European social and intellectual life began to revive
filmmakers began to identify with innovations
literature
painting
theater
1.3 stylistic features
true to life
exposing class antagonisms
horrors of war and occupation
episodic
slice-of-life narratives, opposed to tightness of
Hollywood
open ended narratives
without firm conclusions
heavy use of long take
camera movements
new styles of performance
authorial commentary
2 Prewar Italian Cinema
2.1 Fascists came to power in 1922
no effort to control media
did not nationalize film industries
propaganda centralized by LUCE
L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa
documentaries
newsreels
2.2 Venice Film Festival
established in 1932
international showcase for Italian cinema
2.3 Government Support
guaranteed subsidies from box office receipts
theaters were required to program a certain number of Italian
films
helped encourage production to 45 films per year by the end
of the 1930s
2.4 “General Direction of Cinema”
established by the government
believed entertainment was key
Mussolini reviewed films but never banned them
government subsidized production but industry overall lost
money
2.5 Cinecitta
12 sound stages
film school
journal
begat
directors
performers
technicians
2.6 Films
propaganda films
romantic melodramas
comedies
“White Telephone films”
3 Wartime Realism
3.1 emerged as a reaction to Hollywood style films of the prewar years
3.2 younger filmmakers influenced
Ernest Hemingway
William Faulkner
Italian tradition of regional naturalism
theorists calling for directors to film problems of ordinary
people in actual surroundings
Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s
3.3 Realist filmmaking
Rosselini: “A realist film is precisely one which tries to
make people think. What mattered to us was an investigation
of reality, forming relationship with reality.”
Expressionism
lighting
angular framing
visualization of psychological pressure
Kammeraschaft in showing claustrophobic domestic
environment
Poetic Realism
unrelenting vision of people in hard times
emphasis on lower class life
dreary and dark mise-en-scene
pessimistic sense of fate
Renoir had close ties with Rosselini and Visconti
Style
films deliberately looked different
part by design
part out of necessity
found stories
newspapers
popular reports
rejected glossy romances and melodramas
focused on poverty, suffering, death
4 Postwar Neorealism
4.1 emerged as force for cultural renewal and social change
“Italian Spring”
people eager to break with tradition
4.2 contrast with Cinecitta films
studio was partly destroyed during war
filmmakers moved into the streets and countryside
shot on location
dialogue dubbing in post production
4.3 shot on location
ambient lighting
however interior shots were often shot in a studio
sound was dubbed in post production
4.4 use of non-professional actors
leads were unknown, non-professionals
mixed with professional actors
4.5 rough offhand composition
little use of makeup
long takes, tracking shots, negative space compositions
however edited with Hollywood style
smooth camera movement
crisp focus
sweeping musical scores
4.6 everyday life
sought to embrace everyday life
varying moods
extreme mixtures of tone
from tragedy to comedy
4.7 innovative storytelling
coincidences, as in real life
lacking carefully motivated chain of events
greater use of ellipsis
scenes are not as tightly connected to each other
skipping over important causes for events
climaxes are downplayed
unresolved endings
4.8 reception
officials disliked portraits of poverty
Church objected to anti-clerical themes and depictions of
sexuality
leftists attacked for pessimism
films not popular with audiences
Andreotti Law
passed in 1949
established quotas
preproduction censorship
government committee
reviewed scripts
encouraged films with apolitical slant
films which slandered Italy could be denied export license
movement would end by 1953
4.9 legacy
influential for its political activism and world view
innovations in film form
would inspire and encourage international new wave filmmakers
of the 1960s