orbit of informed Uncle Jack.

Me too. Because I know that this I

don't know, you know, everybody does with,
you know.

Life as it is.

That was Sabatini, his favorite term.

But this should be
the objective of filmmaking,

the capturing of life as it is.

Italy had a long tradition of filmmaking,

of course, going back to the earliest days
of the medium in the silent era,

it had been one of the most important film
producing nations.

One has to look back to Mussolini
and what the fascist government

did in the 1920s,

but more especially in the 1930s,
in terms of investing in cinema.

He invested in Italian fascist film clubs

among Italian youth
and fascist youth to foster cinema going.

He invested money in Cinecitta,
the foremost film studios in Italy

and indeed one of the most advanced

filmmaking facilities in the world
when it was opened in 1937.

So film was always an integral part
of the Italian popular culture.

Of course,
while the agenda for all of this

for the Fascists was to,

I think, generate
a sense of a film culture

which was compliant with fascism
and which would serve fascist needs.

It's one of the one of the nice ironies
that this was turned on its head

for very, very different political
purposes and very, very ideological,

different artistic purposes.

After the war,
which Mussolini did not anticipate at all.

The question of

when neorealism began is a very,
very vexed

one and continues to be hotly
debated in Italy and abroad to this day.

But in October 1941,
Mario Alicante and Giuseppe to Santa,

two of those who would become central
to neorealism had published an essay

called Truth and Poetry
in the influential journal Cinema,

in which they argued for a return
or a turn in Italian cinema

towards Verismo, as they call it,
which was a sense of truth to life.

And they made the argument on behalf
of their generation, if you like,

that Italian cinema under fascism,
although they didn't

directly criticize
the regime, as you might imagine,

had become moribund. That was their term.

It had become bourgeois,
it had become staid

and that what was needed

was a turn to a new realism,
a new engagement with society.

And they took for inspiration
the 19th century literature

of Dickens, of Flaubert,
and the plays of Chekhov and Ibsen.

And they expressed admiration
for the French poetic realist

who had been at the height of their powers
in the thirties.

That is Jean
Renoir, René Clair and others.

And then, of course,

they also expressed admiration
for certain American filmmakers, people

like King Vidor, for example,
who are attuned to social crisis in films

like our Daily Bread
and the Crowd in the late twenties

and early thirties,
but also the achievements of populist

directors in the United States,
such as William Wyler, Frank Capra.

And in the documentaries,
for example, of Pare Lorentz,

The Plow, The Broke, the Plains and others
based around the Depression, the years

from 1943 to 1945, when the political

and social conditions of near realism
emerged, were very, very turbulent years.

The country had been through 20
odd years of fascism.

It had been through a number of years
of occupation by German forces,

the subsequent liberation by the Allies,
which was a long and bloody struggle.

Over two years, 300,000
people were dead as a result of the war.

There were some estimates
say 7% of the population living homeless.

The economy was collapsed.

And in this very, very volatile situation,

you had bitterly opposed groups
vying for control.

The neorealist filmmakers engaged
with this postwar crisis

with a tremendously idealistic sense
of what cinema

might be able to achieve
anything was possible.

A complete reorganization
of Italian society was possible.

And this was a tremendously exciting
possibility.

I think that Rossellini, Visconti,
De Sica and others to Santos,

Sergio Hammer Day
and all of these filmmaker

and script writers had a sense
that cinema was a medium

which was uniquely

well placed to contribute to Italy's
regeneration of its sense of self.

And that was partly because it was thought
by many to have a unique access

to reality, that there was something
uniquely symbiotic

about the nature of the camera.

As a technology and the real world,
and that if somehow one could

bring those together
in a pure and unmediated way,

that the camera in the real world
could achieve a spark if you like,

which would shed
light on on social issues.

Making films in the immediate postwar
era was a logistically difficult thing

to do and a financially
difficult thing to do, if not prohibitive.

One of the most striking things
about the postwar

period in Italy, in Italian film
production,

is the very low base
from which the industry started in 1945.

