Neorealism and Transmediality:  A Migrating Narration
10.13125/2039-6597/4276
In rethinking transmediality as a concept we are forced to address semiotics rather than linguistics, and therefore incorporate written, oral and, most of all, visual texts in a new conjuncture. This contribution explores how the Neorealist decade (1945-1956) in Italy can be assimilated to what Thomas Pavel in 1975 theorized as a “possible world” where written and visual expressions are assembled in an unprecedented form of storytelling. W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of ‘the image as agent’ illustrates how Neorealist cinema has an emotional impact capable of transcending written forms of signification, thus making new venues viable for a participated forms of reception, which are still present in later works such as Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1990) and Costanzo’s My Brilliant Friend (2018).
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Neorealism and Transmediality:  A Migrating Narration
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Mauro Pala
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Neorealism and Transmediality:  A Migrating Narration
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                   Neorealism and
                   Transmediality:
                A Migrating Narration

                               Mauro Pala



Abstract
    The lively debate on cinema, literature and the visual arts between
the two wars fed into Italian Neorealism in an intertextual way, as
emerges in Bazin’s, Zavattini’s and Deleuze’s writings on Neorealism.
The French philosopher observed how Neorealism breaks the sensory
motor connection typical of classical cinema, thus paving the way for a
cinema of pure optical situations. W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of ‘the image
as agent’ exemplifies how neorealist movies possess a lasting iconic
impact capable of affecting different medias, thus making new venues
viable for innovative intertextual narrations. The present contribution
analyses how this debate may be translated today in a multimedia
theory that orients aesthetic choices and forms of reception in a
globalized context.



Keywords
    Neorealism; Narration; Transmediality; Screenplay; Reception




Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/1437
Mauro Pala, Neorealism and Transmediality: A Migrating Narration




       Neorealism and Transmediality:
           A Migrating Narration
                                     Mauro Pala


             From Media Convergence to Neorealism

         By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple
      media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media
      industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who
      will get almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment
      experiences they want. Convergence is a word that manages to
      describe technological, industrial, cultural and social changes
      depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking
      about. (Jenkins 2006:3)

      By developing intuitions that are already embryonically present in
McLuhan’s mediacentric vision, through “media convergence” Henry
Jenkins illustrates the effects on the market of different platforms which
propose a broad range of multimedia contents, directed towards a given
public. This public may be heterogeneous in its origins, in its social
position and behavior, just as the products to which this public has
access are also disparate. It is a clientele that , at the very moment when
it expresses preference for one of these products over the others, adheres
to fashion or tendencies that coagulate, even though fleetingly in a
shared notion of taste; in this way the users / consumers also adopt a
position, with greater or lesser awareness, as regards the events of their
own time. If the product in question is a film, its market success
coincides with the deployment of its communicative potential on an




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eventual planetary scale1. This aspiration is supported by the fact that
the film, the video and the respective variants reflect the “ontology” of
the «person- produced universe» (Jameson 1992: 1) more effectively than
would be the case in other forms of expression, connected to the written
one.

         It would have to be an ontology of the visual, of being as the
     visible first and foremost, with the other senses draining off it; all
     the fights about power and desire have to take place here, between
     the mastery of the gaze and the illimitable richness of the visual
     object; it is ironic that the highest stage of civilization (thus far) has
     transformed human nature into this single protean sense. (ibid.: 1-
     2).

     Underlining the fact that the supremacy of the visual involves not
only a form of perception, Jameson cites Deleuze, who singles out the
cinema as the synthesis of movement of the physical world and the
image as a psychic reality. Thanks to the dialectic that revolves around
the movement-image, the cinema becomes the «symptom of the novelty
of an era, a novelty that, beginning with the aesthetic, ends up by
involving the whole of ontology and philosophy» (Carbone 2016: 21).
     «A film, an object we usually consider to be a self-sufficient work,
possessing a narrative with its own mode of closure, is being created
rather like a land – mine; to scatter on impact across as wide a
topographical and semantic field as possible» (Elsaesser 1998: 156): the
explosion of a mine, a programmed traumatic event having the greatest
possible range of action, is an appropriate image for describing the
operation that frames «transmedia storytelling, where film is the
primary media» (Atkinson 2019: 15).
     This is the framework and, together with it, the arrival point of the
idea that lies behind this brief intervention, whose subject is not
Neorealism, but the discourse of Neorealism. The intention is not a


     1
         See Broich – Pfister 1985.




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Mauro Pala, Neorealism and Transmediality: A Migrating Narration



historiographical one but a philological one in the Gramscian sense of
the term: namely, one has to single out the «more general ‘laws of
tendency’» (Gramsci 1975: 1429; Gramsci 1971: 428) of the neorealist
phenomenon in order to understand how the conditions in which it
developed and its interpretations settle down into common sense, on
which in the last analysis market dynamics intervene. In context, it can
be hypothesized that, from a pervasive – and controversial – ideology,
of the immediate post-war years in Italy, over a period of sixty years
Neorealism was transformed into the iconic matrix of a media narration.
This was capable of exploitation on the international circuit: by making
use of the suggestions made by movie criticism, but also by refraining
from expressing the nth value judgement on Neorealism, we are here
postulating the existence of a neorealist discourse – in the Foucauldian
meaning of the term – which has over time amplified the importance of
the phenomenon, turning it into a myth and subsuming its crucial iconic
elements in order to promote a transmedia storytelling that synthesizes
and crosses through an entire «narrative ecosystem» (Benvenuti 2017:
7). In this sense, as a «complex cultural phenomenon integrating
literature, journalism and cinema» (Balint Kovacs 2007: 253) Neorealism
constitutes a perfect case study: the merger of different means of
expression is, at one and the same time, the techné and the ideology that
qualifies it, a meld which provided the basis for the choice of Vittorio De
Sica’s classic Bicycle Thieves (1948), Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso
(1990), Saverio Costanzo’s My Brilliant Friend (2018)2; all are works
which, in different ways, relate to the psychology of perception.
Recently it has emerged that the discourse associated with Neorealism
did not come to an end with Bazin’s “resistance” reading and may
instead be also linked up to the supersession of classical psychology
such as conceived by Merleau-Ponty. This latter shifts the instrument of
our sensory consciousness from sensations, the stimulus to the activation
of the intelligence and of memory as ordering functions of experience,
to perceptions, which instead apprehend a phenomenon in its entirety,
through the senses. As he clarifies in his Phenomenology of perception,

      2
          Ladri di biciclette, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso and l’Amica Geniale are the original titles.



