Labor Intensive

La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) took Luchino Visconti to Aci Trezza on Sicily. Far more documentary in style than the other neo-realist films, The Earth Trembles relies on a completely nonprofessional cast. Visconti explained the day's shooting to the villagers and used ambient sound, allowing the people to speak their dialect (necessitating subtitles even for the rest of Italy). The film is loosely based on Giovanni Verga's novel, I Malavoglia (The House of the Medlar Tree). When an island family risks their savings to buy a boat and fish for themselves, they struggle to pay it off, fishing in bad weather until a storm destroys their boat. Classically organized - Visconti was a veteran of opera - the film allowed him to linger on a cyclical life on the verge of disappearance (Orson Welles once noted that Visconti photographed fishermen as if they were Vogue models.) He used deep focus shots, lighting only the nighttime fishing scenes, showing their lives as an organic whole, with each aspect accorded value. The extremely spare soundtrack comprises few words, several silences, sometimes only the peal of bells and little music. And yet there's a timeless and deeply mythic quality to the film, its emphasis on the honor and dignity that had been attached to a life earned from the unpredictable sea.

Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946)

Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) begins outside Rome, in a kind of idyll of the countryside. Two shoeshine boys set aside what they've earned to buy a horse. Back in the narrow and unforgiving streets of Rome, they're roped into a blackmarket deal that goes sour. Nabbed by the authorities, they're sent to a juvenile prison, their friendship strained nearly to breaking. After an escape, one of them accidentally dies, his death blamed on his friend. De Sica kept his exposition short, detailing the boys' existences through carefully composed scenes such as their neighboring prison cells, each one headed for a different fate. Opening and closing with the horse, De Sica shows the freedom that's denied these two boys. His use of nonprofessionals allowed him to draw natural, seemingly improvised performances from his actors and remain, in his term, "faithful to the character."

This is especially true of his next feature, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), the leading roles of father and son occupied by two nonprofessionals. (David O. Selznick was willing to back the film, but only with Cary Grant as lead, an offer De Sica fortunately had the confidence to refuse.) When the bicycle he needs to do his job is stolen, the young father and son scour Rome to find it; the father is finally driven to steal a ride of his own.

De Sica orchestrated the film carefully, shooting some scenes with multiple cameras and drawing attention to its existence as fiction, not a documentary. Bazin termed it the "only valid Communist film of the whole past decade" and the film was often seen as simply a criticism of working conditions in Italy at the time, when unemployment stood at 25 percent. But unlike the clearcut moralizing of Rossellini's films, De Sica's works focus on a humanist sense of individual and mass. Bicycle Thieves has a mythic feel, the father ultimately forced into thievery, each moral quandary no sooner solved than De Sica poses yet another, the father sympathetic but flawed.

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948)

Italian audiences hardly embraced these new films. To be shown their country in such stark terms made the majority very unhappy. It even became part of the law: the Andreotti Law (1949), named for its author Giullio Andreotti, offered subsidies for those who followed the neo-realist style in a manner "suitable... to the best interests of Italy," but with the proviso that they avoid the blemishes on Italian life.

Legislation had little immediate effect on what was made, though the stories began to reflect the scramble for work and stability that defined this period. Visconti's terrific Bellissima (1951) centers on a daughter and fanatic stage-mamma, the inimitable Magnani, eager to get her modestly talented daughter a spot in a movie. To her husband's dismay, she squeezes every extra penny into lessons and cosmetic improvements for the little girl. Ultimately, the mother all but puts herself on the market to get the recognition she's convinced will make life worth living. Set in a working-class Roman neighborhood, Bellissima gives rare insight into how provincial big-city life could be, each neighborhood a virtual small town, the neighbors sometimes helpful, often petty and jealous of any advantage. Though not traditionally considered a neo-realist film, Bellissima did focus on people's lives in the wake of war, the sense of wanting to better oneself and the struggle to find a way out of the grind of poverty. It becomes yet more poignant in this context.

Umberto D.

This sense of Rome as a small town is especially acute in Umberto D. (1951), which was De Sica's favorite film and is in many ways the masterpiece of neo-realism, an overall superb piece of work. The crisis-filled days of a pensioner, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti), and the complications of his relationship with his dog and a young maid in his apartment building become a study in the difficult drama that constitutes an ordinary life. As played by a dignified nonprofessional - a professor, who, in the event, was often subsequently taken for his character on the street - Umberto D. is stodgy, fussy, irritating and curiously sympathetic. Unlike other films of the era, this was shot nearly entirely in the Cinécittà studios. The indignities of the family-less and indigent old-age are laid out with sensitivity but not sentimentality. Umberto is vulnerable and all but invisible, barely distinguishing himself in a crowd of protesting pensioners, desperately trying to maintain his independence and self-respect. There is no real plot other than the minuscule and life-shaping crises of late-life impoverishment. Even the end strikes a melancholy note of ambiguity.