Only 27 feature
films were made in Italy in 1945

and the rapid growth in production
in the ten years or so after the war

to 1950 455, when there were approximately
200 films a year made.

So the industry rebounded quickly.

But in the immediate aftermath of the war,
45, 46, 47,

there were no film studios in Italy,

no properly operating
commercial studios with equipment,

and there was very little
availability of funds for production.

But in a sense, that maybe brought
the filmmakers even closer to the subject

matter that they were dealing with,

because they were talking about subjects
of deprivation, poverty, lack,

ordinary people, lacking
bread, lacking housing,

and they themselves were experiencing
lack of basic necessities.

And of course,
you know, it has become legendary now,

although it's partly true and partly
mythical that Roberto Rossellini,

in making Rome Open City in 1940 445,
was not simply able to go to his local

distributor and buy, you know,
a good stock of 35 millimeters film.

He had to cobble together
what he could from the black market,

including putting together pieces
that were intended

really for still photography
and so on and so on.

And that led to the grainy, uneven effect
of some of the the visuals

in Rome, Open City
and the lighting qualities, etc.

The war itself was
and was not central as a subject

for direct representation
to neorealist filmmakers.

What I mean by that
is that in the immediate aftermath

of the war, 45, 46, 47, as you might
well imagine,

with events of the occupation
and liberation so fresh in their minds,

many neorealist filmmakers took as

their first task
the telling of that story,

the brutality of the occupation,
the illegitimacy of fascism

and Nazism, and the heroic struggle
of the people against it.

Some of the greatest early near-real films
such as Rome of the City, were quite

classical in the sense that they told
a story and were very action oriented.

Rome Up the city
the most one of the most famous

Italian films
is about the liberation of Rome.

There are action sequences in it.

There's a heroic narrative to it.

It's about the liberation of a people
by their own struggle.

Subsequent to that, I think it's fair
to say that relatively few Neruda's films

directly represent the war
in the sense of the action of the war.

This has partly to do with the turn

on the part of Italian filmmakers towards
the immediate needs of the people

after the war
and the effort to improve society

and to bring about a solution
to the problems

rather than to continually represent
the past.

It also has to do with a move away
from the heroic struggle against fascism

to this increasingly existential sense

of the difficulties
of being in the present moment,

things being for their own sake, and often
the difficulty of being the difficulty

of interpersonal relationships,
whether it's between

an individual and family
or an individual and others in society

about questions of responsibility,
because in one sense, one can understand

Bicycle Thieves as a film

about existential responsibility,
how one has a duty to one's family,

and about the different responsibilities
between one which is torn.

It's also a film about loneliness,
but isolation,

about the variable hostility

and warmth of the crowd
or other people in the city.

So these are films which are very much
about individuals in crisis.

So it

becomes,
if you like, an existentialist cinema.

So their narratives are uneventful,
but not in a negative way, in a way

which is very positive

and is central to their thematic
and philosophical investigation.

Andre Basra, for example,
was a tremendous champion of the film.

The French film critic writing in

kind of cinema and elsewhere admitted
that there was nothing to the story.

He said it wouldn't amount to two lines
in a stray dog column in a newspaper.

Nothing happens.

A man gets a job,
very banal job finds his bicycle stolen.

If anything, we think he's a fool,

and then he spends
the rest of his narrative

traipsing around
Italy on a completely fruitless journey in

search of the most banal and humble object
and never really getting anywhere.

This was typical,
I think, of the sense in which the Nereus

took action out of their films
to a great extent, and focused on people

in predicaments
and people often who were disempowered.

And this is one of the key ways
that one can think about the difference

between neorealism, say,
and Hollywood cinema,

which, of course, was was prevalent.

And everywhere in Italy,

even when the new rules were working,
it was the constant subtext

against which they were working
that Hollywood cinema prioritized

what we call action oriented protagonists
who were in charge of their own

narratives, who were seeking goals,
whether it was crossing the frontier

and settling the West,
or resolving a mystery.

In the case of a detective film
noir, for example.

But that kind of action orientation
was simply not there in their realism.

And they pared things down to to the bare
minimum, to the bare essentials.

