s portrayed Italy in a realistic and critical way that was not the sort of image the establishment wanted for the country, particularly to be presented to the outside world.
Bondanella sees the development of neorealism as a high point in the history of the film and one that would be highly influential to later works and movements. Bondanella cites critic Andre Bazin, who called neorealism "a cinema of 'fact' and 'reconstituted reportage'" which offered a message of fundamental human solidarity fostered by the anti-fascist Resistance. Bazin says that these works often embodied a rejection of both traditional dramatic and cinematic conventions. The filmmakers most often employed on-location shooting rather than studio sets and used nonprofessional actors and documentary effects. Leprohon emphasizes that this cannot be considered a coherent movement in the sense that it created rules or even theories followed by the filmmakers. Rather, the filmmakers were merely trying to express themselves individually in a way that was "in the air:"
Essentially, neo-realism was a product of political and social circumstances. And it is in this revolutionary aspect of neo-realism that I should like to discuss first of all. Before it existed in its own right, with definite aims and sectarian interests, neo-realism--which was still nameless--was opposed to a state of affairs which increasingly stifled and oppressed the expression of truth--a state of affairs that existed . . . long before the Fascist era.
Leprohon notes that the neorealistic style had as its underlying aim making "the cinema an extension of the literary realism that had developed at the end of the 19th century." Leprohon looks back at this literary history and finds a precedent for the new form of cinematic expression: "Neo-realism was thus a revival of the Risorgimento, the 'unfinished revolution' which the young polemicists intended to complete, while at home an...