Paisà was less successful everywhere, but by the account of anyone who knew Italy, it was far more accurate. It teaches us that the structure of a story is a profound element in perceived reality. It also helps us see that “realism” is a purpose that grows out of our political needs or wishes more than improved accuracy or candor. Like any treatment, filmmaking is selective and reveals only predetermined choices. The widespread view after the war was that movies—the movies of the war years and before—had never bothered to treat the real issues, and that had made war and its distress more likely. But after the war, and in Italy above all, there was a feeling of guilt and responsibility over those facile films. That mood is honorable, but it has not reliably settled any reality test.
As if making a trilogy, Rossellini next turned to Germania Anno Zero (1948). It began with a brilliant idea, and if brilliant ideas may be the secret of art, there is no reason to trust the pleas of reality:
I made a child the protagonist in Germany Year Zero to accentuate the contrast between the mentality of a generation born and brought up in a certain political climate, and that of the older generation as represented by Edmund’s father. Whether he excites pity or horror I do not know, nor did I wish to know. I wanted to reproduce the truth, under the impulse of a strong artistic emotion.
Although the story of Edmund and his family was invented by me, it nevertheless resembles that of most German families. Thus it is a mixture of reality and fiction treated with that license which is the prerogative of any artist. There is no doubt that every child, every woman, and every man in Germany would see in my film at least some phase of their own experience.
If you think about that last claim, it is hardly sweeping or exceptional. It’s marketing. What you will never forget if you see the film is the actuality of Berlin in ruins. (Rossellini had little difficulty finding untouched bomb damage, but he also created or dressed some bomb sites.) The tragic predicament of the little boy living alone in these ruins is that of being driven mad in the process, just as he clings to the recorded voice of Hitler. But he does not look mad, because that is an interior condition—until it is dramatized. And talking of acting out, when Rossellini found that Berlin was so cold, he went back to Rome to shoot the interiors!
As usual, Rossellini found his players where he could, and he claimed that many of the scenes were improvised. But the arc of the film was as preset as a star’s motion in the heavens. We see the boy deteriorate to the point of suicide, and the artistic result, as harrowing as that of any of the neorealist films, is a fable of absolute destruction. What we see is not really Germany at its year zero, ready to begin again. It is Germany facing the ultimate tragedy of its Nazi commitment. So it is a film about error and pessimism, a small opera from the devastated streets. Rossellini’s trilogy is an extraordinary achievement, and it has to be said that the viewer will learn a good deal about Europe circa 1945. But the films are educational works, reports of terror and its large shadow hanging over any human future. The war had ended, but it was not over.
Anna Magnani had noticed that she had no role in Paisà or Germany Year Zero, and she was upset. Rossellini responded: he had a habit of suggesting that his life was a series of messy happenings prompted by one woman or another. So before going to Berlin, he shot, in a studio, Jean Cocteau’s short play The Human Voice, in which a desperate woman is on the telephone to a lover who is leaving her. On his return from Berlin, he shot The Miracle, a short written by the young Federico Fellini, about a peasant woman who is seduced by a handsome wanderer because she believes he is an angel. Those two halves were put together, in shameless celebration of Magnani as a diva, in a film called L’ Amore (1948), which, in the deepest sense, is about a director’s indebted infatuation with an actress. Everything about both halves is invented, but I’m not sure that documentary has ever told us more about the embattled state of being an actress.
As is often the case, such passionate involvement with Magnani had left Rossellini ready for a change.
