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European Screenwriting, 1948–60

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Abstract

As in the aftermath of the First World War, when changes in screenwriting within other countries were influenced by the Hollywood continuity, the years immediately following the Second World War saw many European film industries considering their future anxiously in the face of American economic influence. There is a seeming allusion to this in the posters of Rita Hayworth that the protagonist Ricci posts up in Bicycle Thieves (1948), a film which otherwise seems quintessentially of its own time and place in post-war Italy, where the development of neo-realism had at its aesthetic and ideological core a rejection of the blueprint model of the screenplay.

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Notes

  1. See Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp. 26–29, and Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 25–26.

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  2. Quoted in P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), p. 87.

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  6. Ibid., p. 19.

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© 2013 Steven Price

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Price, S. (2013). European Screenwriting, 1948–60. In: A History of the Screenplay. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315700_9

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