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DAVID THORBURN: Our topic today is the influential movement
called Italian neorealism, a movement of filmmakers that
arose in Italy at the end of the Second World War
and had-- although it was a very short lived movement,
lasted only six or seven years before it kind of dissolved
of its own way.
In part, incidentally, because although the films were
very successful with critics and several of the neorealist films
won Academy Awards as the best foreign film of the year
in 1946 and then again in 1948 when the film
you're going to see tonight, Bicycle Thieves,
won the reward.
Despite that acclaim and even global success,
the movement sort of petered out,
although its influence as I've suggested was very great.
One reason the movement petered out
was that forces in Italian society,
chambers of commerce types, people
who are interested in encouraging
the rebuilding of the devastated cities of Italy,
a function, a consequence of the Second World War,
those folks began to feel that the messages coming
from neorealist films were too negative
and were discouraging foreign investors.
So although it was a very remarkable movement,
it lasted only, as I say, a short time.
But its influence ramified very, very, very broadly.
We can trace its influence to virtually every national cinema
that came after it, and there are certain very particular
influences that one can trace from the neorealist movement
to certain American directors of film noir in the '40s
and early '50s, to certain very interesting and historically
curious forms of television that emerged
in the early years of American television
that were deeply imitative of and influenced
by Italian neorealist movies.
The man that many would identify as the greatest
of all Indian directors, Satyajit Ray,
was directly inspired to make movies by The Bicycle Thief,
and he made a series of three films that are essentially
a form of Italian neorealism moved to India,
a wonderful trilogy of films, some of them
actually about the untouchable classes in India,
called The Apu Trilogy.
And they remain among the most treasured forms of Indian film.
The Italian neorealist had a profound influence
on other European cinemas as well,
and most particularly can be said
to be the originating movement behind the French Nouvelle
Vague, The New Wave movement, that in France that
emerges at the end of the '50s and the early '60s
and it involved such now recognized,
such directors who are now recognized
as major figures in the history of film
as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.
So it was although a short-lived movement, profoundly
influential one, and it produced some enduring, and beautiful,
and I guess I would say immortal films.
The most famous and perhaps in some ways the most perfect
of those films is the one you're going to see tonight,
Bicycle Thieves.
And I'll talk a bit about that film in my introduction
to the lecture this evening.
I want to begin, though, by giving you
a sense of how neorealism feels, a kind of distilled version,
or a distilled embodiment of many of the deepest
principles of neorealism, and in order
to do that, I want to show you a clip from the very beginning
of the film you're going to see tonight.
So you'll see this beginning twice.
Hopefully, the second time you see it,
you'll be alive, more alive to some of its implications.
So here is the very opening of Bicycle Thieves.
And one of the things I want to ask you to watch for
is first how much information, how much visual information,
dramatic information, becomes available to you
under the titles, and then how fluently and fluidly the film
moves out of the title sequence into a kind of continuation
of the drama that's articulated in that title sequence.
On the surface, this little anecdote
at the very beginning of the film seems very modest
and one might even think of it as simply expository, that
is providing information to the audience
so that they can get on with the story.
As I hope you'll recognize, and as I'll try to show you briefly
after I've shown you the clip, much more is going on
than that, and it's a particularly wonderful example
of the way in which the best neorealist films generate
a kind of texture, a kind of density, what I've sometimes
called a multiplicity that we have suggested in this course
is one of the fundamental ways in which you can distinguish
between entertainment and serious entertainment
or between entertainment and art.
When items and objects begin to have this multiplicity, when
they begin to serve multiple functions, not just
a single function, you're in the presence of something
not only complex, but something that
acknowledges the complexity of the world in some respects.
And this opening sequence of Bicycle Thieves
does this with remarkable economy.
So here's the beginning of the film.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
DAVID THORBURN: Great.
Can you freeze it for a second?
One thing I should mention while you're
watching this, to interrupt the sequence for a moment.
The activity that you see taking place under the titles
is supposed to be confusing at first.
Although, after a while it begins to clarify.
Perhaps you're not fully clear what
is going on until the titles disappear
and you see these men assembling around that staircase there
where a man with a list is speaking to them.
What is going on here is what in the United States in the '40s
and '50s on the docks in New York, they called the shape up.
And a shape up is a place where men
who are eager for work sort of come and hang around and wait
for the boss, the foreman, or the hiring boss
to pick them out of the crowd.