And Suddenly It Was Over

Giuseppe De Santis's Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) was described at the time as the "last gasp of the neo-realist movement." Like Obsession, its strongest overt influences are American films - noir and westerns and even a hint of musicals). It introduced audiences to a smoldering Sylvana Mangano, who played a rice weeder. By the hundreds they descended on the Piemonte region in the postwar years and into the 1960s. The brutally exhausting work demanded precision, suited, as the voice-over states, to the delicate "hand that rocks the cradle or threads the needle." Mangano's characters long to go to America, where she's sure "everything is electric."

In Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), De Sica kept to neo-realism's focus on the marginalized mass, but his approach marked a break with just about every other neo-realist premise. Miracle in Milan is a kind of neo-fantasy. He showed postwar conditions and real locations - in this case, the run-down outskirts of Milan - the dreariness leavened with make-believe. When his foster mother (Emma Grammatica) gives him a white dove, Toto (Francesco Golisano) can suddenly grant the wishes of his neighbors in the periferia or shantytown where they live. De Sica jettisoned chronological time, replacing logic with magic. And yet, this has some of the grittiest urban landscapes of any of its contemporaries, the long shots of the shantytowns conveying a sense of how imprisoned the characters are. De Sica termed it a "fairy story and only intended as such," yet the film had the unintended effect of essentially signalling neo-realism's official end.

A Long Shadow

In general, people look backwards when talking about neo-realism, acknowledging its roots, according it artifact status. But the films stand on their own even without the movement they've come to represent. More important, they pointed out new directions for filmmakers in Italy and elsewhere. Both Fellini and Antonioni worked on neo-realist films and even in Fellini's later, extremely fanciful work and Antonioni's brooding studies of men and women, there's a similar urge to document Italy's social realities.

Among the filmmakers influenced by Italian neo-realism are the French New Wave, Dogme 95 and, as Images writer Chris Norton points out, the Los Angeles School of Black Independent Filmmakers (known as the L.A. School). The latter include directors such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima and Julie Dash, all of whom have at some level addressed the working-class experience in America with methods borrowed or inspired by neo-realism.

Even such apparent non neo-realists as Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Gianni Amelio and Lina Wertmüller carry over the ideas of neo-realism with their emphasis on class conflicts (the eternal north/south tension) and use of non-professional actors, particularly children, to great effect.

The last word on this goes to Fellini. He agreed in principle, he said, with the neo-realist idea of taking films from life but he redefined it for himself as "looking at reality with an honest eye - but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him." Fellini taps into the essence of neo-realism, the reason the films of that particular era still appeal and the reason they continue to inspire: they address the human condition which, despite technological advances and special effects, remains very much what it was when these filmmakers took to the streets and captured what surrounded them.

For almost as long as GreenCine has been around, we've been tremendously fortunate to have an active, prolific and insightful cinephile in our midst, Eoliano. And his specialty, if his user name hasn't tipped you off, is Italian cinema. Which is why we're going to do something a little different with the recommendations on this primer; all comments come from his outstanding list, "Cinema Italiano."

• Ossessione (Obsession, 1942). "This masterful first film by Visconti is the best adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice; banned by the fascists because it did not conform to their ideals, it finally hit the screens in Italy after the war."

Roma: città aperta

• Roma: città aperta (Open City, 1946). "Rossellini's landmark neo-realist film is a gripping drama of noble proportions; one that cries out against man's inhumanity and cruelty to man, and an anti-fascist drama of unforgettable power and sweep."

• Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946). "An early testament of neo-realism, Sciuscià is a moving film about friendship, loyalty and betrayal, but it's also an outcry against war and poverty, and its most innocent victims, children."

• Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947). "Rossellini's look at the aftermath of WW II Germany through the eyes of an innocent, young boy, who is left to survive among the rubble, only to find that there's no future for him; this is a heartbreaking film, cathartic, though ultimately depressing."

• Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948). "De Sica's heartrending neo-realist masterpiece never ceases to please."

La Terra Trema

• La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). "An epic tale about Sicilian fishermen struggling to be masters of their own lives. This film almost seems like a documentary, and it's no wonder that assistant director Francesco Rosi went on to make such brilliant films like Salvatore Guiliano."

• Umberto D. (1951). "DeSica's touching, beautifully realized portrait of an elderly pensioner down on luck in post WWII Rome. Umberto's struggle to survive, along with his dog, Flike, is at times heartbreaking, and thankfully, occasionally amusing. A neo-realist masterpiece."

One more recommendation: Martin Scorsese's My Voyage to Italy. It's on Disc 1 that Scorsese discusses the masterworks of Italian neo-realism (though you'll probably find the continuation of the journey on Disc 2 irresistible as well). A fair word of warning: Scorsese's vital analyses, personal and professional in equal measure, depend quite a bit on showing you great swaths of the films he discusses, beginnings, middles and ends. Spoilers don't seem to be an issue for Scorsese here, and so, if your interest in any particular films has been sparked here, watch them first. Then, tune into the perspective of a director who loves them.