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School of Entertainment and Design Technology
FIL 1030 History of Film
Lecture Notes
Chapter 13
prepared by
Mario Beguiristain, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Film
from
Mast, Gerald and Bruce F. Kawin. A Short History of the Movies.
Abridged Ninth Edition. Longman Press, Pearson Education, Inc. 2007. ISBN #: 0-321-41821-2
These notes are intended solely as a study aid and are not meant to replace the reading assignments from the text.

Chapter 13:
Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave
After World War II:
American films in transition
European Cinema emerges as “best, serious, quality cinema”
Cultural snobbism: “ART Theaters”
European Films vs. American Films:
American Films: considered escapist fare, entertainment, narrative driven, frivolous.
European Films: seen as realistic, serious, worthy of study, intellectually engaging.
Realism = Art
Mast: “European films structured themselves around a theme or a psychological
problem, more than around a story.”

Italian Neo-Realism
Precedents:
Mussolini establishes Cinecittà
Centro Sperimentale (first film school)
White Telephone comedies
U.S. films were banned
Devastated Post-War Italy:
Unemployment, poverty and scarcity
Cinecittà Studios Front Gate
Centro Sperimentale,
the world’s first film school
Vittorio De Sica became a matinee idol in Ai Vostri Ordni,
Signora! (1939) and Il Signor Max (1937). Invariably set onboard
liners or in hotels or nightclubs, these "white telephone" pictures
gently mocked the upper-classes.
Aerial view of Cinecittà Studios outside of Rome
Cesare Zavattini defined the principles of Neo-Realism (p.328):
“To show things as they are, not as they seem, nor as the bourgeois would prefer them to appear;
to write fictions about the human side of representative social, political, and economic conditions;
to shoot on location wherever possible; to use untrained actors in the majority of the roles; to capture
and reflect reality with little or no compromise; to depict common people rather than overdressed
heroes and fantasy role models; to reveal the everyday rather than the exceptional; and to show a
person’s relationship to the real social environment rather than to his or her romantic dreams.”

Roberto Rossellini
Post-War Neo-Realist Trilogy:
“Open City” (1945): Ana Magnani: Resistance in Rome
“Paisan” (1946): Six stories on Allied Invasion and Nazi retreat
“Germany Year Zero” (1947): Hungry boy lives in Berlin rubble
“The Miracle” (1948)
Anna Magnani is a crazed peasant woman who claims her pregnancy is the result of immaculate conception.
Rossellini intended this film to be a study of personal faith in the face of social ridicule but the film was
denounced by the New York Catholic League as "heretical", Protests, bomb scares and the threat of fines and
jail terms (possible at the time since films were not protected as free speech under the first Amendment)
forced the distributors to initiate a landmark lawsuit. The case, which went to the Supreme Court, established
for the first time that film was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The Ingrid Bergman scandal and their collaboration:
“Stromboli” (1949): Bergman goes to live on an island and faces repudiation
“The Greatest Love” (1952)
“Ingrid Bergman” (1953) Episode in We, the Women with Bergman as herself.
“Voyage to Italy” (1953) Starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders.
“Joan of Arc at the Stake” (1954)
“La Paura” (Fear) (1954) Last Rossellini film starring Ingrid Bergman. “Stromboli”

Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini
The former White Telephone Comedy leading man joins
the socialist writer and they become the standard bearers
of Italian Neo-Realism.
“Shoeshine” (1946)
“The Bicycle Thief” (1948)
“Miracle in Milan” (1950)
“Umberto D.” (1952)
Vittorio De Sica Cesare Zavattini
The
Bicycle
Thief
André Bazin on “Umberto D.” :
"I have no hesitation in stating that the cinema has
rarely gone such a long way toward making us
aware of what it is to be a man. And also, for that
matter, of what it is to be a dog."

