Limits of Neo-Realism

by Amos Vogel

There is no doubt that one of the most significant post-war developments in the cinema, the renaissance of the Italian film commonly labeled ‘neo-realist,’ was a direct outgrowth of the social issues, tragedies and problems bequeathed by the war and the fascist regime to this defeated and impoverished nation. The great humanist masterpieces of this period – Paisan, Open City, Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief – sprang directly from a social matrix in which all conventional values had been called into question if not destroyed outright, in which the individual was at odds with society, in which social, political, and moral issues were constantly raised in the daily life of the masses. In their best works, the neo realists (Lattuada, Visconti, Zampa, Rossellini, De Sica, Blasetti, Comencini) raised problems of general human import, far transcending narrow national boundaries, and seemed to capture the very substance of contemporary reality in all their quivering immediacy.

Today, a decade later, the exigencies of film financing, the need for dollar income and the box office failure of the neo-realist classics (despite their critical success) have impelled the Italian film industry away from the stark social themes of the immediate postwar era and toward a cycle of lusty sex and comedy films. It seems that Umberto D., The Roof (not yet seen here) and Love in the City stand as the final signposts of the original neo-realist movement. But while Umberto D. is undoubtedly one of the great films of this or any other decade (despite its deceptively limited subject matter), a viewing of Love in the City leaves one disturbed by the complexities of ‘neo-realism,’ a term applied so copiously and inexactly.

A film originally in six episodes (one significantly removed from the U.S. release print), Love in the City was produced by Cesare Zavattini, the ideologist of neo-realism, as an artistic manifesto of the school. Conceived as a programmatic statement by its maker, it must be evaluated as such.

Zavattini’s intention, as seen in his scenarios for The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D., and Miracle in Milan, is to approach in the cinematic medium even closer to ‘true reality,’ to the ‘very essence’ of life. His scenarios are based on true incidents, he employs non-professionals, abhors references to art or aesthetics, and claims to deal with the raw stuff of life itself, unadorned by poetry or artistic transformation:

“The true function of the cinema is not to tell fables, but to tell reality as if it were a story; there must be no gap between life and what is on the screen … One shouldn’t be astonished that the cinema has always felt the natural, unavoidable necessity to insert a ‘story’ in the reality to make it exciting and ‘spectacular.’ All the same, it is clear that such a method evades a direct approach to everyday reality, and suggests that it cannot be portrayed without the intervention of fantasy or artifice … It is evident that, with neo-realism, the actor – as a person fictitiously lending his own flesh to another – has no more right to exist than the ‘story.’ In neo-realism, as I intend it, everyone must be his own actor. To want one person to play another implies the calculated plot, the fable, and not ‘things happening.’ However great a faith I might have in imagination, I have a greater one in reality. I am interested in the drama of things we happen to encounter, not those we plan.”

While the earlier neo-realist films still contained elements of the story film, Love in the City represents an extension of Zavattini’s ideology to its logical (and illogical) limits. This film supposedly represents ‘reality itself’; actors and stories have been eliminated; actual incidents are re-enacted by the very people to whom they happened.

This ‘new kind of journalism’ (a ‘magazine printed on celluloid rather than newsprint’) deals, in this instance, with various kinds of urban love. It is claimed that over 500 people were interviewed, the end result being almost 2000 pages of typewritten reports, plus 60 hours of tape recording.

The first sequence, Paradise For Three Hours, by the young director Dino Risi, takes place in the supercharged atmosphere of a cheap Rome dance hall where young Italian clerks, truck drivers and servant girls on their weekly three hours off, engage in formalized yet hectic physical contact in a series of brilliantly photographed dance sequences. There is a superb if fleeting impression of instinctual sex, awkwardness, braggadocio and a touch of romantic love. No actors are employed.

When Love Fails, by Michelangelo Antonioni, has a group of unsuccessful suicides recount their own stories before the camera. Blaming disappointment in love, they are interviewed by an off-screen interrogator and then re-enact their stories in words as well as visuals.

In Love Cheerfully Arranged (by Federico Fellini), a client of a matrimonial agency pretends that he is looking for a wife for his friend who has delusions of being a werewolf. A preposterous premise, yet a story develops that has elements of genuine pathos and flashes of the lyrical talent that has stamped Fellini as one of the true poets of neo-realism. Fellini himself was the original ‘client’; the film records his own experiences with the agency. In one scene, he is led by a group of mischievous children through a maze of hall corridors in a slum project until they finally help him ‘discover’ the office of the matrimonial agency. Here (as in the unforgettable semi-surrealist scene in La Strada in which children lead Giulietta Masina to the sick room of the mysterious child), the innocents are portrayed as the guardians of truth, leading the ignorant adults by the hand.

