Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950S and 1960S

Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation DiSalvo, Mary Lorraine. 2014. Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274334 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s A dissertation presented by Mary Lorraine DiSalvo to The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Italian Literature Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2014 © 2014 Mary Lorraine DiSalvo All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Giuliana Minghelli Author: Mary Lorraine DiSalvo Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s Abstract The aftermath of Italy’s cinematic movement neorealism left several directors searching for a new cinematic practice and a new directorial identity. Many of the most artistically intrepid directors of the era turned to women as a means of professional and personal reinvention. This study analyzes the collaborations of Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni with the actresses Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Giulietta Masina, and Monica Vitti, respectively. The political disillusionment with post-war reconstruction and the desire to transcend the strictures of neorealist practice manifested as an impulse to turn towards more personal and lyrical cinematic narratives. By placing women at center stage, these directors found a conduit through which to explore the vision of the other. The post-neorealist films of these artists reveal the extent to which they abandoned neorealism’s chorality, its focus on the collective and the common man, in favor of the single, marginalized, uncommon woman. Using Deleuze’s concept of deterritorialization, this dissertation addresses the way in which the collaborations of these couples, often defined by the directors’ attempts to harness the woman’s perspective, resulted in the creation of a third space, an open space of interpretation. The woman’s vision presents a fruitful indeterminacy. An analysis of the films reveals how these women irreversibly changed the face of the directors’ cinema. The study concludes with an iii examination of Lina Wertmüller and Giancarlo Giannini’s collaboration as an example of a “reverse” case that took place in the following decade (the 1970s). iv Table of Contents I. Introduction 1 II. De Sica, Loren, and the (A)historical Female Body 18 III. Encountering the Other: Rossellini, Bergman and the Creation of a New Cinematic Language 61 IV. Masina’s Performance of Spectatorship in Fellini’s Films 117 V. Resistant Subjectivity: Antonioni’s Appropriation of Vitti’s “Modernity” 163 VI. [Epilogue] Grotesque Vision, Visions of the Grotesque: Wertmüller and Giannini 211 VII. Bibliography 236 v I. Introduction Every critic focusing on a specific period in cinematic history is faced with the tricky proposition of historical and aesthetic demarcation. In Italian film, the monolithic term “neorealism,” often used as an ambiguous catch-all, complicates this attempt at periodization. The 1950s and s’60s saw dramatic shifts in Italian cinema, a movement away from the categorical strictures of neorealism established by critics in the post-war era. And yet, in art, a turning is often a returning. While the auteurs of this era expanded the definition of their “neorealisms,” venturing into new aesthetic realms, they also drew upon bygone eras. One such return, the focus of my study, is the reemergence of the female figure at the center of the frame. The four directors on whom I will focus—Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni—all reinvented their cinema around women in the post-neorealist period. Their actresses—Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Giulietta Masina, and Monica Vitti, respectively—allowed a renegotiation with the directors’ engagement with neorealism and all that it had come to contain. The formation of these four directors can be traced, to varying degrees, to the crucible of neorealist practice.1 The films I will examine demonstrate a reaction against or manipulation of this aesthetic and ideological base. Much of this reaction coincided with a general feeling of disillusion in the post-war reconstruction. The build-up to the miracolo economico redirected the collective desire for political and cultural reforms toward more purely economic concerns. The 1 Here, as throughout this introduction, it is difficult to generalize about the trajectory of these directors. De Sica, for example, started his acting career in the late twenties and filmed the neorealist classic Ladri di biciclette in 1948, two years before Fellini or Antonioni made their first feature films (Luci del varietà and Cronaca di un amore, respectively). Yet even Deleuze insists that, along with Visconti, “Antonioni and Fellini are definitely part of neorealism, despite all their differences.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Robert Galeta and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2005) 4. 1 result, on the part of intellectuals, was “a bitter feeling of helplessness and disenchantment, even of shame and remorse for a missed opportunity, with parties competing at polished forms of fraudulent patronage instead of busying themselves with negotiations framed by an idea of curbed inequalities and public good.”2 Naturally this failure debased the tenets by which neorealism was originally defined, that is, “as a social realist expression of populist politics,” as Giuliana Minghelli reminds us—a definition that preceded a “formal appreciation of its innovation as an art cinema.”3 The political character of neorealism called for reconstruction, for the redemption of the ruins left by fascism: according to Noa Steimatsky, “In a landscape of ruins, neorealism was reconstruction.”4 The clearest voices of post-neorealist reconstruction (“re”-reconstruction?) did not hesitate to offer a cultural critique of Italy’s miracolo economico as well as an aesthetic critique of neorealism itself. The most resounding of these voices can be found in Rossellini, Fellini and Antonioni. Peter Bondanella affirms that “All three played an important role in scripting or directing neorealist works, but all felt continued critical association with the implicit goals or techniques of neorealism to be increasingly confining.”5 In their artistic transition from neorealism, however, they did not make a clean break, but rather raised “the specter of neorealism in an effort to lend aesthetic force” to questions about the economic miracle and its 6 extension of postwar politics, as Karl Schoonover explains. Though many film critics recognize 2 Luca Barattoni, Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) 12. 3 Giuliana Minghelli, Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema, Year Zero (New York: Routledge, 2013) 2. 4 Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 45. 5 Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1990) 103. 6 Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) 187. 2 the complexity of this transitional period, few identify the crucial role that women played in it. My goal in this study is to elucidate the use of female focalizers as a passage from neorealist practice to a new directorial stylistics. First, a note about periodization—upon which I’ve briefly touched—and the films that I’ve chosen to analyze. Each director finds a unique journey with his leading lady, and the forms they take are various indeed. Yet trends and reactionary movements emerge. The Italy of the fifties, as noted by Paul Ginsborg, saw the political and cultural entrenchment of the Christian Democrats through a base of Catholicism, Americanism, and anti-Communism.7 Though Italy was not yet in a period of “unchecked industrial boom,”8 the early efforts of economic reorganization were gathering force. In film, as Angelo Restivo notes, “the decades of the fifties can be seen as a period of aesthetic retrenchment—with neorealism either diminished to a kind of populist celebration of local color, or adopted as a method for cinematic experimentation.”9 Indeed, the early fifties saw the first use of neorealist stylistics as a jumping-board for more lyrical projects. Already, in 1950, Rossellini had struck out on his metaphysical journey with Bergman in Stromboli,10 while two years later, De Sica was still adhering to the neorealist spirit with Umberto D (the same year as Rossellini’s second Bergman collaboration, Europa 51). 1954 found Rossellini, Fellini, and De Sica all contributing to the post-neorealist corpus; but while 7 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988 (London: Penguin Books, 1990) 182. 8 Ginsborg 186. 9 Angelo

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