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Merleau-Ponty conceives a “movement” common to the various arts,
including the cinema, that is capable of stimulating «the same type of
attention and amazement […], the same will to grasp the sense of the
world or of history at it is being born» (Carbone 2016: 26-27). In a
nutshell, it is from these tendencies that there follows «the non-mimetic
nature of film neorealism» (Carbone 2016: 39), a judgment that
delocalizes the lively debate on the sense of Neorealism in the cinema,
and, as a reflection of this, on the meaning of Neorealism. Carbone’s line
of research does not stop at the formal aspect, and implicitly gives the
lie to the idea of «An Aesthetic of Reality [which] constructs Bazin’s
account of neorealism» (Fabbri 2015: 184), a cornerstone in the
reconstruction in a sociopolitical perspective of Neorealism as a faithful
mirror of the Italy of the immediate post-war years. Lorenzo Fabbri
makes a similar charge, meticulously documented and forcefully
argued, against a vision of Neorealism that is reduced to the myth of the
resistance, a vision that as the years passed ended up by hindering a
critical revisiting of the collusion of Italy with fascism: as urgent as it
was lacking, this would also include the cultural sphere. Alan O’Leary
and Catherine O’Rawe (2011) arrive at suggesting a moratorium on the
use of the very term Neorealism; this provocation of theirs is
accompanied by the claim for an Italian cinema that was not to be
monopolized in an élite sense by Neorealism at the expense of other
traditional genres such as the melodrama, the «commedia all’italiana»
or the detective movie. A reasoned assertion against the veritable
consecration – by conformist academic criticism under the aegis of the
Italian Communist Party – of Neorealism as the national film canon, as
the ambassador of Italian values in the world runs as such «While
Vittorio De Sica’s shoe shiners conquered the entire world, while
Roberto Rossellini and Giuseppe De Santis were presented in American
salons as “Open City” and “Bitter Rice”, while – that is – neorealismo
determined and defined the film image of Italy in the US and it is for this
reason that since then the US market has accepted only those Italian
films that recall that period and that style: Nuovo cinema paradiso,




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Mediterraneo, Il postino, La vita è bella and so on» (O’Leary – O’Rawe 2011:
112)3.
      Della Casa not only took note of the irresistible rise of Neorealism
to the rank of the national cinema but also observed how, thanks to the
recognition afforded by the Anglophone academy, the neorealist
paradigm oriented not only the taste of the habitués of the cinema clubs,
but also, even if only by emulation, that of the wider public. Even now
when Neorealism is anthologized in the histories of the cinema, various
Italian producers and directors try to benefit from the extraordinary
sounding box provided by Hollywood and, more or less consciously, go
back to neorealist style elements in order to satisfy the constant thirst for
an orientalist Italy, on the part of the United States audiences and on that
of the mass of world-wide spectators. O’Leary and O’Rawe also propose
afresh the question of the simultaneous presence within the neorealist
galaxy of a popular and élite use, in other words the possibility of tracing
within a work of entertainment a vision of the world and assigning a
pedagogical role to it which a certain critical tendency obstinately
denies. Precisely the problematics of the neorealist discourse accentuate
its «monstrous, in the sense of prodigious» and, at the same time,
unresolved nature (Parigi 2014 :8). These are factors that contribute to
the culturally and economically profitable metamorphic longevity of the
phenomenon, in which it is exactly «the catalogue of icons, objects,
physiognomies, landscapes which, albeit difficult to define, are
nevertheless immediately recognizable, are deployed in an easily
identifiable series, and are disseminated in time and space. We are
dealing with three linked profiles which are grafted onto each other,
involving different perspectives of analysis: history (of the cinema and
the nation), theory of forms, and social, cultural and visual studies»
(ibid.).




      3
          See also Della Casa 2001: 5.


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     Fig. 1. Bicycle Thieves


      In Stefania Parigi’s diagnosis, following on the lasting neorealist
divergence between poetics and theory even after the end of the
neorealist decade, one may reasonably hypothesize that it is precisely
hybridization as a factor of identity – an evident oxymoron – that makes
Neorealism the meeting point for a differentiated use, never in any case
related to the real and presupposing to reflect it, but having instead
recourse to symbolic practices.
      Thanks to the contribution of Zavattini, with De Sica Neorealism
had already gone through various aspects of “media convergence” and
was developing in a transmedial direction, starting from the tried-and-
tested adaptation of the literary text to the screenplay. At a distance of
forty years Tornatore added his own value to what in the meantime had
been confirmed as part of the neorealist iconic heritage for drawing up
his personal account-sheet of Italy in the 1980s; and lastly similar
stylistic elements are re-proposed as a distinctive and recognizable code
in Elena Ferrante, the premise for television serialization. Starting from
dissemination between literature, a historical perspective is adopted
which, from the globalized present looks back to the past to define the
formal constants of a neorealism that migrates through different eras,
modes and sensitivities.