Luchino Visconti
Aristocratic parlor communist with an operatic gay sensibility.
Neo-Realism:
“Ossessione” (1942) (The Postman Always Rings Twice)
Regarded as the first Neo-Realist film
“La Terra Trema” (1948)
“Rocco and His Brothers” (1960)
Lavish historical melodramas: Decadence, perversion and homosexuality:

“La Strada”
Federico Fellini
From grungy Neo-Realism to
a hallucinogenic dream world
“I Vitelloni” (1953)
“La Strada” (1954) (Oscar)
“Nights of Cabiria” (1956)
“La Dolce Vita” (1960)
“8 1/2” (1963) (Oscar)
“Juliet of the Spirits” (1965)
“Satyricon” (1970)
“Nights of Cabiria” “La Dolce Vita” “8 1/2” “Satyricon”

Michelangelo Antonioni
Post-Neo-Realist. A visual master who
captured the emotional void at the heart
of the upper classes.
“Red Desert” (1964)
(First Color Film)
The Trilogy
of Alienation:
“L’Avventura” (1960)
“La Notte” ( 1961)
“L’Eclisse” (1962)
In England:
“Blow-Up” (1968)
In The U.S.A:
“Zabriskie Point” (1970)

Post-War France
I. Post-War Classicism
Max Ophuls
“La Ronde” (1950)
“The Earrings of
Madame D.” (1953)
“Lola Montes” (1955)
Jacques Tati
“Mr. Hulot’s Holiday”
(1953)
“Mon Oncle” (1958)
“Playtime” (1967)
Jean Cocteau
“Beauty and the Beast” (1946)

André Bazin
Critic who argued
that film was art
and the artist
was the director.
Laid down the
precepts for
“The Auteur Theory.”
II. Cahiers du Cinéma and the “Auteur” Theory of Film Criticism
Founded in Paris in 1951 by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Lo Duca, and legendary film critic and theorist André Bazin, Cahiers du cinéma - literally
"cinema notebooks" - has been the most influential film magazine in the history of the art form of cinema. The ideas championed on its pages
have revolutionized film theory and criticism and filmmaking practice, and helped give rise to much of what we think of as serious film culture
today. Indeed, Cahiers has played an instrumental role in the development of the very idea of cinema as an art form.
It was in Cahiers du cinéma that a now-celebrated coterie of young, often fiercely polemical critics - Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, François
Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol most prominent among them - began attacking the hidebound, safe and highly literary "tradition
of quality" then predominant in French filmmaking (which they disparaged as cinéma de papa, or papa's cinema). Their cinephile sensibilities
cultivated by countless nights viewing Hollywood and international achievements at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, they began
advocating a radical new notion, la politique des auteurs - or auteur theory - that advanced cinema as a distinctive creative form with its own
language and means of personal artistic expression (cinema was not simply a bastard art, a form of literature with pictures, or of filmed theatre);
argued that it was the director who was the author, or artist, or creative force of this medium; and put forth the then-revolutionary idea that
American genre filmmakers and craftsmen such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, with their dynamic styles and highly personal
signatures, were true masters of the art. (The Cahiers critics were also great proponents of more personal, individualistic French talents such as
Renoir, Vigo, Cocteau, Tati, and Bresson).
Most famously, at the end of 1950s, these young talents put the aesthetic ideas and film- wonk sensibilities they had promulgated on the pages
of Cahiers into glorious filmmaking practice, giving birth to the great creative explosion known as the nouvelle vague, the French New Wave.

III. The French New Wave
Francois Truffaut
New Wave Splash:
• “The 400 Blows” (1959)
• “Shoot The Piano Player” (1960)
• “Jules and Jim” (1962
The Adventures
of Antoine Doinel:
• “The 400 Blows” (1959)
• “Antoine and Colette”
• “Stolen Kisses” (1968)
• “Bed and Board” (1970)
• “Love on the Run” (1979)
Audience Favorites:
• “Day for Night” (1973)
• “The Last Metro” (1980)
Homages to Hitchcock:
• “Fahrenheit 451” (1966)
• “Bride Wore Black (1968)
• “Mississippi Mermaid”
(1969)

III. The French New Wave
Alain Resnais
Obsessed with memory and time
“Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959)
“Last Year at Marienbad” (1961)
“La Guerre Est Finie” (1966)
“Stavisky” (1974)
“Providence” (English) (1977)
Last Year at Marienbad
Hiroshima Mon Amour

III. The French New Wave
Jean Luc Godard
Enfant terrible of the New Wave
“Breathless” (1959)
“Contempt” (1963)
“Pierrot Le Fou” (1965)
“Alphaville” (1965)
“Weekend” (1967)
Contempt

FIL 1030 History of Film
Lecture Notes
Chapter 13
“The End”
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