Impacts of Italian Neorealism on Naturalist Filmmaking
Surrounded by the chaotic ruins of World War II, darker, more sober attitudes began to reflect in people’s artistic expressions. Specifically, the fall of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1943 spawned a new and provocative branch of Italian cinema that divorced itself from the theatrical conventions of Hollywood storytelling. This new cinema was a reactionary movement away from the implacable restrictions of Fascist cinema, as well as American imported, slap-happy, unreality films that failed to reflect Italian realities. The movement was referred to as Italian neo-realism. Filmmakers of the neorealist movement carried a dark and gritty sensibility, one that was primed by the dregs of war and brought sober and sometimes challenging themes to the screen. The cultural significance and evolution of this movement has influenced the way stories can be visually expressed and communicated. It has given rise to the development of third-world cinemas, has placed the camera in the hands of commoners, and is the umbrella, as will be argued, of all contemporary naturalist filmmaking.
Similar to the aesthetics of neorealism, naturalist filmmaking seeks to replicate the mundane qualities of everyday life, project social problems with extremely limited bias, and observes ordinary people in their environment. It, too, carries a dark, gritty, even pessimistic awareness that tries to push cinema into an objective, non-theatrical light. A comparative study of Italian neorealism and its effect upon the filmic, narrative structure — naturalism — will provide what is, on balance, a similar type of cinematic storytelling experience that distinguishes itself by true-to-life plots, realistic social problems, visual authenticity, and unobtrusive camera and editing techniques. To start, it will be helpful to prepare the grounds by first providing a basic overview of what Italian neorealism is, why the filmmakers of this movement felt compelled to react against the conventions of Fascist/Hollywood storytelling, and what this would mean for future filmmakers, both third-world and contemporary.
Before the fall of Mussolini, the ‘white telephone’ era was in effect. These productions, often American imported, were lavishly decorated, “set in big hotels, tony nightclubs and ocean liners” and offered escapism from oppressive Fascist dictators (Ratner). Although these films were greater-than-life, well-polished, and preserved the status-quo, they failed to reflect issues that Italian audiences could relate with: issues like post-war poverty and chronic unemployment. Describing this time, Federico Fellini said that such “seductive films showed a paradise on earth,” a paradise that was completely unreal to Italian audiences (Ratner).
In search for the Italian identity through cinema, filmmakers were urged by anti-fascist journalist Leo Longanesi to “go into the streets, into the barracks, into the train stations; only in this way can an Italian cinema be born” (Ratner). When censorship bonds loosened after the war, Italian filmmakers felt compelled to create films that would finally reflect their destitute circumstances. In doing so they combined cinematic realism (a documentary-type aesthetic) with social, political and economic themes that would have never been tolerated by the regime. Thus was the birth of the ‘new’ and ‘real’ cinema in Italy; what Felix A. Morlion called “a magic window that opens out onto the real” — coined later by critics as neo-realism (Gallagher 88).
Pioneers like Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti jumpstarted the neorealist movement and fought desperately throughout their careers to break away from prior theatrical, big-budgeted storytelling conventions. They highly criticized Italian society, avoided happy-endings, and glared social problems in the face without fear. Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942) was the first film to break the white-telephone mold. Film journalist Gianfranco Poggi describes Visconti’s courage to reflect the “true Italian reality” in the following way:
“…the heat and the sounds and the dust of the flatland, the drabness, the disorder of the house interiors, the vulgar loudness of the local festivals and singing and contests, the tired pace of life in this setting, greed and the possessiveness of the people’s life in it: all these traits of the bare everyday reality [tore] apart the veil which had separated the camera’s eye from all those years of mystification and lies” (Poggi 14).