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                   Neorealism and traveling theory
     Like people in flesh and blood, theories too travel, from one
situation to another, from one era to the next; this is an empirical
observation, the critical approach whose notably dialectical nature is
underlined by Edward Said. This postulate of his does not however
represent a smooth unhindered path for migration:

         such a movement into a new environment is never unimpeded.
      It necessary involves processes of representation and
      institutionalization different from those at the point of origins. This
      complicates any account of the transplantation, transference,
      circulation and commerce of theories and ideas. […] there is a set of
      conditions – call them conditions of acceptance, resistances – which
      then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its
      introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be.
      (Said 1983: 226-227)

      If the neorealist discourse worked as a traveling theory, the
weather-vane for this theory would coincide with the asymptotic nature
of the neorealist parabola, the desire to transcend the technical limits of
cinematography, in the conviction that the real hurdle to overcome for
an adequate representation of reality in the last analysis coincides with
the institution of the cinema and its productive apparatus. The neorealist
paradox is seated precisely in the spasmodic research for the
«coincidence between the character and the actor, between the person
and the character, between essence and appearance, between substance
and form» (Parigi 2014: 73), an operation in which the elimination of all
camouflaging filters between us and actual reality could – if not even
should – also include the film camera.
      While aware of not being able to realize such a radical utopia, albeit
with various tones and differentiations, public voice was given it by both
André Bazin and Cesare Zavattini: «To achieve realism, one has to be
concerned with making cinema the asymptote of reality ‘in order that
life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which



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the film finally changes it’»4. Surprisingly the “historic” critics of
Neorealism enter into dialogue with Deleuze, although from the
perspective of this latter there is no trace of the Platonic idealism and
Christian ecumenicalism that had oriented his predecessors: both in the
exegesis of Bazin and of Zavattini and in that of the poststructuralist
philosopher, an iconological enquiry with ethical implications does
however prevail: «Yet even in Deleuze’s description of neorealism as the
realm of idle time images, one can hear the silent ring of futurity.
Deleuze’s Cinema volumes, in fact, are not only a natural history, a
taxonomy of images; they are also an axiology of life» (Fabbri 2015: 192).
This is an outcome consistent with the vision of Zavattini’s world
considered in relation to film, in which the interpreters

        are no longer actors, the actor by now is finished for this type of
     cinema, but it is one of the aspects that may become normal for the
     profession of a man, the man who says ‘I have a means on my hands
     allowing me to better acquaint myself with how things go, how the
     cinema goes, and I use it in a disciplined fashion, ready for any
     reproof, since we are dealing with understanding in the gesture, in
     the act of the word, in the repeated scene and the detachment that
     emerges indeed from repetition, a moment that reveals the
     significance of our presence in the world and more precisely in
     chronicle, in everyday life, in continuity. (Zavattini 2002: 713)

     The quest for a revelatory moment, in Zavattini’s view, finds its
counterpart in the cinematography which opens towards a «more
inclusive reality» in Kracauer:

        any film narrative should be edited in such a manner that it does
     not simply confine itself to implementing the intrigue but also turns
     away from it toward the objects represented so that they may
     appear in their suggestive indeterminacy. It follows […] that
     cinematic films evoke a reality more inclusive than the one they
     actually picture. They point beyond the physical world to the extent

     4
         Bazin 1967a: 82 (in Fabbri 2015: 192).


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      that the shots or combinations of shots from which they are built
      carry multiple meanings. (Kracauer 1979: 71)

     A cinema constructed around objects (Gunert – Kimmich 2009: 13),
around the observation of their surfaces, and not their interiors, is a
choice that provocatively devalues the concept of interiority, giving rise
to the problematics bound up with the body in a mechanized modernity,
and stimulates the public to assume a role analogous to that of an
eyewitness: «Cinema had literally to undo itself to become itself, had to
abandon its putative specificity in order to get at what lay beyond it» 5.
But what lies “beyond” the cinema? The response in a nutshell is
contained in the screenplay, which reworks an atypical realist text:

          Whoever robbed my bike, the light aluminium bike, five kilos of
      it, with the semi-new tyres, their inner tubes hardly punctured, just
      once in the front one and twice in the back one, the racing handle
      bars, the carrier basket, must be a young thief just out the other day
      from Rome’s Regina Coeli prison. (Bartolini 1948: 11-12)

     While Bartolini’s short novel is not a masterpiece, after having been
put in the shade by the eponymous movie, it has not deserved to be
obliterated by the course of time. Its peculiar realist style6 is to be found
in a critical line in which one confronts the same themes that
subsequently recur in the debate on Neorealism among the film
historians. In this perspective, we were already witnessing in the
interwar period the intensification of exchanges and fusions between
heterogeneous environments, which shed doubt on that idea of a
canonic literature, with frequent connotations of nationalism, which is
associated with naturalism. The supersession of the expressionist and
high modernist positions came about thanks to the convergence
between media, beginning with the contact between prose and the
cinema. The


      5
          Andrew 2009: 85 (in Schoonover 2012: 5).
      6
          See Morreale 2008.


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        object of the novel is reality without the self. The completely
     independent reader, faced with an event that has its development,
     that has taken shape – it is up to that reader, not to the author, to
     judge. […] Given the enormous mass of reality that has been
     formed, representation requires a filmic style. The ‘treasure of
     vision’7 must flow with the greatest possible concision and
     precision. From language we must extract the highest degree of
     plasticity and vitality. The old narrative monotony is irrelevant to
     the novel: we do not recount, we construct. (Döblin 1994: 45)

     Döblin’s provocatory stance is not exhausted in the proposals for a
rupture at the technical level. But takes in the sense of art in modernity,
incapable of measuring itself against reality and transmitting a credible
perception of it: film techniques are exalted as the remedy against sterile
naturalistic conventions. The anguished appeal of the German novelist
for a supersession of literary conformism chares the same asymptotic
logic that guides Bazin’s and Zavattini’s positions, since in both cases
the demand for an aesthetic appropriate for its times requires a literature
and a cinema «which completely [revolutionize] the modes of
production» (De Vincenti 2008: 26).

