Neorealismo
Italian Neorealism
When Fascism and the war ended, Italian studios were damaged and money was scarce. Directors therefore took their cameras into the streets, cast people who had never acted, and told stories about the unemployed, children and the poor.
Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini became the movement's theorist: cinema, he argued, should look at ordinary daily life rather than invent spectacle. Thus a style born of necessity turned into an ethics of looking.
- Real locations
- Non-professional actors
- Post-war poverty
- Zavattini
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01
Roberto Rossellini 1945
Roma città aperta
Rome, Open City
Shot in a Rome barely out of the occupation: a resistance leader and a priest against the Gestapo.
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02
Roberto Rossellini 1946
Paisà
Paisan
Six episodes following the Allied advance up Italy, from Sicily to the Po delta.
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03
Vittorio De Sica 1946
Sciuscià
Shoeshine
Two shoeshine boys in Rome are pulled into the black market and end up in a juvenile prison.
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04
Vittorio De Sica 1948
Ladri di biciclette
Bicycle Thieves
Start hereA man needs his bicycle to keep a new job. When it is stolen, he and his son search all of Rome for it.
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05
Luchino Visconti 1948
La terra trema
The Earth Trembles
The fishermen of Aci Trezza, played by locals speaking their own Sicilian, loosely based on Verga's novel I Malavoglia.
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06
Vittorio De Sica 1952
Umberto D.
Umberto D.
A retired civil servant and his dog face poverty and eviction. It is often seen as the movement's last great film.