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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Saverio Giovacchini, Robert Sklar (eds.), Global Neorealism. The Transnational History of a Film Style, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2012, pp. 273+IX
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2013-03-01
2021-09-06
2013-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Paolo Noto
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Alma Laurea Studiorum, Università di Bologna
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Saverio Giovacchini, Robert Sklar (eds.), Global Neorealism. The Transnational History of a Film Style, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2012, pp. 273+IX
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Saverio Giovacchini, Robert Sklar (eds.),              post-Stalinist Cinema of the Thaw (Salazkina),
Global Neorealism.                                     and the role of documentary films in relation
The Transnational History                              to the debate on realism before World War II
of a Film Style,                                       (Caminati).
University Press of Mississippi,                          The second part covers the way in which neo-
Jackson 2012, pp. 273+IX                               realism has been acclaimed and incorporated in
                                                       the United States by the intellectual elites (Sk-
   Although neorealism has never experienced a         lar) and marketed in the most suitable and prof-
lack of scientific interest, over the last few years   itable (Brennan), assumed as a compelling ref-
the theme has gained particular attention in the       erence by the generation of critics/filmmakers
academic circles thanks to the publication,            of the Cahiers du Cinéma (Eades), and used as a
among others, of works that combine teaching           critical and rhetorical argument in Argentina in
intent and methodological updates (Haaland             the years of Peronism (Halperin). This section
2012; Noto, Pitassio 2010), studies that analyze       is closed, by the co-editor Saverio Giovacchi-
the history of postwar Italian cinema in light of      ni, with an essay dedicated to John Kitzmiller, a
the innovations caused by neorealism (Barat-           unique example of an African-American star in
toni 2012), research into formerly disregarded         Italian postwar cinema and an effective starting
key aspects (Leavitt 2013), and even useful            point for examining the ways in which Italian
provocations that stimulate scholars research-         culture has come to terms with its own colonial
ing in the field of Italian studies to address less    past and with the perceived threat of American-
familiar topics (O’Leary, O’Rawe 2011).                ization. The essays in the third part present neo-
   Global Neorealism: The Transnational Histo-         realism as a completely global phenomenon and
ry of a Film Style, a collection edited by Saverio     focus on those cultural institutions that have fa-
Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, follow this trend,       cilitated the reception and adaptation of neore-
yet provides an original point of view in order        alism, which as a consequence allowed national
to pull neorealism out of the specific area of         cinemas from very different geographical areas,
Italian studies and integrate it into the debate on    such as Latin America (Mestman), India (Ma-
global cinema.                                         jumdar), West and North Africa (Niang), Brazil
   The volume is organized into three parts, di-       (Sarzynski) and Iran (Naficy), to emerge. Final-
vided according to their historical proximity to       ly, the epilogue is devoted to the persistence of
the central phase of the neorealist phenomenon.        a neorealist legacy in contemporary Italian cin-
The essays of the first section deal with Italian      ema (Carlorosi).
film culture of the 1930s and early 1940s, and            The relatively short length of the essays
focus on those films and filmmakers that “antic-       allows the editors to provide readers with a very
ipate” postwar cinema (Zagarrio), on the rela-         broad array of case studies. What emerges as
tionships of intellectual exchange between Fas-        truly global and transnational is less a set of
cist and Soviet film cultures in their attempt to      style rules linked to the “original” neorealism,
stand out as national cinemas – as well as on the      than a range of patterns of adaptation and
impact that neorealism had on the production of        creolization. All over the world in fact, the