There was a strong, hard core

of very noble, very idealistic filmmakers.

For example, Giuseppe DeSantis,
who were genuinely involved

in bringing stories of the Italian

working class and the exploitation
of the Italian working class to audiences.

But on the other hand, among these other
filmmakers were more lighthearted

filmmakers whose films,
if you like, went in a different direction

and achieving a balance
or trying to achieve a balance between

a neorealist, visual esthetic and stories
which were not necessarily

miserable, for want of a better word,
or stories which were not necessarily

bleak or existentialist,
but which were more lighthearted.

One thinks, for example, of Pietro Jeremy,
some of whose films merged near realism

with elements of film noir,
and they're quite action oriented

and dramatic
in a rather genre based sense.

But one thinks also, especially,
I think, of Luigi Zampa in films like Viva

and Patchett to Live in Peace in 1946,
which was criticized at the time

by many on the left because it merged
a neorealist visual style

with what was essentially
a lighthearted comedy.

Certain Italian heroes
filmmakers had strong

and lasting
collaborative roles with certain writers.

The closest and the most long
lasting of these relationships

was certainly that between the director,
Vittorio De Sica, and the writer.

Cesare is Albertini,
which lasted for over 20 years,

while the role of
the screenwriter was important.

There was never anything very literary
about Italian realist

filmmaking or its origins.

For the most part, Italian, neorealist
films derived from screenplays

or very, very, very loose adaptations
of preexisting works of literature.

This is certainly the case
with Bicycle Thieves, which

in its most original form
was an adaptation in a very loose

sense of a novel by Luigi

Bartoli, published in 1946,

which had to do with an out of work
painter who gains a job

posting bills,
but which led to a very different

narrative conclusion
which Sabatini borrowed and adapted.

One of the ways that Italian neorealist
filmmakers

sought to bring reality
closer to audiences was by overturning

the star system,
which had been traditionally central

to Italian commercial filmmaking,
as it was, of course, to Hollywood cinema,

and which in Italian history
was referred to under the term divisible,

which was the term used to describe
Italy's star system,

particularly in the silent era
when it was a major film producing nation.

And one of the strategies
which was employed by

filmmakers, for example, by Rossellini
in making Rome Open City,

was to cast recognized stars
who had a popular appeal,

for example, under Magnani,
and to cast them against type.

And Magnani, who was known for her
work in La Rivista in light

territory and reviews, was recast

by Rossellini as the tragic heroine Pina,

which made the audience realize that

they were not appreciating
the star as a star.

But if you like, appreciating the star
for his or her ability

to represent the common man of the common
woman in the street.

It was the case also,
I think was Visconti's casting of Massimo

Durante in society in 1943
and who had been previously known,

for example,
for playing a heroic Italian fighter pilot

in when pilot to return in 1942.

So who was taken as a heroic Italian
military man and recast

as a thieving,
adulterated murderer in Visconti's film?

And then

another tendency which went alongside
it was the tendency

not to use stars at all,
not even to use trained performers,

not to use actors to use ordinary people
plucked, if you like, from the street.

This was the case with the casting of
Lamberto Majorana in the role of Antonio

and Enzo Stella in the role of Bruno,
the little boy in Bicycle Thieves,

whom De Sica cast
because of their typical qualities

as well as their as he saw it,
their expressive qualities

and their ability to elicit the emotion
and the sympathy of the viewer.

But not,
of course, for any glamor that they had.

Not, of course, for any particular
connotations that they carried.

That Roman yet inhabited.

De Sica
like to talk about the untrained actor

as a blank canvas or
as something that could be molded at will.

And he spoke often about the satisfaction
that he gained in a creative sense

from working with non-actors,
because unlike professional actors,

you would have to

try and get a professional actor to forget
who he was to leave aside their stardom.

These non-actors came to him

with a readymade humility,
if you like, and no pretension whatsoever.

And that spoke directly
to the subject matter and to the thematic

meaning he was trying to achieve.

It was a working against stardom
and a working against glamor,

which was central
to the neorealist approach to performance.

