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It was as though their creators had discovered cinema for the first time. There was no studio atmosphere in these films, no famous actors, no slickly polished techniques. They were true documents which attained, at times, the stature of poetry.
New directors appeared, all of them springing from that period of incubation and restrictions which had lasted a decade. Every one of them had previous training as scenarist, assistant director, or documentary maker. If two or three important films a year are sufficient to give stature to any cinema, then the Italian cinema may be said to have achieved an enviable place in the film world. —
Today the Italian film speaks with a pasionate desire for truth, albeit occasionally inclined towards exaggeration — a revolt against those bitter years when it had to content itself with he vapid and the conventional. Little wonder then that the outside world should find in this new expression the characteristics of « new school ».
To label these films as products of a « neo-realistic school » of film-making would be to pass over them in too great haste. Some of them may have similarities in background and in sources of inspiration, but there are substantial differences between the works of the various directors. Perhaps it is more fitting to consider them as belonging to a single intense period in which the misfortunes of the Italian people, and the fortunes of the Italian cinema combined to operate together to achieve felicitous results.
More than « neo-realism », this is a new truth, derived from the living realities of a newly freed world. If the setting calls for a prison or hospital, the director goes to a prison or hospital to film his scenes. To some degree the usual cinema machinery is simplified or actually by-passed. The lens is used in the same way the writer utilizes his notebook, or the painter his sketchbook, with the same freedom of action and movement. What appear to be notes and sketches subsequently emerge as elements of a solid, finished work. Anything can be considered material for a film — in the hands of an imaginative film-maker.
Let us look at some of these films and their creators.
Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica
The least predictable, often disconcerting, Roberto Rossellini, moves from one film to another with erratic inspiration. Sometimes vivid to the point of genius, sometimes with an easy-going simplicity, he never fails to interest. His greatest strength lies in an instinctive expression of his « temperament ». His first efforts were several documentaries, following which he served as assistant director to De Robertis on The White Ship (1941). He made two rather mediocre films, Un pilota ritorna (The Return of a Pilot) in 1942 and L'Uomo delta Croce (The Man of the Cross) in 1943. But in 1945 he suddenly revealed his full strengthwith Open City. Although the film did not please in Italy (1), it made a place for itself all
(1) This is, of course, not unusual. Countries which have suffered the miseries depicted in their films are usually indifferent to such films, however well done they may be. Vide : Potemkin, which failed in the U.S.S.R. and King Vidor's Our Daily Bread, which failed in the U.S.