                                                                                                     159
nebulous concept of neorealism is always                 cases the historiographical common denominator
mediated through a network of institutions, such         seems to be that of the neorealism as the aesthetic
as film festivals, academies, journals and state         expression of a moral position, according to a
funded programs that are very often involved             tradition of scholarship that recalls the works of
in and responsible for the building of national          Millicent Marcus and Lino Miccichè. This not
cinemas. The contributors prove that wherever            only runs the risk of renationalizing neorealism
the word “neorealism” is accepted and applied,           (and each of its transnational expressions), as
it undergoes similar changes, potentially shifting       the editors point out, but also of restating the
from a critical category, to a style or a mode           factors behind the assumption that realism is an
of production, or to a theoretical stronghold.           inevitable effect of certain social and historical
Sometimes all these transitions are apparent,            conditions.
as in the professional trajectory of James Agee             Here lies the limit and also the strongest point
through criticism and filmmaking investigated by         of interest of this volume, which does not intend
Robert Sklar.                                            to add much to the understanding of neorealism
   Moreover, the same word can describe and              as an all-Italian phenomenon, but nevertheless
cause different occurrences. The ideological             succeeds in broadening it. The more the essays
connotations of neorealism vary according to             turn away from the specific area of Italian studies
particular conditions (Sarzynski) and can be             and address distant contexts, the more they seem
obliterated for political reasons (Halperin), since      to demonstrate that neorealism is a moment of
the relationships between the intellectual elites        “the nationalization […] of a widely international
and the cultural institutions that promote the realist   conversation about realism and political cinema
discourse can be characterized by collaboration          that had been at the center of the 1930s. […]
and rejection at once (Salazkina, Caminati).             In different ways, all of the conversation’s
The reception of neorealism has usually been             participants were concerned with the possibility
instrumental in the establishment of a locally           of making cinema relevant to what they saw as
rooted art cinema (Mestman), although its impact         their national realities” (Ibidem, pp. 9-10). The
is traced back to the mainstream (Majudmar),             readers may therefore undertake the task to verify
                                                         how long this conversation has gone on, how
and neorealist films themselves are marketed
                                                         deeply and how far this “subterranean artistic
in the United States not as pure examples of art
                                                         tradition” has tunneled through the history and
cinema, but as unstable compounds of art and
                                                         geography of global cinema, and most of all
exploitation (Brennan).
                                                         which are the entry points for exploring it and
   Such a variety of examples can affect
                                                         which, instead, are dead ends.
the thorough elaboration of some of the
                                                                   [Paolo Noto, Alma Laurea Studiorum,
historiographical and theoretical issues around
                                                                                    Università di Bologna]
which the contributions revolve. The notion
of “national cinema”, for example, still being           Bibliography
crucial in the majority of the essays, is not called     Luca Barattoni, Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema,
into question, but rather referred to by means             Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2012.
of assertions of film critics and practitioners,         Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face
                                                           with Hollywood, Amsterdam University Press,
and the absence of a concept that has been
                                                           Amsterdam 2005.
highly influential over the past decade, such as         Torunn Haaland, Italian Neorealist Cinema, Edin-
that of “ImpersoNations” proposed by Thomas                burgh University Press, Edinburgh 2012.
Elsaesser (2005) is notable. Furthermore, in many        Charles Leavitt, “Cronaca, Narrativa, and the Unsta-

160
  ble Foundations of the Institution of Neorealism”, Alan O’Leary, Catherine O’Rawe, “Against Realism:
  in Italian Culture, vol. 31, no. 1, 2013, pp. 28-46. on a ‘Certain Tendency’ in Italian Film Criticism”,
Paolo Noto, Francesco Pitassio, Il cinema neorealista, in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 16, no.
  Archetipolibri, Bologna 2010.                        1, 2011, pp. 107-128.



Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder               a polycentric approach. Previously introduced
Dudrah (eds.),                                        by Lúcia Nagib (2006) as the filmic adaptation
Theorizing World Cinema,                              of the notion of “polycentric multiculturalism”
I.B. Tauris, London 2012, pp. XXXII-229               (Shohat and Stam 1994: 7), polycentric cinema
                                                      implies a “world made of interconnected cin-
   Against the background of the increasingly         emas” (2006: 34) as it focuses on the idea of
global nature of the film market and film indus-      circulation in order to think of world cinema
try and the emergence of questions of transna-        as a “positive, inclusive, democratic concept”
tionalism, globalisation, cosmopolitanism and         (2006: 35). This theoretical argumentation
world culture, the need undoubtedly arises to         against the binary system is effectively concep-
revisit the definition of world cinema and to         tualised in the introduction of the book written
reach a better grasp of how our understanding         by the three editors, Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam
of the term has developed within the context of       and Rajinder Dudrah. In fact, it successfully en-
film studies and film history.                        gages with the limits of the discipline, inviting
   This is the main aim of the recently published     to overcome the Hollywood-centric perspec-
edited collection Theorizing World Cinema: to         tive and to offer viable alternatives to the es-
problematise the collocation of world cinema          tablished understanding of world cinema. This
within the disciplines of film studies and film       reframing invites the adoption of “a positive
history. In doing so this work present itself as      and inclusive approach to film studies, which
a new addition to film studies’ re-engagement         defines world cinema as a polycentric phenom-
with the notion of world cinema, joining in this      enon with peaks of creation in different places
way a series of books published in the last de-       and periods” (p. xxii). In order to address these
cade which include Dennison and Lim’s edited          peaks of creation, from India to South Ameri-
collection Remapping World Cinema, Dina Ior-          ca, Theorizing World Cinema comprises twelve
danova’s Cinema of the Periphery, Ďurovičová          chapters – plus the introduction – organised
and Newman’s World Cinema: Transnational              in four “theoretical projects:” the national, the
Perspectives and (with a different focus) Karl        transnational, the diasporic and the realist. This
Schoonover and Rosalind Galt’s Global Art             structure is a consequence of the application of
Cinema.                                               the polycentric method to traditional attitudes
   As part of the recently launched I.B. Tauris       and new tendencies of film studies, from the
World Cinema book series, Theorizing World            theoretical models of transnational cinema to
Cinema offers a new theoretical discussion            the role played by the notion of realism in the
of the subject in order to relocate some of the       diachronic idea of world cinema. Featuring a
most established meanings of world cinema             series of exemplary case studies analysed by
by freeing the term from the negative binary          prominent scholars such as John Caughie, Is-
division between Hollywood and “non-Hol-              mail Xavier, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Lau-
lywood” cinema, in favour of the adoption of          ra Mulvey (to cite a few), the book ultimately

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