I mean, you can

actually leap all over these,
only to be willing

to meet

my new manager, Vincent.

The stylistic characteristics
of what we call

neorealism are,
I think, readily identifiable.

So there's a lot of debate about
just how many films really fit the bill.

But certainly among the most important
stylistic characteristics,

I would say, are a certain approach
to visual representation.

The most appropriate subject
for representation is the real world,

often outside, outdoors,
out of the studio, rather than any

recreated world in studio, rather
than any world of luxurious mise en scene.

Rich settings, rich decor, rich costumes,
things which for the most part

are left by the wayside by the Italian
neorealist in a very deliberate way.

The setting of the city is central

to an understanding of Italian neorealist
filmmaking.

One of the things that the neorealist
filmmakers were able to capitalize on

was the sheer social energy and excitement
and density

of the Italian city,
which was like no other Italian cities,

if you think about it, especially being
so ancient, are tremendously complex

spaces full of piazzas,

narrow laneways, monumental structures,
crumbling walls.

So they're very, very complex
and rich environments,

which of course
makes them perfect for the camera

because they're so full
of visual interest.

But not only are they of interest
physically in terms

of their architecture and their structure,
but they're socially rich.

So these were very lived in spaces.

So much life was lived outdoors
in the Mediterranean climate,

the interaction of families,
of businessmen, of street

traders and others on the streets
one thinks of

and bicycle thieves the porta potties
they market, the very famous flea market.

One thinks of the huge crowds
swarming out towards the end of the film

from the football stadium.

At the end of a game, the flow of life.

And it's certainly
the case that the neorealist and none more

so than De Sica deliberately used
ordinary,

everyday locations
which did not have any touristic meaning.

They weren't recognizable
from a picture postcard.

One doesn't generally see the great

architectural landmarks of Rome,
be it the Colosseum

or the great, you know, heroic arches
built by the Romans.

There was a deliberate effort

to use humble locations,
and this is certainly linked, I think.

And there's an important link
to make between neorealist visual style

and fascist visual style in this sense
that the fascist visual style of Mussolini

and others had been all about championing
Rome's great classical architecture,

its statues of the various Caesars,
that great ancient tradition,

but that kind of iconography for
the neorealist

was entirely delegitimized
because of its fascist associations.

So there was a rejection of that kind
of heroic mythology and landscape

and of focusing on a much more
banal but humane setting.

There were moments

when the nearest didn't simply take nature
as they found it.

Moments of Rome Open City
are filmed in a makeshift studio

that Rossellini established in central
Rome and the Villa delivering an AC

and indeed a bicycle thieves.

One thinks of the famous scene
in which Antonio and Bruno Ricci

take refuge from a tremendous downpour
when they're walking the streets of Rome.

That scene is a scene
which some of those who like to unpick

the myths of neorealism often point to,

because it's one scene in which De Sica
didn't simply take nature as he found it,

but actually enlisted
the support of the Italian Fire Brigade

and had firefighters come in
and actually simply

turn their hoses on the set and generate
rain.

And also, of course, hired
a very large cast of extras to populate

the streets in the piazzas.

In fact,
Bicycle Thieves was not a low budget film.

It was made on a budget of 100
million lire, which was a substantial

amount of money in 1948,
and it was made with a sizable crew

and in certain sequences involved
the use of multiple cameras.

In fact, in some sequences, the use of six
cameras running simultaneously,

which was in neorealist terms,
tremendously extravagant and filmmaking.

So it was both typical and atypical, etc..

But la la.

The nearest filmmakers, to a great extent,
especially in the five years

after the war, made a deliberate effort
also to avoid contrivance

as much as possible and artificiality
in their images,

partly by getting out of studios
onto the street, but also partly

by avoiding, for example,
noticeably complex camera movements,

crane shots, for example,
or naturalistically long tracking shots

and tending as much as possible
to allow the camera

to fixed on the object
without great manipulation,

along with which the

neorealist turn to available light
and deliberately shooting.

Of course, very often for practical
reasons, by day, more than by night,

but loving and trying as much as possible
not to tamper with available light around

various authentic neighborhoods in Rome,
with which he was familiar.

