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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Francesco Pitassio, Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema | Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019, pp. 382
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2020-10-01
2021-10-05
2020-10-01
2024-03-10
Cinéma & Cie
Charles Leavitt
2020/10/01
University of Notre Dame
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Francesco Pitassio, Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema | Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019, pp. 382
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16547/20228
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Francesco Pitassio
Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019, pp. 382




   Addressed to ‘a readership that is already widely familiar with neorealist
cinema,’ Francesco Pitassio’s ambitious new study, Neorealist Film Culture,
1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema, stands deliberately at the leading edge of
scholarship in Italian screen studies. Rather than surveying once more the well-
trodden territory of the neorealist canon, Pitassio has boldly ‘walked along
the margins of neorealism,’ exploring terrain entirely overlooked in previous
accounts and providing far-reaching insights well beyond the scope of more
traditional investigations.
   In the first chapter, Pitassio makes the case for abandoning the more restrictive
definitions of neorealist art and for recognising instead the many different
varieties of realism — local and international, traditionalist and modernist —
that converged in the transitional moment of Italy’s post-war reconstruction. This
convergence, he argues, led to the creation of ‘unique hybrids’ that could never
be confined to the narrow strictures of the retrospectively created neorealist
orthodoxies. The results of the convergences that characterised the post-war
Italian scene were often contradictory: an anti-Fascist culture indelibly marked
by its Fascist origins; a popular culture founded on a rejection of popular taste; a
national cinema predicated on a transnational film style. As Pitassio shows, ‘this
set of contradictions illustrates the difficulties neorealist culture had with the
nation’s past and with national Otherness.’
   Chapter 2 examines neorealism’s difficulties in rigorous detail. These
difficulties, Pitassio shows, complicate traditional accounts of neorealism’s
political significance, which have tended to celebrate, at times uncritically,
the apparent commitment to represent with ethical fidelity the tragedies and
triumphs of recent Italian history. Pitassio makes the provocative claim that
‘neorealist cinema has always been at odds with memory,’ not just betraying
but also concealing the experience of history, and superseding it, until fictional
representation displaces historical reality. Neorealism, in this account, serves
the cause of post-Fascist political equivocation and moral obfuscation, allowing
Italians to deny their complicity with Mussolini’s regime. Indeed, argues
Pitassio, it succeeds in doing so by virtue of the very aesthetic innovations that
have traditionally earned it the highest critical accolades: by rejecting the linear

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                             Reviews / Comptes-rendus


narratives and unambiguous morality of Hollywood films, he contends, Italian
filmmakers implied that notions of causality, responsibility, and culpability were
too complex to resolve. ‘The neorealist style thus perfectly matched the need to
jettison a troubled past and to begin again with forging national and international
bonds,’ Pitassio explains.
   Even as he identifies this perfect match between form and content, Pitassio
— ever attentive to the margins — details its exceptions and complications,
presenting a nuanced picture of neorealism’s politics and style. In chapter 2,
with its stress on the evasion of historical memory, the compelling exception
is documentary filmmaking, which was not only more politically forthright in
its content but also more experimental, more modernist in its style than were
fiction films. Chapter 3 examines post-war Italian film promotion, which
Pitassio finds to be more innovative than was film production, and which he
uses to complicate the relationship between neorealism and its Fascist past.
Whereas neorealist filmmaking demonstrated substantial continuities with film
under Fascism, film advertising, in contrast, broke new ground. ‘Instead of the
abstraction used in pre-war examples,’ Pitassio explains, ‘post-war graphic film
advertisements sought verisimilitude through “iconisation,”’ which entailed
figurative rather than photographic realism, and which mirrored the aesthetics of
the era’s popular art, exemplified by the covers of pulp novels and the contents
of photo-romances. Pitassio thus identifies what he calls ‘a trilateral relationship
between neorealism, the popular press, and post-war melodrama,’ revealing
new connections between films, photography, graphic design, and advertising
that advance the case well beyond the typical auteurist framework within which
neorealism still tends to be discussed.
   The fourth and final chapter proposes a similar advance in our understanding
of the contributions of nonprofessional actors to neorealist cinema. Once again,
Pitassio casts a wider net than is typical, attempting to capture not only the
supposed quest for authenticity that led prominent directors to cast amateur
actors in key roles, but also the competing considerations that inspired the
creation of casts far more diverse than is often recognized. As he aptly puts
it, ‘human figures within neorealist cinema came from varied training and
professional backgrounds, carrying into films different social gestures, acting
styles, and aesthetic traditions and conveying various cultural values attached
to them.’ Pitassio is particularly interested in the new female figures that came
to prominence after the war, explaining persuasively why we should not be
surprised that actors like Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Lucia Bosè, and
Silvana Mangano all got their first break in neorealist films, even as their
subsequent star personas would seem to owe little to the neorealist aesthetic.
He is no less persuasive in his analysis of the star who would seem instead
to embody most fully the neorealist aesthetic: Anna Magnani, whose persona
reveals for Pitassio the manifold ways in which post-war culture created
authenticity.’ Crafting her ‘composite’ style, which borrowed from the theatre,
the music hall, and other forms of popular performance, Magnani skilfully

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cultivated what Pitassio identifies as the ‘close relationship between her
performing body and a popular crowd working both as a representative of the
Italian people and an audience for her expressive behaviour.’ That relationship
has never appeared with the kind of depth or clarity it does here, and with
good reason. To take it in fully, to appreciate the sophisticated on- and off-
screen operation that ensured its success, requires the kind of comprehensive
approach Pitassio adopts in this study.
    If there is a limit to Neorealist Film Culture 1945–1954, it is that the book
contains no conclusion, afterward, or epilogue, no attempt to synthesise its
arguments or to speculate about its implications for the field. The reviewer
is thus compelled, even more than usual, to conjecture. Of course, it takes
little imagination to see how, informed by Pitassio’s insights, scholarship on
neorealism will be renewed and revised, evolving to consider more films — and
much more besides film — than has been customary. Yet I would hazard to guess
that scholarship across the field of screen studies — not just neorealist, and not
just Italian — will likewise benefit from Pitassio’s countless discoveries and his
capacious methodology.

                                     [Charles Leavitt, University of Notre Dame]




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