Divorcing from fascist “mystification and lies” would be further advanced with the release of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945). This film was a strong followup to Ossessione that helped create the Italian identity. With little to no finances, Rossellini left the generic, studio-bound sets being used as refugee camps and entered the actual city itself to film (Nowell-Smith, 437). He showed the blown out, war-torn landscapes of Italian life using natural lighting, actors with little or no make-up, and depicted social problems such as interrogation, torture, corrupt military violence, and rabid-poverty. His was a cinema of “looking critically” at the problems that Italy had inflicted upon itself (Gallagher 91). Visconti, Rossellini, and other neorealists provided the aesthetical look and feel of what the new cinema was to be: a cinema truer to reality than was depicted in previous, American imported and Italian films. The idea of representing truth was important to neo-realism. As Cesare Zavattini wrote:
“This powerful desire of the [neorealist] cinema to see and to analyze, this hunger for reality, for truth, is a kind of concrete homage to other people, that is, to all who exist… whereas we are attracted by the truth, by the reality which touches us and which we want to know and understand directly and thoroughly, the Americans continue to satisfy themselves with a sweetened version of truth produced through transpositions.” (Bertolucci).
To heighten the veracity of their films, the neorealists used town-locals as actors over professionally paid actors. This moved their cinematic style away from cleverly delivered lines to the unrefined nature of everyday language. They believed that by using town-locals would not only cut back on costs, but more importantly that a greater sense of truth would be arrived at in character performances. Non-paid, unskilled actors reflected real, ordinary and relatable lives that Italians believed mirrored reality. Due to these choices, the aesthetics of using on-site locations, cheap and affordable cameras, town-locals as actors, and natural lighting, was not just an artistic choice, but a practical one. Neorealists were starting to not only break away from the standard conventions of the old-Italian Cinema and Hollywood standard, they were also granting pragmatic allocations for film productions to be accomplished without the need of financial aid from larger institutions (Bertolucci). By placing the camera in the hands of commoners, the neorealist movement helped paved the way for third-world cinemas to develop.
Spanish-born filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, was one of the first emerging third-world filmmakers to be influenced by the neorealist movement. Buñuel’s films, though mostly surreal and expressionistic, took highly critical views on various social problems such as fascism, war, poverty, and the bourgeois culture. He, too, used on-site locations, non-professional actors, worked from less-than-ideal budgets, and used the camera in certain films to mirror reality, not fabricate it. With the release of one of his more controversial docudramas, Los Olvidados (1950), Buñuel depicted the lives of child gangs growing up in the nightmarish slums of poverty-stricken Mexico.
This film, above all, was created in the spirit of neo-realism; it was a dark and gritty social protest against countries that neglected to give children an education (Garcia-Abrines and Guzman 58). His intention was to show that children “remote from humanity, without education or love, must needs become a human animal” — an animal void of moral consciousness (58). The subject material and ugly characters of Los Olvidados proved to audiences around the world that the courage of neo-realism was, in fact, influencing cinema in major, compelling ways.
Although petitions were written by various statesmen to expel Buñuel for his adverse depiction of Mexican life, he did not quench his neorealist thirst to use the camera as an eye for reflecting truth. Film journalists Garcia-Abrines and Guzman conclude: “In his solicitude of the social struggle, Buñuel does not seek a solution in Utopia…but in naked reality” (58). This devoted attitude to “naked reality” continues to reign tantamount as well as paramount over a select group of contemporary filmmakers — the naturalists. Though the term ‘neo-realism’ died completely out in the feel-good 1950’s, its spirit continues to thrive and is the fundamental pillar, as will now be argued, behind what today is referred to as naturalist filmmaking.
To provide a brief caveat, the narrative structure, naturalism, dates back to the late 1800’s with the prolific playwright/novelist, Émile Zola. Zola was an artist who explored how “individual reality can be most appropriately and most accurately represented” (Braudy 68). His was a philosophy of scientific observation — that is, observing people in their natural environments (as animals more so than human beings) in order to obtain the truth of their world. In developing his narrative structure, Zola proposed that social problems (i.e. poverty, prostitution, alcohol abuse, etc.) should be displayed on stage as objectively as possible, provide no solution for their causes, and instead allow the audience to discover the origins to such problems on their own. Reminiscent of Morlion’s words, Zola’s structure was a “magic window that open[ed] out onto the real” (Gallagher 88). Any type of stylization, ‘white-telephone’ spectacle, or propagandist message, would detract from the overall purpose of his art form: to allow audiences to discover the “naked truth” of real-life people via observation.