The soundtrack
and the visual track in a neorealist film

do not always, in fact, very often
do not at all sit comfortably together.

There was no synchronized sound.

And so there was very often a disjuncture
between the image that you see

and the sound that you hear.

That is that you're actually going to get.

And I thought it then

occurred to me terrible.

It is the case that Mussolini imposed
a system of dubbing

on the Italian film industry, requiring

partly for the purposes
of official control, that all soundtracks

and lines of dialog, etc.,
be dubbed onto the film after the fact.

And it continued after the postwar period
such that

Rossellini, de Sica, Visconti and others

deliberately dubbed their films.

It was like a TV film.

Yeah, well, so this will look video
as called the beach ball.

Well, no, not really.

And then there was also,
of course, the tendency

and this was very deliberate
to avoid complex editing, by which

I mean editing, which was overt
and noticeable to the viewer.

And I think particularly here
must have been the neorealist

knowledge of Soviet
filmmaking of the twenties

and thirties, the so-called Montage
School, in which editing had been central.

And, you know, another left wing tendency
in filmmaking which editing

and jarring juxtaposition of images
had been central to the esthetic.

The neorealist wanted to avoid editing
as much as possible

and to allow the camera to run,
to allow the camera to capture reality

without cutting, without,
if you like, cramping it style.

I love the fact
of further follow up to the.

Italian

filmmakers who subsequently became known
as neorealist,

gained a sense of themselves
as being engaged in quite an interesting

and distinctive project and became
self-conscious, if you like, of themselves

as neorealist, even if they didn't use
that term was was very, very quick.

It happened quickly, I think.

Each film that was released
became part of a very large public debate

in which virtually everybody
had something to say.

And the major Communist Party newspapers
l'unita the Catholic Church,

the Christian Democrats
each had their own film journal

and commented on them
and immediately responded to the film

and appreciated its artistry
or lack of in its political position.

A conservative or radical.

So it was inevitable, I think, in that
climate that the filmmakers would gain

a sense of themselves
as self-consciously doing something new.

And filmmakers were often
prompted to put pen to paper

or to make public statements to the press.

And in that sense, neorealism
generated an intellectual meter.

So it was, if
you like, a written discourse behind this.

And it's not surprising in the sense
that Italy is one of those countries

which historically has been
very privileged in that it's there

has been a to ing and fro ing between
its filmmaking, culture and debate.

And there's always been a healthy
and hearty debate about film.

Italian neorealist films

fared
well and badly in the Italian film market.

Some films achieved both critical

and commercial success.

Of course, the most famous
and one of the earliest is Rome

Open City, released in 1945,
which is one of the only,

if not the only Italian neorealist film
to have been number one

at the Italian box office
in the year of its release, 1940 546.

Few other Italian neorealist films

achieved that kind of instant
and universal popularity.

Bicycle Thieves was made in 1948
and released in 1940 849.

That particular season,
it was 11th most popular film of the year.

It's important, of course,
also to recognize that internationally

they were widely acclaimed
and I think the two countries in which

they gained the most recognition
and which then in turn

became decisive in building
the legend of neorealism,

were firstly France
and secondly the United States.

And it was French critics such as Andre
Basa encouraged cinema and French

film goers which reacted and applauded
the neorealist achievements.

And then, of course, American critics
in The New York Times.

One thinks of the rave review
given to Rome Open City

by Bosley Crowther in 1946
when the film was released.

And then,
of course, of the Academy Awards,

as we call them,
the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film,

which were achieved by shoeshine and then
by bicycle thieves in subsequent years.

So the international recognition
and the ability

of neorealism to travel internationally
is a distinctive feature of the movement.

And one of the ways of explaining
it, surely, I think, is that

there was something

distinctive about audiences in Italy
and internationally after the war.

The war was something

which, for better or worse,
everybody has experienced.

The French, the Italians, the British,
the Americans.

It was a unifying experience, if you like,
but of course, in a very terrible way.