Perhaps the most successful episode of the film, The Love of a Mother, directed by Francesco Maselli and Zavattini, is based on a moving incident in Italy’s headlines of a few years back. It is a story of poverty, despair and love, reminiscent in more than one way of The Bicycle Thief. An unmarried mother through a series of incidents finally discovers, in an ironic and deeply moving plot-twist, that society will assume its responsibility toward her child only if she abandons it. Catherina Rigoglioso, just released from prison, relives her story for the camera, as does the child and the other members of the cast. In one compelling scene, mother and child are trapped in a city park, with street noises and honking cars as the sole and unfeeling chorus of their tragedy. Here the camera comes alive as a weapon; no words are employed to make a point and none are needed. The defenseless individual and a hostile society at last confront each other with all masks off. In several other scenes, the petty government bureaucrats are portrayed not as hateful tyrants but as indifferent cogs in a vast impersonal machine, providing an interesting comment on present-day attitudes toward bureaucracy (quite unlike the open rebellion and intentional exaggeration of the early Soviet films). Regardless of whether they are tyrants or cogs, the result, of course, remains the same: the individual is still ground to dust by organized society.

Paid Love, by Carlo Lizzani, deals in an outspoken yet non-sensational manner with prostitution. Again, no actors are used. One by one, the girls are ‘picked up’ by the camera on the street, in cafes, in their rooms, and are interviewed by the off-screen reporter in a matter-of-fact way. However, the revelation that prostitution exists in Italy was considered too damaging to Italy’s prestige in the U.S. and the sequence had to be omitted from the American version at the request of the Italian government.

The last sequence alone, Alberto Lattuada’s Italy Turns Around, should assure the film a healthy run in puritanical America. Not less than 20 luscious, hip-swinging, sex-exuding Italian beauties are literally ‘let loose’ on the unsuspecting male populace of Rome whose reactions are irrevocably registered by concealed cameras. Edited as an assault to the solar plexus, close-ups of breasts, buttocks, thighs are interspersed with the stares of the men, unbelieving, lecherous, furtive, aggressive. A startling sound track openly reinforces the theme of the sequence: the city as a jungle of rapacious, sex-hungry males, provoked by and reacting to the female animal. In its unashamed and joyful acceptance of sex and lust, this sequence seems healthy when compared to the sickly sensuality and carefully concealed semi-pornography of many Hollywood films.

At the end, one is left with a curiously mixed reaction. Undeniably, the directorial, camera and editing work in some of the episodes is first-rate. Undeniably, the Love of a Mother sequence and part of Fellini’s Love Cheerfully Arranged episode recall, at least to some extent, the great Italian neo-realist works. In fact, the film is pleasant enough as an entertainment – but Zavattini meant it to be more than just that. To prove his contention that life is always more dramatic than fiction, he utilizes all the trappings, precepts and formulas of extreme realism: true stories, no actors, no sets. This, then, is truth incarnate, the very stuff of life itself … Or is it ?

The device of using the actual unsuccessful suicides, for example, is daring in the extreme; its failure, at least in this film, is complete. It simply is not enough to have the ‘actual’ person mouth her lines, reliving her tragedy in words, exhibiting the ‘very’ scars on her slashed wrists – if there is no creative transformation proceeding from the mind of the director that makes us feel her torment. One of the girls slowly wades into the river, at the ‘very’ spot where she ‘actually’ attempted to end her life, and yet we remain unmoved, cold spectators at an alien tragedy which is not our own. What might have happened had a great actor played this scene for us at the ‘wrong’ river, ‘pretending’ to commit suicide, but with a De Sica behind the camera to make us feel the ‘staged’ tragedy as our very own?

And how ‘real’ is the setting and content of many of the sequences? How ‘candid’ are the ‘concealed’ cameras? Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of film production will spot a large number of staged sequences in several episodes, intercut with the candid footage. Many of the shots in Paradise for Three Hours and Italy Turns Around, while pretending to complete authenticity, were in fact carefully staged.

In a curious way, one is forced to the conclusion that – by entirely different methods and with totally divergent motivations – both Hollywood and the neo-realists are capable of fabricating reality. Neo-realism, while its insistence on eschewing sets and actors is a provocative and progressive counterpoint to the studio-made monstrosities, is equally capable of achieving a superficial, two-dimensional ‘ersatz’ reality when it confuses photographic reality with art, as it does in some of the episodes of Love in the City.

