d abroad the regime was giving increasingly clear signs of its imminent collapse." Neorealism was itself a revolution.
Liehm sees many of the young filmmakers of the time as conscious revolutionaries seeking artistic truth in cinema because the literary scene was too disorganized and scattered to be an effective vehicle:
The struggle had to originate where the 'strongest weapon' was, carried out by film artists whose work was centered in the major cities, mainly in Rome. After twenty-seven years of fascism, no other medium had the stamina to create a social context for a new artistic movement.
Roberto Rossellini's Ossessione is the film that allowed the filmmaker to give concrete form to ideas that had been discussed for some time: "But its impetus was immediately transmitted in several very different directions, notably towards the problems posed by the new situations resulting from the fall of Fascism and the new social perspectives resulting from the war."
Ossessione was Visconti's first film. One critic describes Visconti as "a m
...