         In bourgeois society, it is only with aestheticism that the full
     unfolding of the phenomenon of art became a fact, and it is to
     aestheticism that the historical avant-garde movements respond.
     The central category of ‘artistic means’ or ‘procedures’ can serve to
     illuminate this thesis. Through it, the artistic process of creation can
     be reconstructed as a process of rational choice between various
     techniques, the choice being made with reference to the effect that
     is to be attained. Such a reconstruction of artistic production not
     only presupposes a relatively high degree of rationality in artistic


     7
      “Die Darstellung erfordert bei der ungeheuren Menge des Goformten
einen Kinostil. In höchster Gedrängtheit und Präzision het die Fülle der
Gesichte vorbeizuziehen. Der Sprache das Außerste der Plastik und
Lebendigkeit abzuringen” (Döblin 1913: 3). The expression “die Fülle der
Gesichte” is a quote from Goethe’s Faust.


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      production; it also presupposes that means are freely available, i.e.,
      no longer part of a system of stylistic norms where, albeit in
      mediated form, social norms express themselves» (Bürger 2016:17)

     Bürger does not mention the main antagonist of the avant-garde,
the canon, and as the highway for renewal – meaning also ethical
renewal – points to artistic technique, whose instruments are at the
disposal of the artist according to a free rational choice, freed from the
prescriptions of any school, or of any form of state authority. It is
moreover by concentrating one’s innovative efforts on technique and
not on an abstract theorization that one arrives at the synthesis between
different forms and artistic genres 8. Against this background one
understands the importance of the detailed description of the bicycle in
Bartolini’s novel as an example of the fascination for the technological
object; neorealism in fact shares some of the founding principles of New
Objectivity (Die Neue Sachlichkeit), beginning with the fascination for
“the thing”, which

        is not taken in by the senses, but thought as a concept [bearing]
      an intellectual status […] So many temperaments and different
      ways of thinking and seeing converge in New Objectivity. For the
      moment it is useful to define a new way of being, freeing us from
      an exorbitant subjectivity, helping us to find anew a sort of reality
      […]. (Michel 2002: 43)

     As against the anti-objective and anti-figurative drives of the first
twentieth-century avant-gardes, it was the requirement of objectivity
that was dominant in the late expressionism of Weimar. «Naturalism
contraposed to one’s self. Objectivity of the interior vision […] There is
nothing I detest so much as sentimentalism. I want to establish the facts

      “The forces of Technology have the same effect on all borders, work like
      8

an eraser on the lines, make them disappear. This drive takes us into the
boundless. […] The drive for extension is documented at the same time as the
laying of endless railway tracks, telephone wires. These are newly awakened
sense organs that know no boundaries” (Döblin, 2019: 42).


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of life in such an intense and overwhelming manner that they cannot be
expressed» (Beckmann 2002: 11-12). The new formal paradigm is the
fruit of an intense dialogue between cinema and literature.



        Spiritual revolution, interior research, subjectivist delirium, cult
     (and crisis) of the self: doubt is soon shed on the cognitive frontiers
     indicated by expressionism and modernism by those who distrust
     psychology and bring man back to the materiality of the body, to
     the elementary automatism of gestures and instincts, a body
     crushed by the dis-human, perturbing inflexibility of objects and of
     the environment in which we live. (Bertoni 2007: 282)

      The outcome of the lively debate on techniques of representation
stimulates a dialectic of realism that unites the narration of Berlin
Alexanderplatz and the screenplay of Bicycle Thieves. In wandering,
alienated, through the streets of Berlin, Franz Biberkopf shares various
elements with the feverish search for the stolen bicycle, in Rome’s
markets and among her petty thieves, by Antonio (Lamberto
Maggiorani) and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola). In both works, the
relations between the individual and surrounding reality are constituent
factors in modernity’s notion of the citizen; the world and the person are
presented as mutually open systems, while finally the metropolitan
context reorients the forms of perception by applying Simmel’s lesson to
the cinema and the novel. We are not dealing with universal principles
but with the precipitate of cinema praxis in dialogue with narratology.
Both Biberkopf and Antonio in Bicycle Thieves propose



        the ordinary man, precipitated into everyday life. An individual,
     then, who is not exceptional, only normal, in whom the spectator
     may be reflected rather than identifying with. The singularity of
     this individual tends almost always to be projected within a
     community, with regard to which the person justifies their acts and
     feelings. (Parigi 2014: 74)




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     Even the endorsement of the goodness of an idea only after it has
been subjected to the scrutiny of the collectivity confirms how, both in
the construction of a naturalistic work like that of Döblin9 and in
neorealist poetics, technique is simultaneously the expression of the
aesthetic and of the ethical requirement that lies at the base of the
operation10. As Zavattini observes:

         Neorealism is always a process of non-differentiation, it aims at
      tracing common rights according to the needs of elementary life,
      and for this reason it is love of life […]. And, let us come to the
      ‘way’. How, that is, can we express this reality in the cinema? I
      would like to repeat, here too, that a content that we want to express
      always finds its technique. And then there is imagination, on
      condition however that this is exercised in reality and not in a
      limbo. (Zavattini 2002: 744)

     The faculty of the imagination firmly anchored to reality
emphasizes how that axiology of existence is not a prerogative of
Deleuze: Zavattini does not limit himself to asking, but requires the
active participation of the spectator to a projectuality firmly anchored to
the present.



         «As in the novel the aesthetic implicit in the cinema reveals itself
      in the narrative technique. […] The objectivism of the modern
      novel, by reducing the strictly grammatical aspect of its stylistics to
      a minimum, has laid bare the secret essence of style. Certain
      qualities of the language of Faulkner, Hemingway, or Malraux
      would certainly not come through in translation, but the essential
      quality of their styles would not suffer because their style is almost




      9
       “The naturalistic impulse initially asserts itself in the technical form. To
be precise, it rises to the surface in the technical form” (DÖBLIN 1994: 175)
     10 Cf. BELTING 2001.




