Christopher Wagstaff,
Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach.
University of Toronto Press, 2007.
ISBN: 9 7808020 95206
US$39.95 (pb)
514pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press)

Italian neo-realism was many things. At one end of the spectrum it was a wide social and artistic movement emerging from the debris of the Second World War – Fascism, German occupation, liberation, reconstruction – and embracing literature and visual art as well as the cinema. In the years when it flourished – 1945 to 1953 or thereabouts – there were hardly any films made in Italy which were unaffected by its general ethos which, although not easy to define with any precision, comprised elements such as simplicity and directness of means of expression, popular subject-matter and a sort of democratic optimism: times were hard, the cinema seemed to say, but we, the people, can face this hardship and the world will soon be better. At the other end of the spectrum, however, the notion of neo-realist cinema has come to be crystallised around a small number of aesthetic devices, not in fact all that widely deployed, which yielded up a handful of canonical films standing in exemplary contrast to the cinematic mainstream.

With the passage of time the contours of the bigger picture have become increasingly blurred, at least in the English-speaking world. Films illustrative of the broad movement known as neo-realism have disappeared from circulation. What are remembered and still celebrated are a few films by Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and the tandem of Vittorio De Sica as director and Cesare Zavattini as scriptwriter; and what is emphasised about these films (particularly in the academic literature and when they are used for teaching) is their difference from “classical Hollywood”.

There are at least two problems here. One is that the bulk of unremembered films that are nevertheless “neo-realist” in the broader historical definition are not in fact as far divergent from mainstream films as are the exemplary, remembered ones. And the other principal one is that the notion of neo-realism as a broad historical movement, although glossed over, continues to cast a shadow over the way the canonical, remembered ones continue to be viewed. Students are earnestly assured that neo-realism was a broad movement arising from the war and are shown Rossellini’s Rome Open City (Italy 1945) or De Sica and Zavattini’s Bicycle Thieves (Italy 1948) as evidence of this fact. So far so good. But they are not then shown Pietro Germi’s In nome della legge (Italy 1949) or Antonio Pietrangeli’s L’Onorevole Angelina (Italy 1947) as further evidence. Instead the likelihood is that they will get to see a later Rossellini film such as Journey to Italy(Italy 1954), praised by André Bazin as the purest of all neo-realist films but utterly disconnected from the historical movement that was neo-realism in the immediate post-war period.

The underlying problem, according to Christopher Wagstaff in his new book, has to do with the baggage that comes with the notion of neo-realism itself. The moment neo-realism acquired its name it also became burdened with two assumptions that tend to accompany any consideration of artistic realism: firstly that the artwork described as realist arises more or less directly out of a set of determinate and determining circumstances, and secondly that it reflects them. These assumptions are widely held by Marxists but are by no means unique to Marxism and, given the importance of Marxist or quasi-Marxist thinking at the time neo-realism came into existence, it is not surprising that neo-realism has tended to be looked at in the light of them. But while they are not necessarily false, they are also very limiting. It is in fact undeniable, from a historical point of view, that neo-realism was the product of a determinate set of circumstances and that furthermore some of the circumstances that were determining also provided the subject matter of many of the films. But it does not follow from this either that the circumstances explain the film or that the films should be looked at solely in terms of their ability to reflect the world that produced them. We do not look at On the Town(USA 1949) or Black Narcissus (UK 1947) solely, or even mainly, in terms of the circumstances that produced them: why should we do so with Bicycle Thieves?

It might be objected here that the makers of Black Narcissus were not at all interested in reflecting contemporary social reality and the makers of On the Town only indirectly, whereas the makers of Rome Open City and Bicycle Thieves had the portrayal of the reality they saw all around them very much in mind. But that is Wagstaff’s point. In spite of Rossellini’s disingenuous claim, “Things are there, why manipulate them?”, reality does not just reflect itself in film. The imitation of contemporary life in the works of Rossellini and De Sica and their fellows is the result of an effort to create a work. Dialogues are composed, actors are instructed, scenes are lit and framed, cuts are calculated, soundtracks are laid down, in much the same way in a work called realist as in any other kind. There may be more lines of dialogue thought up on set, or fewer lights at the disposal of the cinematographer, or more accidents to be covered over or taken advantage of, but what matters is the activity of making the work and the way this translates itself into an aesthetic experience for the spectator. The “reality” of Rome Open City or Bicycle Thieves is a reality of raising money, finding actors and locations, turning an unexpected rainshower to good account and fusing what you’ve got into something which, in some mysterious way, exceeds what you had intended at the outset. It is making cinema, and not for nothing does Wagstaff entitle his book, not “Italian neorealism” but “Italian neorealist cinema”.

It is a book which, having set the scene for how the material will be approached, consists mostly of three case studies: two films by Rossellini, Rome Open City and Paisà (Italy 1946) and one by De Sica and Zavattini,Bicycle Thieves. Each study is meticulous and this reader at least would have welcomed more of them, but given that the book is already 500 pages long the publisher probably baulked at including any more, even if the author had wanted to supply them. Something on a later film when the Italian cinema had moved on from the heady days of the early neo-realist period would have been particularly welcome, as it could have helped to substantiate another of Wagstaff’s arguments, to the effect that later Italian cinema (films by Antonioni for example) should not be seen as contrasting with the cinema of neo-realism but on a continuum with it.

A lot of quiet debunking goes on in Wagstaf’s book. The mythical attributes of neo-realism such as the use of non-professional actors, location shooting, inadequate equipment, rejection of audience-directed melodramatic or comedic devices are subjected to close scrutiny and, while not negated, are cut down to size –ridimensionato in the Italian phrase. Yes, non-professional actors were used, sometimes in key roles; but most actors in neo-realist films were professionals, often drawn from the comic stage. Yes, location exteriors are frequent; but most interiors were studio-shot. Yes, equipment was not always perfect; but an industry cinematographer like Uberto Arata, who had shot La signora di tutti (Italy 1934) for Max Ophuls ten years before being asked to make Rome Open City, had no intention of just rigging up a single flood and a filler if he could lay his hands on a full set of lights. Yes, there are moments in Paisà or Bicycle Thieves which justify Bazin’s claims for neo-realism as a cinema that was no longer cinema but had dissolved itself back into reality itself; but on the whole neo-realist films avail themselves of a wide range of narrative and cinematic tropes. All this Wagstaff documents minutely, but on the whole without polemical intent, his purpose being to set up his own model of aesthetic criticism, rather than argue with previous critics, many of them long dead. Speaking personally (but very much as an ex-theorist rather than an active one), I am less convinced by the general model sketched out in the early part of the book than by the working out of the ideas in practice. And in practice they do work out, so quibbling some of the generalities seems pointlessly churlish. Wagstaff’s scholarship has done a great service to our understanding of one of the most important moments in the history of world cinema.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith,
Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Created on: Sunday, 30 August 2009