FIL 1030 History of Film - MDC Faculty Home Pages

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.”