Italian Redemption Of Cinema: Neorealism From Bazin To Godard, The
...definitive gesture, pronounced neorealism a school.1 By contrast, Italian critics have always seemed reluctant to acknowledge neorealism as a movement and so have never produced a manifesto or program for an ideological faction. Neorealism in Italy may be said rather to encompass two somewhat different meanings. The term comes to be associated, on the one hand, with the project of reformulating the nation's identity in the period immediately after World War II and, on the other, with the notion of a privileged instrument for the recuperation of reality either in its immediacy (Zavattini) or in a critically mediated form (Aristarco).2
Cesare Zavattini and Guido Aristarco may be regarded as the two chief Italian expositors of neorealism. Zavattini worked as the screenwriter for Vittorio De Sica and authored several of the masterpieces of neorealist cinema including Ladri di biciclette (1948) and Miracolo a Milano (1950). Aristarco founded the journal Cinema Nuovo and encouraged the idea of Italian cinema as a natural progression fron neorealism to what might be called critical realism. Interested in promoting a realist agenda reminiscent of Lukács's throughout the arts, Aristarco contended that the descriptive approach of early neorealism was too simplistic and ought to be replaced by a more critical method. In Visconti's Senso (1954) he identified the exemplary expression of a realist poetics informed by historical criticism.
With respect to periodization, neorealism generally is supposed to start with Visconti's Ossessione (1942), to culminate in Rossellini's Roma citta aperta (1945) and De Ska's Ladri di biciclette, and to begin to decay after De Sica's Umberto D (1952), which Guglielmo Monetti has portrayed as the last neorealist masterpiece.3 Whereas French critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have ascribed to neorealism the achievement of a unifying...
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