Realist Film Movements
Neorealismo (1)
Films of Roberto Rossellini
Table of Contents
1) Neorealismo
2) Roberto Rossellini
3) Roma, Citta Aperta
'… as the theatrical sense of drama stems
from reality, people in real situations will
produce drama…' Richard Leacock
Neorealismo
Documentary Films and Fiction Films
DIFFERENCES?
• Documentary Films → To be true to what
they depict; to reflect the issue they raise
truthfully
Neorealismo
• Fiction Films → free to shape and alter
what they tell to suit the needs of the story.
We cannot ask whether they are true to facts
and circumstances outside themselves, but
we can ask whether they create a
convincing make-believe.
Neorealismo
Italian NEOREALISMO
• One of the first conscious attempts in the fiction
film to be true to facts and circumstances
– Classical American Films - conscious attempts to
create a convincing make-believe.
• Filmmaking ‘movement’ in the mid- and late
1940s.
Neorealismo
• One of the first significant alternatives to the
Hollywood-style realist aesthetics.
• Neorealismo - the name given by hindsight to
the films of such directors as Roberto Rossellini,
Vittorio De Sica, Giuseppe di Santis, Pietro
Germi and Luchino Visconti
• Documentary-style rendering of actual lives
Neorealismo
• The Parma Conference on Neorealismo in 1953
COMMON FEATURES - ideological
• a new democratic spirit, with emphasis on the
value of ordinary people
• a compassionate point of view and a refusal to
make facile (easy) moral judgements
Neorealismo
COMMON FEATURES - ideological
• a preoccupation with Italy‘s Fascist past and
its aftermath of wartime devastation
• a blending of Christian and Marxist
humanism
• an emphasis on emotions rather than
abstract idea
Neorealismo
• COMMON FEATURES - sylistic
• an avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favor
of loose, episodic structures
• a documentary visual style
• the use of actual locations--usually exteriors-rather than studio sites
• the use of nonprofessional actors, even for
principal roles
Neorealismo
COMMON FEATURES - sylistic
• use of conversational speech, not literary
dialogue
• avoidance of artifice in editing, camerawork,
and lighting in favor of a simple "styless"
style
Roberto Rossellini
• Roberto Rossellini
• Father of Italian
Neo-realismo
• 1906-1977
• Director and
screenwriter
Roberto Rossellini
• Italian realism before Neorealismo and
Rossellini
• Realist impulse in literature and cinema
• ‘We are convinced that one day we will create
our most beautiful film following the slow and
tired step of the worker who returns home.’ Di
Santis and Mario Alicata (1941)
• Reaction to the filmmaking tradition in Italy historical epic, fantasy and romantic melodrama
(‘telefono bianco’)
Roberto Rossellini
• Neorealist and
neorealistic films before
Rossellini
• Alessandro Blasetti’s
Four Steps in the Cloud
(1942), Vittorio De
Sica’s The Children Are
Watching Us (1943),
Ossessione (1943)
Roberto Rossellini
• War-time trilogies made with Federico
Fellini - Propaganda films
• Two months before the liberation of Rome,
Rossellini prepared for making the selffinanced film, Roma, Citta Aperta with the
help from Fellini and Aldo Fabruzzi
Roma, citta aperta
• Roma, Citta Aperta
(Rome, Open City,
1945) The (half-)
true story of the
struggle against the
German troops
occupying Rome and
a priest executed by
Nazis.
Roma, Citta Aperta
IMPROVISATION AND SCRIPT
• Rossellini never used a script in a
conventional sense. His script was
collectively written and showed only its
narrative outline. The film is based on
blended pieces of the true stories which
took place in the winter of 1943-44.
Roma, Citta Aperta
LOCATION SHOOTING
• 'Take the camera out into the streets'
Rossellini avoided studios whenever
possible.
• An imaginary geography created out of
various settings and places. Roma, Citta
Aperta was one of the rare films which kept
to the correct streets and directions of the
city in which it was filmed.
Roma, Citta Aperta
Roma, Citta Aperta
Roma, Citta Aperta
Roma, Citta Aperta
NON-PROFESSIONAL ACTORS
• Mainly amateur actors with some professionals
in the key roles.
• ‘… In order to really create the character that
one has in mind, it is necessary for the director
to engage in a battle with his actor which
usually ends with submitting to the actor’s wish.
Since I do not have the desire to waste my
energy in a battle like this, I only use
professional actors occasionally.’
Roberto Rossellini
Roma, Citta Aperta
• GRANY PHOTOGRAPHY
• Documentary feel
• The film owes its uneven look to the stock, some
of which was given by the American occupation
army or bought from street photographers.
Roma, Citta Aperta
Roma, Citta Aperta
MISE-EN-SCENE
• Pina's death scene: the imitation of our real
experience. We hear a crack (though, we do
not see the one who has shot her) - we see
her fall - we make connection. Briefness,
the episode told by sound.
Roma, Citta Aperta
REALITY EFFECT
• Non-diegetic scenes
• Small incidental details → a choirboy kicks
a German soldier; another soldier molests
Pina; a long ladder in Pina's stockings must
be noticed.
Roma, Citta Aperta
'This is the way things are.’
Roberto Rossellini
-- A motto of neorealismo
War-time Trilogy
• Paisa (1946)
• Six episodes of the Allied
advance from the South
at the end of WWII.
• Germania, Anno Zero
(1948)
• A story of a German boy
in Berlin under
occupation.