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     completely identical with their narrative technique». (Bazin 1971:
     30-31)11

      In the osmosis between neorealism and Neue Sachlichkeit,
paradigmatic of the intermedial nature that in the first half of the
twentieth century grouped together literature, the figurative arts and
cinema, the preeminence of technique stands out, the importance
attributed to technique by all theorists and artists without exception.
Through his reflection on movement-images Deleuze constructs an
archeology of the cinema in the Foucauldian sense of the term. Bergson
had already intuited by what means reality is fixed in snapshots, which
attribute sense to reality itself, to become in this way our code of reality,
by which «we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform
and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge […]
Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we
would think becoming or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do
anything else than set going a sort of cinematograph inside us»12.




     Fig. 2. Cinema Paradiso




     11   In Italian Bazin 2019: 291.
     12
          Bergson 1911: 306 (cited in Deleuze 2016: 6).


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      The cinematograph inside us for Bergson is a metaphor and, at the
same time, a framework in which the celebrated movement-image is, to
which Deleuze attributes the epoch-making role of dividing line
between an “old realism” bound up with the motor senses and the
neorealism which «is [instead] defined by this growth of purely optical
situations (and sound ones, although at its beginnings synchronous
sound did not exist)» (Deleuze 2017: 5). There has been much discussion
of this caesura which involves not only the cinema as a device but,
rather, reorients its praxis and, indirectly, also the function based on the
Darstellung (on which he again comes close to Kracauer): expressed in
other terms, the cinema, rather than explaining, must make one see.
      A young Bazin, the future founder of Cahiers du cinema, in March
1945 invited Merleau-Ponty to give a lecture at the Hautes Études
Cinématographiques, which Bazin directed. The text was then published
under the title “Cinéma et psychologie”: «There are great classic works
which confront man from the outside as, at the same time, do the cinema,
modern psychology, and the American novel» (Carbone 2019: 269)13. The
French critic continues: «If the cinema, psychology and literature agree
in expressing man from the outside, it is not a whim of fashion, it is a
demand of the human condition that even classical art did not ignore»14
(Carbone – Dalmasso – Franzini 2013: 25-27)15. To shift the perspective
to the outside means first of all to make the character «a sort of spectator.
He moves well, runs well, is agitated, the situation in which he finds
himself goes well beyond his motor capacities, and makes him see and
feel what cannot be theoretically justified by a response or an action»
(Deleuze 2017: 5). The transformation of the character into a receptacle
of feelings which then is left to the reader/spectator to decipher abolishes
the distance between internal and external psychic and physical reality.
The cinema forces the spectator to assume an inverted perspective

      13
          Translation modified.
      14
          The text was published in Les Temps Modernes n° 26, 1947, under the
title “Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie”. (CARBONE 2017: 24)
       15 Cited in CARBONE 2019: 269t.; see CASETTI 2005.




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because what appears on the screen has only a symptomatic value as
compared with the real.
      Referring to Bicycle Thieves, Bazin links the weaknesses of the
screenplay to a vacillation of the possibility of a hermeneutic of the real:
«the events are not necessarily signs of something, of a truth of which
we are to be convinced: they all carry their own weight, their complete
uniqueness, that ambiguity which characterizes any fact. So, if you do
not have the eyes to see, you are free to attribute what happens to bad
luck, or to chance» (Bazin 2011: 65)16. As well as Bazin, Zavattini too
insisted on the fact that neorealism must constitute the “eye on the
world” and Bartolini’s novel, which inspired the film represents only «a
stage, an aspiration to a rupture at that given moment [while] the cinema
served to drive even literature to detach itself from its schemes of
narration» (Zavattini 1979: 95). This neorealism, refractory as it was to
any programming, as it was equally refractory to a rigid naturalistic
temporal reading, meant to shape itself to the contingent and fortuitous
element, since the plot negates the flow of daily life, which for Zavattini
constituted the sustenance of the real. To the uncertainty to which the
perspective of man from the outside arrived, Zavattini reacted by
emphasizing his faith in the cinema as a machine, and, concurrently, a
local prosthesis for lessening the distance between the observing subject
and the world. Purged of all its spectacular lustre, from the screenplay
to the plot, up to the actors and the scenography, what remains is the
movie-camera, fetishized in the cinema of Dziga Vertov – although
Zavattini does not mention him – in order to sanction a «visible
perception [that] is already a cognitive act. Vision is thinking, just as
thought is the visible»17.
      Summarizing the neorealist discourse it emerges that we find
ourselves faced with a movement that, over time, has transformed into
a plural sensitivity, or rather an «indiscipline» (Cometa 2020: 1), that has
transited along barely perceptible trajectories as compared with other
expressive environments, from literature to the cinema, from

     16
        In Italian Bazin 2019: 308.
     17 Arnheim 1974 (in Parigi 2006: 38).




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photography to the constantly exploding field of the new visual arts.
Intertextuality is inscribed in an ensemble that is not to be identified in
a reduced corpus of texts18, except by repressing a nature that is
dialectical and “resistantial”. The term “resistantial” is here to be
understood not in the sense of a Manichaean and exclusive identification
of Neorealism with the Resistance19, a degenerate identification,
beginning in the 1950s in a self-celebratory appropriation by the Italian
Communist Party in order to construct a rhetoric which, in the long run,
devalued the revolutionary drive embodied by the Italian antifascist
resistance movement.
      In a post-Bazin era «scholars have returned to Bazin after a period
of comparative disinterest in his works and found his question, ‘what is
cinema?, to be relevant once again as the medium weathers an identity
crisis in the aftermath of its centennial celebrations» (Schoonover 2012:
8). The reply to the question on the meaning of the cinema today
emphasizes the centrality of the reception, that consideration for the
user/spectator that constitutes the ethical substrate for the neorealist
iconic turn.

