Neorealism: What Is and Is Not

PART I Neorealism: What Is and Is Not Creating their works out of the ruins of World War II, authors and fi lmmakers such as Primo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Vittorio De Sica attracted international acclaim for their elaboration of neorealism as the aesthetic defi ning post-Fascist, or “new,” Italy. Although not a formalized artistic school with prescriptive tenets, Italian neorealism became noted for its literary and cinematic focus on stories that arose from the everyday lives of common people during Fascism, the Nazi occupation, World War II, and the immediate postwar period. Generally viewed as fl ourishing from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the movement broadened signifi cantly during the 1960s and 1970s as several authors and directors returned to the original themes of neorealism. 1 The neorealist movement has been associated primarily with leftist intellectuals who hoped that “communism or a more egalitarian form of gov- ernment would eventually prevail” in Italy after the defeat of Fascism to “transform Italian society” (Pastina 86). Thus, these artists renounced the rhetorical fl ourishes generally associated with the Fascist regime (1922– 1942) and fashioned a documentary style, describing the often brutal material conditions of postwar Italy in simple, colloquial language. They devoted substantial attention to social, economic, and political problems, giving rise to the concept of impegno sociale , or the “social commitment” of artists to renewing Italy and its citizens. 2 Neorealism made it possible to express emotions, realities, and problems previously camoufl aged by the Fascists (Leprohon). Theorists have attrib- uted the international success of Italian neorealism to “the compassion of its products,” as authors and fi lmmakers created “poignant syntheses 10 NEOREALISM AND THE “NEW” ITALY of the anguish experienced by a whole nation” (Pacifi ci 241). They also underscored the positive infl uence of this emotional component in the context of postwar Italy: “If it is possible to generalize about such matters, one might say that the ‘new’ Italy is at once more human and compassionate, less rhetorical and provincial, than the ‘old’ Italy of Mussolini” (Pacifi ci 16). However, these theorists have not elaborated on the nature of compassion as communicated by neorealist novels and fi lms, leaving us with several questions to explore. What is the function of compassion in neorealist works? What features of compassion are represented in neorealist literary texts and fi lms? This study analyzes the ways in which neorealist characters show or do not show compassion toward one another. It considers compassion as an emotion that may be triggered to unify indi- viduals and communities in different ways, and it explores the function of these artistic works in promoting emotional intelligence, shaping Italian identity, and defi ning neorealism as a distinct fi eld of study through their depictions of a specifi c time in Italian history. My study centers on the thematic motifs that recur in six neorealist works: Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare ( Family Sayings ), Alberto Moravia’s La ciociara ( Two Women ), Renata Viganò’s L’Agnese va a morire ( Agnese Goes to Die ), Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta ( Rome, Open City ), Liana Millu’s Il fumo di Birkenau ( Smoke over Birkenau ), and Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo ( Survival in Auschwitz ). These works offer a rich array of characters whose identities are shaped by their expo- sure to suffering and compassion. Equally important is the representation of Fascist models of identity, consistently rejected by the suffering characters, in these literary works and fi lms. As neorealist artists denounced the horrors of life during the Fascist regime and World War II, they created a binary opposition between Fascism as rhetorical, inauthentic, and false, on the one hand, and postwar Italian national identity as authentic and truly compassionate on the other hand. These artists’ representa- tions of compassion—or lack thereof—indicate how gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and geographic location determine inclusion in or exclu- sion from the new Italy, using paradigms that the claim to compassion may naturalize. To investigate the signifi cance of compassion in neorealist representa- tions, it is important not only to explore the emotion of compassion (as I will do in Part II), but also to examine how neorealist artists perceived the circumstances that they experienced and how they subsequently narrated NEOREALISM: WHAT IS AND IS NOT 11 those experiences. To understand the development of the neorealist approach and style, theorists agree that it is crucial to recognize the mean- ing of the historic moment in which these ideas arose. Neorealist artists lived through a unique period of change that infl uenced their ways of observing and communicating present or past circumstances. For instance, Millicent Marcus affi rms that when neorealist artists explored historical subjects, they did so with the purpose of associating the past with the present (“Italian Film in the Shadow” 15). Mark Shiel, on the other hand, underscores the signifi cance of the moment of change: “One of the most important ways of thinking about neorealism has been to see it as a moment of decisive transition in the tumultuous aftermath of world war which produced a stylistically a philosophically distinctive cinema…” (1). These theorists, treasuring the specifi c moment in history that they were experiencing, exhibit interest in the past in order to fi nd a connection with their current circumstances. Similarly, the postwar enthusiasm for a renewed freedom of expres- sion was also highlighted by the intellectuals at Il Politecnico , a literary magazine created and directed by Elio Vittorini in 1945, in their plea for cultural rejuvenation. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile describe these intellectuals’ intent to initiate a ground-breaking project of “ …new thinking and writing, addressing both cultural and more strictly scientifi c, even technical, as well as sociological and other issues, and aimed at informing and educating the working class, as well as addressing a more intellectual readership…” (544). But although very innovative in impact, the neorealist artists’ approach did not suggest a radical discontinuity with the past. On the contrary, the origins of their methodology dug deep into the works of writers and directors in Italy and elsewhere who could be seen as forebears of the themes and stylistic inventions that neorealist artists were embracing and disseminating. To examine the neorealist works mentioned above and to convey their primary implications, particularly in connection to the emotion of compassion, we must examine a multiplicity of topics and related schools of thought. For instance, it will be important to consider the cinematographic and literary origins of the movement, the association between the movement and its cinematographic and literary productions, their main themes, and the ways in which neorealist works established emotional involvement. 12 NEOREALISM AND THE “NEW” ITALY NOTES 1. Laura E. Ruberto, in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema , affi rms that European movies about immigration, such as Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica , (1994) also adopted the style of postwar Italian neorealism (242). 2. In contrast, Giorgio Agamben underscores the refl ective aspect of art: “Politics and art are neither tasks nor simply ‘works’: they name, rather, the dimension in which the linguistic and corporeal, material and immaterial, biological and social operations are made inoperative and contemplated as such” (72). .

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