yearbook 2010/11 - The European Film College

So the use of non-actors is another principle?
Yes, it’s very essential that it’s mostly non-actors. Because what the people, who promulgated the
ideas of neorealism, said is that the studio bound films and the fiction films at the time tended to
focus on people who looked a certain way, spoke a certain way, which was artificial. So that we
never got the pulse of real life, the rhythm of normal speech – the attitudes, the gestures, the way
that ordinary people behaved. That was kind of excluded – it was a world that was removed from
the real world.
But the essentials of neorealism is not that you have a small story, quite the contrary
– you have a big story. In “Bicycle Thieves” it sort of spreads from the small story of a man,
who’s been out of work for a long time and who’s bicycle is the mean of his livelihood – to the
story of that whole society, to Rome at that point, just before 1948 when it was recovering from
the devastation of war.
It’s about society. The thing about neorealism is that it’s always about the one in the many. They
focus on the one, but in order to tell you something about the many. So they’re all epic.
Did neorealism ever spread to other parts of the world?
There was an attempt in America to import it, but it never quite worked. The American model
never really quite worked, all though there are films that we would talk about as neorealistic.
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neo r e a l i s m – ta k e t h e f i l m i n t o t h e s t r e e t s||fi n a lCu t 2011