Vittorio De Sica was born in Naples in 1901, and he was an actor from 1928 onward, in any medium that would have him, from drama to vaudeville. He was always handsome, even in old age, when his ingratiating smile went with silver hair—indeed, as an actor he is the lover in Ophüls’s Madame de…, and the title figure in Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere. He had been a star ever since playing the chauffeur in Mario Camerini’s Gli Uomini, Che Mascalzoni (1932). It was in 1940 that he became a director with Rose Scarlatte, to be followed by Teresa Venerdì, in which he himself played the doctor involved with three different women. In many ways, De Sica was an exponent of a kind of Neapolitan romantic comedy in which men and women couldn’t make up their love-bound minds—and that was something he would return to in the 1960s with Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964). In Yesterday, for instance, Sophia Loren plays three women, all of whom demonstrate their ability to trick their men. Marriage Italian Style is Loren again (with Marcello Mastroianni), and it is an adaptation of Eduardo de Filippo’s play Filumena. Both are entertainments of a high order, and as realistic as bubblegum.
But something happened to De Sica and it seems to have been his meeting with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini in 1935 on Darò un Millione, a comedy but also a rueful examination of rich and poor. Zavattini became a Marxist in the 1930s, and he apparently cultivated the friendship with De Sica as a way of putting his ideas across. They collaborated on Teresa Venerdì (1941) and then, three years later, made the crucial step of I Bambini Ci Guardano, or The Children Are Watching Us. Some of the novelty of this film was its discovery of a child as a pivotal character; it is disorder as seen through the eyes of a little boy whose parents are divorcing. At the time it was made, no one really identified it as realist, except for the way in which the child’s experience was very tenderly spelled out. This did not escape being sentimental, but in hindsight one can see the development of an attempt at social realism and the emptiness of adult lives (without any reference to wartime).
Then, in 1946, Zavattini and De Sica collaborated again, on Sciuscià, or Shoeshine. Again, children are the leading figures. We meet two boys, urchins and orphans, who have the dream of owning a horse. This is dramatized early on by a superbly shot and edited scene of riding that entirely overlooks the question of how these impoverished kids managed to get out to the country outside Rome to rent horses for a few hours. Still, it symbolizes the urge in the boys to change and improve their lives—they are bootblacks who serve the American soldiers in the city. Soon enough they get into a life of petty crime and they go to a prison, where the bond between the boys leads to betrayal and death.
Shoeshine is a devastating experience because it seems absolutely sure of a hellish condition in Italy in 1945–46—this despite the great vitality of the child actors. In many ways it seems to enact some principles laid down by the director Alberto Lattuada as a way of addressing a reality that has occurred in every developing country as it has attempted to make its first films:
So we’re in rags? Then let us show our rags to the world. So we’re defeated? Then let us contemplate our disasters. So we owe them to the Mafia? To hypocrisy? To conformism? Or irresponsibility? Or faulty education? Then let us pay all our debts with fierce love of honesty, and this world will be moved to participate in this great combat with truth. This confession will throw light on our hidden virtues, our faith in life, our immense Christian brotherhood. We will meet at last with comprehension and esteem. The cinema is unequalled for revealing all the basic truths about a nation.
That doesn’t ring true in every detail. The “immense Christian brotherhood” is not palpable in many postwar films, even if priests have a few honorable roles (notably in Open City). And the self-examination omits altogether the mood that was prepared to go along with fascism—shall we say the “conformism” that is so disturbingly uncovered in Bernardo Bertolucci’s great film of 1970. But the question of whether the cinema was or could be “
unequalled for revealing the basic truths about a nation”—that gripped people in many countries after 1945 and amounted to a pressure toward realism or commitment. Of course, more than fifty years later, we may have reached the conclusion that whatever film can do with basic truths it is not nearly enough. Those realities may be too vast or obstinate to be trapped in the light. So many of them exist in the dark, or in places where cameras are prohibited.
Immediately, De Sica and Zavattini made Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), which still stands among the most celebrated films ever made. We are in Rome. A man needs a job desperately to support his family. He gets work pasting up posters on the city walls. But the job requires a bicycle so he can get around the city. The family pawns their only bedsheets to obtain a bicycle. He goes to work—it is his task to put up posters for the American movie Gilda, with a lush full-figure portrait of Rita Hayworth. To do his work, he leans the bicycle against a wall and it is stolen.