         Alongside his famously bottom-up version of image production
      and democratic semantics, Bazin grants the viewer a top-down
      perspective. The sequestering of the ethical agent he describes is a
      familiar concept, and here we have it identified with the filmgoer.
      This is a reappropriation of many Western systems of justice, which
      seek out juridical authorities (justices, juries, tribunals) who are
      simultaneously within the community and outside it, agents who
      are not actors in a community but are charged with acting for the

      18
         While taking note of what is designated the Andreotti Act of 1949 on
the reorganization of the cinema industry, and of the 1952 occupation of the
Experimental Cinema Centre (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia) by
governmental forces, as episodes in a general post-war restoration, it is
reasonable to argue that the import of neorealism went beyond a taxonomic
vision limited to the first generation of directors who may be ascribed to this
tendency (see Fabbri 2015: 186).
      19 See Fabbri 2015; O’Leary – O’Rawe 2011.




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     community. Bazin makes the case that cinema’s unique spatial and
     temporal parameters can nurture this type of observation and
     adjudication. Furthermore, he sees taking this vision to a global
     scale, and hence he expands the parameters of what we think of as
     ethical community. (Schoonover 2012 :7).

      One is then dealing with re-reading the neorealist film as a critical
elaboration of reality, a reading that cannot give up on a reflection on
the expressive means (Parigi 2014: 287), taking account of the fact that if
we identify with a genre more than with a corpus of texts 20, «already in
its terminological constitution itself, neorealism seems to put in close-up
the relation between the old and the new. The entire lexis that it uses in
the attempt to give itself an identity presents this double nature, this
ambiguous oscillation between present and past» (ibid.: 304).




     Fig. 3. Cinema Paradiso


     20
        Within the limits of competence and space, this revisitation of the
neorealist discourse refers mainly to the idea of the movement as an “ethic of
the aesthetic” (see Miccichè 1999), while granting undoubted anthropological
and historiographical merits to other lines of research that are more
typologically oriented (see Farassino 1989).


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     And, in effect, neorealism plays on this ambivalence, criticizing the
productive mechanism of the film industry and, simultaneously
surprising us – as a neorealist discourse – exactly in the invention of new
film styles, that are important even against the background of the
current mediatic convergence (Forgacs 2008: 47).



The neorealist discourse between awareness and brand
      In many ways, the ambivalent but at the same time technically
centrifugal discourse of neorealism, a compendium of its theatrical,
literary and, obviously, filmic components anticipates multimediality.

         If we give the same meaning to both occurrences of ‘media’ in
      the expression ‘multimedia media’ we get something as difficult to
      conceive of as a set that is a member of itself, which is a well-known
      paradox in logic. But people have no trouble understanding the
      expression ‘multimedia media’, because they spontaneously
      interpret the two uses of media differently – the first (in
      multimedia) in a semiotic sense and the second (in media) in a
      technological or cultural sense. (Ryan 2014: 26).

     Alice Bell and Marie Laure Ryan do not need to clarify what
multimediality consists of, in that the phenomenon is already common
knowledge in their field: it has already for some time been metabolized
at the global level. The problem that they pose regards the meeting
between semiosis and technology21, in other words, what type of
narration can originate from the indispensable condition of the
technology being used.

         The question of fiction, long taken for granted, suddenly
      becomes worthy of attention. It also means the rehabilitation of the
      question of truth and reference with respect to fiction, a question
      that was either undecidable, heretical, or too easily resolved in a

      21
           See Murray 2017.


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     one-world model. […] we can interpret statements made in
     language with respect to various fields of reference or universes of
     discourse. If we call these fields ‘worlds’ the statement presupposes
     the existence of multiple worlds with respect to which the truth of
     propositions can be evaluated. (Bell – Ryan 2019: 2-3).

     In the techniques used and the discourse that informs them, two
works such as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso and Saverio
Costanzo’s My Brilliant Friend prefigure what Bell and Ryan presuppose,
namely an “Unwelt”, or an innovative ecology of the media, a new
synthesis between gaze, images22 and media devices (Cometa 2020: 293).
     Bicycle Thieves invites us to rethink the opposition high culture
versus mass culture in such a way that the emphasis on evaluation to
which it has traditionally given rise – the binary system of value which
distinguishes between popular culture as more authentic and high
culture as autonomous and, therefore, utterly incomparable to a
simplistic mass culture, does not hold true.
     This is precisely the point on which Bicycle Thieves meets Giuseppe
Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso in English).
Tornatore’s Academy award-winning movie evokes remembering,
childhood and adolescence, an intense sensory experience through film,
once again with a focus on the fabulous Neorealist decade, seen through
the eyes of another child – after Bruno –, Toto, the protagonist, who falls
in love with cinema and forms a bond with the projectionist of the
theatre, Alfredo (Philip Noiret). Alfredo, who works at the Nuovo
Cinema Paradiso, becomes a father figure to the boy, and teaches him
about the cinema. We see the progression of cinema, with Toto
eventually becoming filmmaker himself and, at the same time, an
unconscious translator of that American way of life epitomized by
Hollywood, which already in 1943 had lured his fellow citizens.




