Italian neorealism
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Italian neorealism developed under onerous circumstances and became a form by which Italian filmmakers could express themselves in a new way. Essentially, the early neorealist filmmakers were doing what they could with the tools at hand and doing it under the watchful eyes of an antagonistic ruling class, From the tensions this arrangement produced, they created something distinctive, allowing them to develop ideas and to do so in a new cinematic style. At the time, Italy was ruled by fascists, who viewed art as valuable only to the degree it was useful. Yet, these films were not made in service of fascist ideas but as a counter to them. The forces that helped shape these films, the style that was produced by these tensions, and some important examples demonstrate the vitality achieved by Italian directors as World War II ended. One of the best-known of what would be called the neo-realist approach to film was Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1945), and many of the characteristics of the movement were evident in this film. These films had an anti-establishment, revolutionary attitude. They had an extemporaneous, documentary quality enhanced in the early era by the materials from which they were made--war-time film stock, cobbled-together equipment, non-professional actors, and location shooting. Open City is a good example of this early period in neorealism, while Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948) is an expression of the fully developed tradition from the p
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erent sensibilities are at work, and both versions differ from the novel in essential ways. The novel, as noted, has a stronger sense of fate, something that is muted in the American film, perhaps because of the major star gloss the film receives from its director. The doomed husband is nowhere near as gross in the film as he is in the novel. In this sense, the Italian film is closer to the original, but the Italian film has a different world-view that comes to the fore. Visconti makes his film much more a social statement than either Cain or Garnett does, and he achieves this first by evoking a time and place as he sees it and second by relating his characters to the tensions of that time and place, which he does in a way that stays with the viewer.
This element of the social statement was an important component in the leading neo-realist films, and indeed this element was feared by the fascists, who did not want their society depicted in any but the best light. With the end of Italian fascist rule, a different set of critical rulers was put in place. Roberto Rossellini's Open City is a film about Rome during the period of the German occupation, and the conditions under which the film was shot mirror the situation in the
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Approximate Word count = 3396
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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