For there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ image automatically reflecting ‘true’ reality at the snapping of the shutter. Behind each camera there is a human being tendentiously selecting various elements of reality in accord with his entire mental, psychological, physiological and intellectual apparatus – not to speak of the collective subconscious of his race or nation. There is no photograph that cannot be interpreted in various and even opposite ways; the use of the same documentary footage for opposing propagandistic purposes by both sides engaged in a war is too well known to deserve comment. To pretend that the use of actual locales, actual people and actual stories is synonymous with ‘true reality’ is to confuse the techniques of neo-realism with its artistic essence. The Bicycle Thief was an artistic achievement not because of the utilization of non-professionals. Mechanical reliance on non-professionals and the other devices of the neo-realist school can only lead to the sterile corruption of the newsreel. The descent into journalism becomes inevitable; and, as in all mere journalism, it provides description instead of interpretation, information instead of knowledge, titillation instead of understanding. We learn nothing about either prostitution or suicide from this film that we did not know before; and it could easily be argued that (as in the tabloids) these unfortunates are simply trotted out to provide vicarious thrills to the philistines reclining in their easy chairs.

Far from approximating real life, some of the episodes in Love in the City actually succeed in transforming the streets of Rome into sets, non-actors into actors, true stories into fiction. This is possibly a greater failure than Hollywood’s frequent inability to transform sets into a semblance of reality. This misplaced striving for authenticity – so typical of modern mass media – provides all the trappings of reality without its inner meaning, analogous to the famous ‘on-the-spot’ radio reporters whose ‘up-to-the-minute’ news add up to exactly nothing.

Closely allied with the artificiality of much of the film is an (undoubtedly unintentional) suggestion of voyeurism in some episodes. If this is a new kind of “screen magazine”, as the directors would have it, it approaches – especially in the suicide and prostitute sequences – the tabloid sensationalism of the New York Daily News, reflecting both the limited joys and the unlimited frustrations of the Peeping Tom. There, too, we find ‘actual’ photographs of ‘actual’ incidents, suicides, violence and sex; but while our morbid curiosity is often aroused, our sympathy never is. We remain outsiders looking in on somebody else’s life – while the essence of art lies in the audience’s involvement in an ‘artificially’ created, yet ultimately self-felt and therefore self-experienced occurrence.

In Love in the City, Zavattini has extended the valid aesthetic precepts of neo-realism beyond their limits, thereby invalidating them. The neo-realist emphasis on authenticity, considered in contrast to the usual Hollywood presentation, is entirely apropos; but in extending it to encompass a complete and unequivocal rejection of actors, ‘invented plots’ and artistic re-shaping of reality (as he did in his October 1953 Sight and Sound article and in Love in the City), Zavattini seems to reject art itself to the extent that it is an ‘illusion’:

“With neo-realism, there must be no gap between life and what is on the screen … the actor has no more right to exist than the story … we must tell reality as if it were a story … to want one person to play another implies the calculated plot, the fable, and not ‘things happening’ … I am interested in the drama of things we happen to encounter, not those we plan.”

Fortunately for film art, these formulations are both untenable and contradicted by Zavattini’s work itself. There is always a gap between life and what is on the screen; Zavattini constantly invents stories. Nor has he succeeded in fully eliminating actors. [See his revealing published statement regarding Caterina Rigoglioso, the mother who abandons her child, at the time when pre-production work on Love in the City seemed to have reached a dead-end: “Everything broke down. Caterina did not seem to ‘take’ to the cinema. But wasn’t she Caterina?” (my emphasis—A.V.).]

It is a tantalizing fact that while in theory (and especially in Love in the City) Zavattini has explicitly adhered to these exaggerated formulations, in practice his films have often achieved a deeply poetic and artistic transformation of ‘the raw stuff of life’ (not a mere confrontation of it), touching the very depths of the contemporary conscience.

Actually, the term ‘neo-realism’ has never been wholly appropriate and we are now paying the price for not having been able to convince Zavattini to define it more satisfactorily. Cocteau pointedly remarks that “in the so-called neo-realistic films, our Italian comrades deploy a power of imagination worthy of Arab story-tellers.” The products of the neo-realists are far removed from the cold intellectuality of factual documentaries and so-called realistic films. Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Paisan, Open City, La Terra Trema, Umberto D., Ossessione, Miracle in Milan, Two Cents Worth of Hope and the films by Fellini are, to a greater or lesser extent, outstanding achievements of a type of poetic naturalism, shaped in the highest traditions of humanistic art.

In all of them, the common man in all his grandeur, weakness and suffering is solidly and cruelly placed at the very center of creation. In all of them, an artistic transmutation at the hands of a gifted director changes reality into art so that we can finally experience it as truth.

Film Culture, June 1957