     22
          See Freedberg 1989.



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Mauro Pala, Neorealism and Transmediality: A Migrating Narration




      Fig. 4. My Brilliant Friend


      Italy in 1990 had little in common with the war ruins and rubble
from the late 1940s. Lastly, the Southern problem remains unresolved
and Toto, who, as a Sicilian makes a career in Northern Italy, dramatizes
this issue as he gets back home as member of that new urban class well
on the road to becoming the dominant section in Italian society. The talk
on the phone between Salvatore (Tore) and the love of his youth Elena
show how lost love and romantic dreams do not come true, making
obvious the gap between what could have been and what has really
happened. Tore has thwarted his adolescence and youth, cutting ties
with his family in exchange for fame and fortune. His transition from
Cinema Paradiso’s movie projector to his own activity as professional
movie maker epitomizes the meaning of Italian modern history
according to Tornatore: the country has not worked through its past in
order to come to terms with its present and the related cultural
contradictions. But the final explosion of the old building hosting the
Cinema Paradiso – reminiscent of the close of Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point – tells also another story. This story could be narrated
through a bottom- up approach, such as in Edward Branigan’s Narrative
Comprehension, «that analyses local strategies of subjective
representation in order to arrive at the global structure of a given
narrative» (Ryan – Thon 2014: 69) but also in more philological and


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conventional forms (e.g. in Genette’s palimpsest) and in this case we can
easily detect that a “media convergence” as conceived by Jenkins
(Jenkins 2006) had already taken place with both De Sica, and Tornatore,
the latter one telling the same story as first, rather focusing, in his case,
on the mimetic qualities of the cinematic medium.
      De Sica is explicitly indebted to photojournalism and a school of
cinema which imagined new forms of producing the event shooting
outdoor, thus adopting new categories of temporality and causality,
which also preside over what will come to be thought as reality. Indeed,
such narratives must eventually produce both the reference and the
referent of the real, of the ‘objective’ or ‘external’ world, which may
undergo decisive modifications in other modes of production. At the
same time, the realism that De Sica and Tornatore share must cancel
while producing, and at an outer limit must seek to cancel itself as fiction
in the first place. There is no better example of this procedure than the
dialogue between Alfredo and Toto as a child, as the experienced
projectionist cuts sections of the film – those which feature kisses or
anything possibly related to erotism – acting as a narrator producing
and sorting out stories for his storytelling. We should not forget that the
façade of the building where Cinema Paradiso is located closely
resembles that of a baroque church: religious and secular authorities
compete for the souls of the local audience. After all, also in Bicycle
Thieves Antonio got a job for putting up movie posters. The decade of
neorealism is the perfect location and template for these epistemological
experiments.
      Why did a female author, Elena Ferrante, seeking recognition and
fame end, with My Brilliant Friend, as a realist author instead of opting
for some flamboyant version of postmodernism? The reason, once again,
can be found in De Sica. There is a crowd in the background, but only a
man and his male son in the centre. In scrutinizing Italian social history
Paul Ginsborg notes: «there is [a] theme upon which I have tried to
concentrate in particular. It is that of the relationship between family
and society. Attachment to the family has probably been a more constant
and less evanescent element in Italian popular consciousness than any
other» (Ginsborg 1990: 2).


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      Ferrante needs to return to the foundational experience of the
neorealist decade to validate a new gender perspective for interpreting
a culture and a worldview which represent the stigma of the South. The
two protagonists, Elena and Lila, experience through Don Achille a
sense of the past, in which «the images of dark cellars and hidden spaces
evoke an underworld where all is mysterious and frightening: Italy’s
dark past of fixed social classes, poverty, lack of opportunity, and abuse
of power. When Lila deliberately throws Elena’s doll through the grate
of Don Achille’s cellar, they are forced to descend in the hellish
underworld to retrieve it. Ferrante spares no effort in conveying the little
girls’ terror» (Bullaro – Love 2016: 21). It is still the grim image of
Neaples in the aftermath of World War Two. «I felt under the soil of my
sandals objects that squeaked, glass, gravel, insects. All around were
things not identifiable, dark masses, sharp or square or round. The faint
light that pierced the darkness sometimes fell on something
recognizable: the skeleton of a chair, the pole of a lamp… fruit boxes… I
got scared by what seemed to be a soft face… those are moments which
are stamped into memory. I am not sure, but I must have let out a cry of
real terror… I continued to tremble and moan with fear» (Ferrante 2012:
55). «In Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels the reader is offered the privilege
of sharing the mental states, the interiority of those have lived this
transformation» (Bullaro – Love 2016: 16).
      Gianpiero Brunetta confers on Giuseppe Tornatore the
“cinematographic citizenship” of “icononaut” and able, as such, to
«assimilate all the syntactic and prosodic forms and to move at all levels
of narration by image» (Brunetta 2020: 300-301). Tornatore deserves
consideration as a global director since, beyond his undoubted iconic
expertise (before becoming a director he was a skilled photographer),
and as well as putting us on our guard against correlated risks, his movie
anticipates the tendencies of the multimedia spectacle 23 in which the
spectators, on the basis of their tastes, are called on to evaluate the
correctness or adequacy of the “statements” which comprise the “work
of fiction”. In the main scene of Cinema Paradiso a stunned crowd

      23
           See Bartsch 2019: 179-200.


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witnesses the demolition by dynamite of the building housing the
cinema. That explosion not only brings to an end the reassuring and
compensatory role played by so many films before a public that loved
the place, but also heralds the end of the utopian drive «of the expanded
cinema […], always involved in reflecting on how to fully develop its
own possibilities, and for this reason intent on looking beyond its
immediate horizons» (Somaini 2011; XVI). A reflection such as the one
that characterizes canonic neorealism and culminates in the hypothesis
of a cinema-symptom, and of a spectator educated to a “thinking vision”
is to be excluded. Tornatore’s and Costanzo’s neorealism is a «second
semiological system» (Barthes 1978: 197), a modern mythologeme
within which «culture itself and its sphere and social function undergo
radical and dialectic modifications from one historical moment to
another» (Jameson 1992: 214); the strategy of these directors, active in
different periods but both of them interpreters of that evolution that
over the course of thirty years, has made a genre of neorealism. Various
qualifying elements in this sense, from the setting in the Mezzogiorno
through the landscapes, to the physiognomy of the characters and the
photography converge in a textual synergy that is competitive on the
world media market thanks in part to the aura of historical neorealism.
«Neorealist cinema promoted a set of visual features on a transnational
market and in global discourses. Its fame was due in part to them, which
first struck contemporary viewers and then was enshrined in historical
memory» (Pitassio 2019: 212). Neither Cinema Paradiso nor My Brilliant
Friend have, nor aim at having, the same dramatic charge of Godard’s
Histoires(s); however, in these productions, as in Godard’s reflections,
neorealism functions as a semantic substrate which «does not indicate
the recognition of a movement, of a group, but is rather a stylistic label
associated with a certain number of values» (Schifano 2008: 216).
      In particular Costanzo and the author – or the consortium of
authors – known as Elena Ferrante are well aware of the close
relationship between image and value. The serial saga of My Brilliant
Friend calls neorealism into question indirectly, and avoids proposing
afresh the nth documentary on post-war Italy and the related sensitivity:
«What is at stake, then, is not some proposition about the organic unity


