Abstract
The neorealist film movement rushed into Italy on the heels of the departing Nazi troops. The sense of relief coming from the realization that Mussolini, the fascists, and the Nazis had been defeated was matched only by the conviction that the story of the widespread suffering of the Italians needed to be filmed immediately, especially the story of the terrible World War II years (1943–1945) of devastation and civil war when the Allies’ invasion of Italy (1943) triggered the fall of Mussolini and fascism and the Nazi occupation of the peninsula in order to restore Mussolini’s regime, while a strong insurgent reaction, called the Partisan Resistance, arose and fought on the side of the Allies against the combined fascist and Nazi forces. In those years, the war was fought on Italian soil and it became a civil war, with Italian Partisans fighting Italian fascists.
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Notes
Readers interested in learning more about the neorealist movement in Italian film, may find more exhaustive information in the following studies in English: Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism. A Study of Italian Neorealist Cinema (Cranbury, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1971)
Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: Ungar, 1990)
Ben Lawton, “Italian Neorealism: A Mirror Construction of Reality,” Film Criticism 3 (1979): 8–20
Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
For a comprehensive study of Rossellini in English, see Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).
On Anna Magnani, see the few, but very insightful pages dedicated to her by Gian Piero Brunetta in Chapter 5 of his Cent’anni di Cinema Italiano (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1995), 2: 95–109.
As explained by Paola Melchiori in her essay “Women’s Cinema: A Look at Female Identity,” in Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti, eds., Off-Screen: Women and film in Italy (London: Routledge, 1988), 25–35.
Some of the scholars who have commented on this trend are Peter Brooks in The Melodrama Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976)
Griselda Pollock, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and Stephen Heath in “Dossier on Melodrama,” Screen 18, no. 2 (1977): pp. 105–19
E. Ann Kaplan in Motherhood and Representation (London: Routledge, 1992), 59–123.
For a more detailed presentation of the De Sica-Zavattrni collaboration, see Carlo Celli’s essay “Ladri di biciclette, in The Cinema of Italy, ed. Giorgio Bertellini (London: Wallflower, 2004), 43–50.
For a thorough discussion of the film, See André Bazin’s groundbreaking study, What is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Grey (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 60.
See especially Millicent Marcus’s study on the argument: Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
For more detailed information on Antonioni and his films, see The Architecture of Vision, Writings and Interviews on Cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni, ed. M. Cottino-Jones, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
For a more exhaustive discussion of De Santis and his films, see Antonio Vitti’s Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
G. Bertellini’s The Cinema of Italy (London: Wallflower, 2004), 53–62.
As Noel Carroll has noticed in his essay, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Karl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 21–47.
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© 2010 Marga Cottino-Jones
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Cottino-Jones, M. (2010). Women in Neorealist Cinema. In: Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105485_5
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