The Place of Neorealism in Italian Cinema from 1945 to 1954

Abstract

To discuss the place of Neorealism in postwar Italian cinema is to raise a number of issues concerning approaches to history, approaches to cinema history, and notions of popular culture and art. Italian historians have a tradition of casting their analyses in an idealist light, seeing historical events as betrayals of what might have been: Gramsci dubs the Risorgimento a ‘failed revolution’, and this perspective is transferred to the reconstruction of Italy at the end of the Second World War with the notion of a ‘restoration’. It is therefore asserted that as Italian film-makers began making films that in their style and content opposed the escapism and repetitive formalism of both the Fascist cinema and Hollywood, the combined forces of Hollywood’s industrial monopoly, reactionary forces in Church, State and among the Allies, and the weakness and amateurism of Italian cinema industrialists contrived to deprive these films of their exhibition market and of the funds necessary for their production. The Italian cinema revealed the possibility of a mass popular culture which was not purely entertainment, but reactionary forces reinstalled the mechanisms that had controlled the cinema during the Fascist regime, forcing it back into entertainment.¹