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[of that period] but rather a hypothesis about the rhythm and dynamics
of that fundamental situation» (Jameson 1988:179). The outcome is a
narration strongly imprinted with the characteristics of television, which
gives pride of place to rhythm rather than to the continuity of the
historicist approach, and one that entrusts itself to image more than to
acting, drawing on an ideal neorealist archive that, though without an
apologetic intention, is effective as a consciousness of national identity.
Elena Ferrante satisfies «the immediacy which characterizes television
[such as] exemplified with great clarity by soap opera serials» (Bolter –
Grusin 2003: 220) and constitutes the primary value of this
communicative modality, on which the name of brand, crucial for the
promotion of the television serial, depends. In the second place, albeit
closely bound to the primary aspect, is the capacity to orient the
production on the basis of the relationship between spectator and the
media means: «to make the relationality of image and beholder the field
of investigation. The idea is to make pictures less scrutable, less
transparent: also to turn analysis of pictures towards questions of
process affect, and to put into question the spectator position: what does
the picture want from me or from ‘us’ or from ‘them’ or from whoever?»
(Mitchell 2005: 49).
      Placing the accent on the agency between user and media, Mitchell
criticizes a modus operandi of «Media ecology» (Scolari 2019: 323), an
emanation of «Transmedia commodification» (Kerchy 2019: 225). We
cannot limit ourselves to the formal and organizational aspects of an
initiative such as that of Elena Ferrante, as demonstrated by the militant
feminist criticism of Grace Russo Bullaro. Faced with Jenkins’s optimism
on the hoped-for annulment24 «of the distinction between producer and
user, within a universe of widespread co-authorship and creativity»
(Benvenuti 2017: 15), Mitchell observes that «vision and visual images,
things that (to the novice) are apparently automatic, transparent, and
natural, are actually symbolic constructions, like a language to be


       «In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told,
      24

every brand gets told, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media
platform» (Jenkins 2006: 3).


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learned, a system of codes that interposes an ideological veil between us
and the world» (Mitchell 2005: 344).
      Conceding that, with a limited sample and summary analysis such
as the present one, it would not have great sense to draw up a balance-
sheet of neorealism, I would argue that Mitchell’s acute remarks are
pertinent to the discursive analysis of neorealism beginning with the
choice, among the various possible meanings of the lemma, of an
«[attitude which] functions as a continually reactivated space of
memory» (Parigi 2014: 335). Mitchell’s reference to the spatial dimension
of theory underlines this «new attitude towards reality» (Zavattini 2002:
741). «Consciousness [that] is awareness of the differences between
situations, awareness too of that fact that no system of theory exhausts
the situations out of which it emerges or to which it is transported» (Said
1983: 242). The resistance to theory as an effect of “traveling theory” is
translated for neorealism into a scopic regime which, although
maintaining it to be essential, transcends the technological basis of the
phenomenon25. The dialectic between common sense and technological
innovation, the «physiology of vision and the social and technological
dimension of the devices» (Cometa 2020: 127) go, rather, in the direction
formulated by Reinhart Koselleck of an “identity crisis” and a “culture
of transition”: «neorealist cinema marks a rupture from which a
different way of articulating cinematic discourse and narrative emerged,
the primacy of recording and representing over storytelling, which gave
way to ambiguity and narrative indeterminacy and a new mode of film
production» (Pitassio 2019: 18-19). From these elements there emerge the
outlines of an innovative episteme, a productive contradiction and, with
this, a cultural cypher for the nation of which neorealism is a metonym.




     25
        «Paying attention to mise-en-scène, narrative technique, acting,
cinematography, and location, Wagstaff (Wagstaff 2007) ascertains that
neorealist films abide by the laws of genre that govern conventional
filmmaking» (Fabbri: 186).


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                              Filmography
Bicycle Thieves, Dir. De Sica Vittorio, Italy, 1948.
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1990.
My Brilliant Friend, Dir. Saverio Costanzo, Italy, 2018.



                              The Author
Mauro Pala

    Full Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Ca-
gliari (Italy), has studied at the University of Cagliari, Columbia Univer-
sity and FU Berlin. He has been a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at
the University of Notre Dame, Visiting Professor at the Universities of
Aarhus, Limoges, UAM (Mexico City) and Guest Professor at the Uni-
versity of Malta. He has published extensively on European Romanti-
cism, Critical theory, Cultural studies and Postcolonial studies.

      Email: pala@unica.it



                               The Article
Date sent: 15/07/2020
Date accepted: 20/10/2020
Date published: 30/11/2020



                       How to cite this article
Pala, Mauro, “Neorealism and Transmediality: A Migrating Narration”,
Transmediality / Intermediality / Crossmediality: Problems of Definition, Eds.
H.-J. Backe, M. Fusillo, M. Lino, with the focus section Intermedial Dante:




                                                                               147
Mauro Pala, Neorealism and Transmediality: A Migrating Narration



Reception, Appropriation, Metamorphosis, Eds. C. Fischer and M. Petricola,
Between, X.20 (2020), www.betweenjournal.it




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