Unanswerable Situations

Abstract

Deleuze’s approach to neorealism is unusual. Guided by his unorthodox synthesis of Henri Bergson and Andre Bazin, he does not focus on the documentary techniques or the didactic messages of these films but rather on the new kinds of scenarios they explore — ‘situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe’.¹ Neorealism takes these ‘unanswerable situations’ as its basic raw material. Roberto Rossellini’s films are usually associated with the emergence of a new kind of realism that eschews the fantasy space of Hollywood cinema to present life as it really is. It made use of non-professional actors, real locations and no scripts. On this view, it prefigures the French New Wave, cinema verité, various kinds of documentary realism and even newer forms of user-generated media. For Deleuze, however, what matters in neorealism is not any social content, or humanitarian message. Rosselini’s project is not a sociological exercise of providing context to the plight of war orphans and refugees and all the other damaged lives of the post war years. In fact, just the opposite seems to be the case. Neorealism attempts to strip away context and narrative in order to expose the enigmatic quality of a situation, and from there to teach us something about the nature of situations per se. In this way, it realizes the capacity of cinema to teach us something about the most basic properties of kinesis, that is to say, the movement or unfolding of events.