How can he or the police make any progress in a city of bicycles? And here something quite profound emerges in the film, a sense of the city, sustained by endless gray perspectives, the rustle of bicycle bells, and the implication of some infinite life going on without regard for this one story.
As the man searches for his bicycle, he takes his young son with him; and so it is that the son has to observe the demoralization of the father, even to the point where the man tries to steal a bicycle himself. He is captured and rebuked, but he is let off and cast loose with a child who has seen and heard. No relief comes in the film. It ends on the question of what will happen to the man and his family.
This film about hopeless poverty opened in New York and played to full houses and laudatory reviews—how far that revenue could be translated into more bicycles in Rome is not clear. The New York Film Critics voted it Best Foreign Film. The Academy nominated Zavattini for Best Screenplay. But in the furor of the moment, the film was significantly interfered with. For some reason, in the United States it was called The Bicycle Thief—perhaps this was an attempt to build the father as a character and to distract from the child’s helpless complicity or the larger social implications. Perhaps it was just an American idea that the man in a film has to be its hero—when David Selznick saw the picture he straightaway longed to remake it, but with Cary Grant as the man. People laugh at that story, but don’t miss how it reveals innocence in 1948. Americans were moved by the film. They wanted to help. Yet in the retitling, an essential part of Zavattini’s scheme was overlooked: the way in which theft is the ultimate behavior shared by all the poor in a shattered society. And so the country horrified at the thought of Communist influence suppressed the gentle Marxist interpretation of the title.
Otherwise sane minds were carried away. André Bazin called it “one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”
Be careful of the word pure! Yes, the man who played the father, Lamberto Maggiorani, was not a professional actor. He was a factory worker. But he was handsome, with a grave, eloquent face, and he did make more films afterward. For a moment, Bazin was so excited that he started enthusing over the way all Italians seemed to be natural actors. The truth was that Maggiorani was asked to act, to register feelings and emotion; he was charged by De Sica to play the man, and who would be astonished if sometimes De Sica acted the part out for him in the way so many directors had done with novices before? Acting is pretending. It is learning a script and working out what it means. And then it is striving to get a shot “right.” But what is right in a world allegedly comprised of amateur actors and the trust that nothing will happen except what happens?
Bazin, and many others, gasped at the prospect of infinite reality poured out on our screens. He rejoiced at the lack of design:
Plainly there is not enough material here even for a news item: the whole story would not deserve two lines in a stray-dog column. One must take care not to confuse it with realist tragedy in the Prévert or James Cain manner, where the initial news item is a diabolic trap placed by the gods amid the cobble stones of the street. In itself the event contains no proper dramatic valence. It takes on meaning only because of the social (and not psychological or aesthetic) position of the victim. Without the haunting specter of unemployment, which places the event in the Italian society of 1948, it would be an utterly banal misadventure.
Zavattini actually called for an end to the culture of people being moved by “unreal things”: one day, he hoped, the cinema would be nothing but our chance to reflect on the real thing. You can see the temptation. But who is to say when or how the real thing has been delivered? For example, in the course of their mounting misery in Bicycle Thieves, the man and his son are caught in a rainstorm. Rain cannot help but be providential, visible, significant information—call it what you will. I don’t know whether the rain was in the script, or it just happened so that De Sica jumped to take advantage of it. It doesn’t matter, because the rain is so degrading and spectacular at the same time—it is cinema, just like the light. It cannot help but contribute toward an atmosphere. Yet no raindrops fall on the lens—which means that great care has been taken to get it “right.” Or is that wrong?