Naturalism then, as defined by Zola in theater stage productions as “a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice,” seems strikingly similar to what André Bazin said of neo-realism: “a cinema of fact and reconstituted reportage” of everyday, ordinary and truthful lives (Birchall 30, Bondanella 31). Bazin, like Zola, stressed that the ontology of the narrative structure (whether in theater or film) was to focus on the process and duration of real time, real people. In this way, audiences could “watch actions through windows, around doorjambs, and through the cracks in doors” and “formulate a moral problem that arises directly from the method of naturalism” (Braudy 71). This moral method of getting closer to reality seems like an echo of Rossellini’s words on neo-realism: “it is the result of a moral position, of looking at the obvious (Gallagher 90). Both Zolaian naturalism and Italian neorealism are thus uncannily similar; the former no doubt inspired the latter. Both are as Zavattini described as investing “unlimited trust in things, facts, and people” (Bondanella 32). For these reasons, it seems only probable to conclude that the spirit of neorealism, as was most likely inspired (either directly or indirectly) by the form of Zola’s naturalism, is one that filmmakers have clung to throughout the last century as possessing a window to truth. Throughout the years, that window has evolved and garnished much controversy, and today continues to influence a new group of contemporary filmmakers, argued here as the new naturalists.
Filmmakers of the new naturalist movement (e.g. Larry Clark, Harmony Korine, Neil LaBute, Todd Solondz, etc.) cannot help but be compared to the filmmakers of Italian neorealism. To be clear, the comparison is really drawn by inspiration; that is, the spirit of neorealism has inspired the body of new naturalist works present in today’s culture.
New naturalist films carry a raw and visceral aesthetic much like their forefathers cinema. They’re arguably closer to current reality than the puffery of Hollywood films, they possess “characters [who] appear to have been photographed without knowing it,” and bear a sense of “candid, overpowering realism” that some find to be grotesque (Foreman quotes Rossellini 5). The grotesque pendulum was severely pushed in 1995 with the release of Larry Clark’s sexually explicit and controversial film, Kids. Written by nineteen-year old Harmony Korine, Kids tells the debauched story of rebel teenagers coming face to face with the AIDS epidemic while growing up in the nightmarish slums of New York City. With respect to Buñuel, Kids made Los Olvidados seem somewhat Pollyannaish. Thematically, however, the absence of adults and education in both films express similar predilections towards the “daily experience for those who inhabit the spaces and places that promote suffering and oppression” (Giroux 33). All of Clark’s and Korine’s films mimic the neorealist attitude in relation to using non-actors, documentary-type stylization, dark and pessimistic plots, and observing real-life social problems under what seems to be a less-than biased lens.
Much has been similarly said of director Todd Solondz; a contemporary filmmaker who examines “the dark underbelly of middle class American suburbia” at the cost of making “vile art: art that presents immoral acts irresponsibly, if not with approval and joy” (Cardullo 461). Solondz’ films tackle extremely difficult and uncomfortable topics such as child molestation, rape, teenage pregnancy, abortion and so forth — all of which, in the heart of neo-realism, “eschew the conventional cinema’s obsession with narrative,” and seek to establish objectification via the camera lens (Wagstaff 9). Although the new naturalist films are adverse depictions of certain modern life-styles, and have enticed critics to label them as “unintelligible messes,” these abrasive pieces nevertheless thrive in neorealist shadows, using the camera as Rossellini described as “an instrument of torture,” an “aggressive rather than passive machine” (Gallagher 91).
Filmmakers of contemporary naturalist cinema are an important breed to understand. Though it is true that the content of their films do not dwell on cheerful subjects, it is important to remember that these filmmakers are, in fact, the children of a post-war traumatic nation. War is never a pleasant topic of discussion, but when a country suffers from the chaotic ruins of mass destruction, it seems only natural for people’s artistic expressions to become darker, sober, and more pessimistic. This darker sensibility was immediately spawned after World War II, as seen personified in Italian neorealist films. The impacts of this movement were huge. As for where the spirit of neorealism will develop next is open to interpretation, but the overall purpose of its structure has always remained the same: to get closer to a truer, more vibrant reality. Indeed, in 1974, Rossellini was still saying: the purpose of neo-realism is “to see things as they are, that’s the main point. It’s not easy to reach that point. I’m searching for it. I’ve not found it yet” (Foreman 35).
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