But it explains
the very distinctive ability,

I think, of neorealism to shoot
like lightning internationally

from one country to another
and to gain admiration

in all contexts.

Bicycle Thieves came out in 1948, almost,

if you like, at the high point of

neorealism, but also the last great moment
in which neorealist filmmakers

could breathe freely if they could at all.

In Italian political life in 1948,
there was a turnaround

in which the Christian Democrats
suddenly had the power.

So there was, in this period,

a switch from a left wing government
to a right wing government.

And the neorealist became increasingly
hostile to the conservative Christian

Democratic Party,
which launched often bitter,

vitriolic and very personalized
attacks on film makers.

Especially one thinks of the quite
vociferous exchanges between Andreotti,

the Italian Minister for Culture
and eventually Prime Minister,

who took very strong,
condemnatory public stances in papers and

in various other fora

against neorealism,
personally castigated Vittorio De Sica

for letting his nation down
and called upon De Sica

to exercise his social responsibility,
which Andreotti was convinced

had to do with telling,
ennobling and uplifting stories

about Italy rather than bitter
social portrait.

How do you know

this?

As the time went on and as neorealism
became more and more bitterly fought over,

a law was passed which made it compulsory
for all film makers

seeking production
funds from the government

to submit their scripts
in advance for government approval.

Which of course
was a difficult thing to do

if you wanted to make a contentious
film of any kind.

It's also the case that the problem for

the neorealist was not only that
they were coming under attack

from the powers that be,
but also that the commercial cinema

was rebounding Hollywood very quickly
throughout the postwar period, controlled

between two thirds and three quarters
of the box office at any given time.

Kinoshita was

reopened, Reequiped refinanced, relaunched

and very quickly, studio based
escapist films

were increasingly being produced in Italy
and were increasingly outnumbering

the rather numerically meager efforts
of the neorealist.

Of the approximately 800 feature films
which were produced

in Italy in the ten years
or so after the war.

The most generous estimates, using
a flexible definition of what neorealism

was, suggests
that about a third, maybe 250,

maybe 300 films were near realist.

The atmosphere for the Italian neorealist
filmmakers

deteriorated rapidly,
followed then by controversy

after controversy around particular films
for example, Miracle in Milan

and then with Umberto D in 5152.

And it's at this time that many point
to the demise of neorealism

and its replacement by something else.

Now there are a number of films in
and around the period 1952, 53, 54,

which became particularly controversial
even among filmmakers themselves

and those who championed neorealism

because one person pointed to it
as the end of neorealism,

another pointed to it as yet another
creative reemergence of neorealism.

As these filmmakers
Rossellini and De Sica,

but then also newcomers,
so to speak, such as Fellini

and Antonioni, moved towards
more and more metaphysical issues.

The left began to criticize quite strongly

the rejection
as they sort of social issues, and began

to accuse these filmmakers
of retreating to relatively comfortable

milieu and subject matter,
especially middle class subject matter.

Two of the most important of these
are Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy

and Federico Fellini's somewhat later

film, Nights of Cabiria of 1957

in Roberto Rossellini's

Voyage to Italy of 1954, starring
George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman.

You have a film
which focuses on a very well-to-do,

middle class English
couple traveling to Naples

in order to sort out the estate of George
Sanders relative who has died.

And this is a film
which engages with the streets of Naples.

It engages with the landscape,
but one which is not at all austere

and which in many ways
is pretty beautiful in a way

which is not neorealist,
at least if one uses the sense of the term

bicycle thieves, which for some,
especially on the left, immediately

meant that it could not be neorealist

because neorealist films
must have to do with the working class.

And if they did not,
they could not be neorealist.

But Andre Barzun, the French film critic,
was one of those who argued that

the film and Rossellini's
great achievement and Rossellini's

courage
was to push the boundaries of neorealism

and to adapt neorealism
to the changing circumstances

in which Italians and others
found themselves in the mid 1950s because,

of course, by the mid 1950s, the Italian
economy is starting to stabilize.