I don’t mean to make fun of Bicycle Thieves. When Sight & Sound polled critics in 1952 in their first attempt to identify the greatest film ever made, Bicycle Thieves came top. It was in sixth position in 1962. Today the film still plays; it works. And any film student should see it. But I don’t think many people feel as strongly about it now. Is it that we realize Italy has grown out of its postwar poverty, or have we become more accustomed to a cinema that concentrates on inward states of being? Have we become blasé about images of poverty and reports of suffering? In the last thirty years or so, our screens have brought us hideous scenes from Sarajevo and Srebenica, Darfur and Rwanda, Haiti and the last great natural disaster, so regularly, so loyally, that we have had to acquire the hardening process that says we are looking at a screen rather than reality. We can endure only so much. We wait to be put in the dire position of having to survive ourselves.
De Sica and Zavattini went on. After Miracle in Milan (in which sharp satirical comedy is employed to point up continuing hardship), their next film was Umberto D. (1952), which seems to me formally the most interesting of their works. It is a study of an old-age pensioner, a singularly charmless man, and his dog. He has nowhere to live, and the dog is an impediment to his chance of getting a place. Should he kill the dog? Should he kill himself? The bleakness is emphatic and it has always kept down the audience for Umberto D.
But there are great virtues: the carefully controlled restriction of sympathy for the man, even with the dog in evidence; the determination to observe ordinary human incidents at the risk of losing dramatic appeal. Indeed, we are very close here to a documentary that might simply record human loss and tragedy. Bazin stressed the way De Sica showed a maid getting up in the morning. “Have I already said that it is Zavattini’s dream to make a whole film out of ninety minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens? Two or three sequences in Umberto D give us more than a glimpse of what such a film might be like.”
There were many others caught up in the wave of neorealism. Giuseppe de Santis made Bitter Rice in 1948, which is ostensibly a portrait of the very hard life led by rice pickers in the Po Valley, but which also made a great star of the statuesque Silvana Mangano, whose dance sequences led us straight back to the allure of Gilda. In 1949, Mangano would marry Dino de Laurentiis, the rising business star of Italian film. In 1954 she would play Penelope (and Circe) in Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (with Kirk Douglas as the hero). By then, Italy and Cinecittà were into the age of the Italian international coproduction.
Michelangelo Antonioni (born in Ferrara in 1912) was on the edge of the neorealist group. In 1943, as Visconti shot Ossessione, Antonioni made a documentary nearby, Gente del Po. He had helped write the screenplay for R
ossellini’s Un Pilota Ritorna, and he had a similar job on De Santis’s first film, Caccia Tragica (1947). He made another documentary, about street cleaners in the city. And by 1950 he would direct his first feature film, Cronaca di un Amore, with Lucia Bosé and Massimo Girotti. This was a tragic love story about beautiful people—it seemed like a throwback to old-fashioned melodrama or the salons of Paramount. You might even see a white telephone in it, and Bette Davis clutching it. But it also demonstrated an eye for the city that surpassed the poetry in De Sica and a sense of camera movement that could seem impersonal and undesigned but that became a keynote to the most novelistic Italian director. We shall meet him again.
Perhaps neorealism was always a diversion. There is another Italian cinema, stylish and stylistic, literary and operatic, rich in gesture and architecture. “Grand cinéma” is what Visconti gravitated toward with The Leopard (1963) and Death in Venice (1971). From La Strada (1954) to Amarcord (1973), Fellini loved the grandeur of the picaresque. Sergio Leone made infatuated rhapsodies to the Western—above all, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—with mock symphonic scores (by Ennio Morricone) and pastiche violence. Pier Paolo Pasolini went from the austerity of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) to lavish art albums: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Arabian Nights (1974). Décor and moral decay make the tension in Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). And in Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2009) there is a sense of the political-cultural passion of cinema. It’s the story of Mussolini’s abandoned first wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but it draws upon newsreel and the thunderous example of Mussolini himself as an actor or national presence. He longs to have life become a movie, and you know he would have appreciated The Godfather or Raging Bull. Mussolini and Joe Pesci is one of the meetings that demand computer-generated enactment. If it resulted in madness, that was predicted in the two great earlier works by Bellocchio: Fists in the Pocket (1965) and The Eyes, the Mouth (1982), both driven by the alarming Lou Castel.
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