In fact, by the end of the fifties
as something of an economic boom,

it's not enough
simply to talk about the war anymore

or the immediate effects of the war,
but that one must talk about

how Italians are living their lives now
and how they're having to deal with

often an increasingly affluent

environment
which is no longer revolutionary

or potentially revolutionary, but in which
there's a status quo, if you like.

And this in a different ways
is is also arguably the case with

Federico Fellini's slightly later

nights of Cabiria, which for Bazaar

is one of the last moments
of near realism,

but also one which transforms near realism
because it's a film

which is about a poor prostitute
living on the outskirts of Rome

and who plies his trade
on the streets of Rome.

And in that sense,
the film is a social study,

but it's not necessarily a film
which is particularly

interested in her exploitation,
its critics or the films.

Critics alleged that she was happy
and unwitting in her poverty.

If you like.

And of course, being a Fellini film,
it's a film which involves much comedy.

It's a film

which also moves away from neorealism
because it's at least as much about

swank clubs and fashion culture,
which became increasingly important

in the 1950s
as it is about the harshness of life

on the street for the poor
and the dispossessed

and since Fellini is one of those
who many point to as having moved

neorealism the furthest away
and the most decisively away

from that sense of gritty life
on the streets

to something more magical, to something

not which is not only realist,
although it is realist,

but which is also playing
with the medium of cinema

and playing with the device of the camera
in a way which acknowledges

that what you're watching is artificial.

Many historians argue that for all intents
and purposes,

neorealism as a coherent thing,
and neorealism has a certain

ethical or political disposition dissolved
and gave to something else,

which was generally referred
to as the art cinema of the sixties,

epitomized, I guess, for many historians
by films like La Dolce Vita

by Fellini in 1960,
the influence of neorealism on subsequent

filmmaking, both in Italy and abroad, is

very, very difficult to overstate.

I would suggest that it was certainly

one of the most, if not the most

long lasting and internationally pervasive

film movements of all the film movements
of the 20th century, of all of the avant

garde and cinema of that era,
one can point to, for example,

the distinct parallels
and sometimes the echoes in American film

noir of the late forties and early
fifties, especially in the representation

of urban landscapes
as dilapidated and as rundown and as poor.

But the influence goes further
afield, too.

In the 1960s, neorealist filmmaking became
a key point of inspiration.

I think because of its visual commitment
to everyday life,

because of its visual commitment or its
ideological commitment to the people.

Among Third World filmmakers
such as the work of Satyajit Ray, again

documenting the harsh conditions
faced by the peasantry

in recently
liberated independent India in the 1950s.

So Third World is filmmakers
were one of the key groups

to pick up on the neorealist tradition.

But it was also,
I think, innovative and influential

in other types of filmmaking,
especially in documentary.

The closest to documentary filmmaking

within the Italian neorealist tradition,
which was of course, a fiction.

But filmmaking tradition was the tendency
epitomized by Sabatini.

And Sabatini
certainly was influential upon

those filmmakers
who worked in cinema verité, for example.

Jarmusch in that very medium
and in the early sixties,

or the American filmmaker
Robert Drewe, with so-called

direct cinema documentaries of the 1960s,
such as primary, and then,

of course into other direct cinema
films like Don't Look Back and and so on.

So the influence was, was, was felt far
and wide for many generations.

What is

particularly valuable about near
realism is its realism.

It's the freshness
and the striking engagement

on a very humble
and I think well-meaning level

and in an idealistic sense

between the camera and reality,
between the filmmaker and reality,

between the filmmaker and an audience,
which is not always easy to conjure with

and which is not always evident
in the very media saturated, very cynical,

savvy, the world of images
in which we live today,

in which it seems
that there's a constant appetite

for among audiences
for a sense of reality.

But I think seeking it
in a very different way, or at least

being provided it in a very different way
to that which the near realists achieved.

And I would argue that

one of the

constantly inspiring things
about neorealist films is that one

can always go back to them
as a way of cutting through the morass

of very often cynical
and very often exploited media images,

which everybody has to deal with today

because they cut straight to the issues
and they cut straight to the image.

And it's they're sometimes naive,

but very endearing directness and honesty,

which is their constant redeeming feature.