Shape ups are always unpleasant experiences
because there are many people who are excluded,
and the people who are chosen are often--
this was especially true on the New York waterfront
in the days which I know about because my father was
a longshoreman for a while.
It was a particularly bad thing in the New York waterfront
because you had to know somebody to get work.
I don't know if that's an implication here or not.
Although, you'll see as the men complain that some of them
have that suspicion.
In any case, what's going on here
is what is called a shape up.
Men are gathered around, men who are unemployed,
looking for work.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
DAVID THORBURN: I wish I could let the scene run on.
But I hope you, I hope you-- I can tell some of you
are responding to what you saw there.
Make some observations about what you saw there.
What in that introduction what do we learn as an audience?
You have to be fast.
I only have a few minutes here.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Is there a way for [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID THORBURN: All right.
One thing we know is that there's
a lot of unemployment in this country, a lot, right?
And there's a lot of discontent.
And then the minute he says, I don't have a bicycle,
virtually everyone else in the crowd says, I have a bicycle.
Everyone is desperate for a job, not just Ricci.
That's right.
So we learn how grateful he is, but also how troubled he is.
What's the evidence in the film that he is really very
unhappy, very, very troubled by the fact
that he doesn't have a bicycle to get this job after so long?
What's the most dramatic piece of evidence
we see that he's distracted by his anxiety?
Help?
AUDIENCE: He doesn't help her with the water.
DAVID THORBURN: He doesn't help his wife with the water.
Yes.
It's a very dramatic scene, isn't it?
She's walking behind him, carrying these two heavy--
and he doesn't ignore because he's a nasty patriarch who
thinks that women should carry water,
he's so distracted he doesn't notice it.
And, in fact, he walks down that little incline
and looks back and sees her struggling, goes back,
and as soon as he recognizes it, he takes one from her.
And it's significant, isn't it, that he takes only one
from her.
They're really partners.
And what else is significant?
She doesn't yell at him.
She doesn't say, my god, Ricci, what kind of a pig
are you, making me carry all this stuff by myself?
because she shares his anxiety and his concern, doesn't she?
So on the surface, the scenes certainly
dramatizes Ricci's desperate need for a job and the fact
that he's one of many people in a similar situation.
But what does it tell us about his marriage?
On the basis of these details, what you just
saw in this beginning, do you think
he has a good marriage, that he has
a good relationship with his wife,
that it's a mutually trusting relationship?
Of course, of course, right?
And how do we know that?
We know that from that detail.
Now, the detail does not advance the plot
in the sense of telling us anything further
about his need for the bicycle or his unemployment,
but it does reveal to us something about their marriage,
about the kind of man he is, about the kind of woman she is.
So that it's a moment in which his anxiety about his job
is maybe the primary thing we see,
but what is also dramatized for us
is the nature of their relationship.
And it's dramatized for us without anyone
coming out and saying, let me show you
a mutually engaged couple who depend on each other
and who survive in part because they
share each other's troubles.
People whose respect for each other
is so total that even when one of them
commits a really mean or at least an unpleasant act
by ignoring his wife struggles, she doesn't even
think to complain to him about it,
because she shares his anxiety.
It's an example of what I mean by a moment of multiplicity
in which something about their relationship, something
about their marriage emerges even as we are also learning
something about the economic circumstances in which
these characters live.
Say a little bit more about the scene you saw.
How about the place where she's drawing water?
What about that?
Why would-- They're in a city.
They're walking, in fact, to a high rise apartment
house in which they live.
What does it mean that she's carrying two buckets of water
to an apartment and then she's going
to climb up four flights or three flights
to get to their apartment?
What does that tell us about Mussolini's Italy?
AUDIENCE: There's no running water.
DAVID THORBURN: There's no running water in the building,
in the high rise apartments.
And not just that, is the water precious?
How do you know it is?
AUDIENCE: She doesn't leave it there.
DAVID THORBURN: Say?
AUDIENCE: She doesn't leave it there.
DAVID THORBURN: Yes.
But what else?
Where do they get the water?
Is the water-- do they go to a pop in the open square?
No.
It's in a barbed wire compound.
Again, these details may not register instantly as deeply
significant, but think what they tell us
about the conditions of urban life in Rome in 1947 or 1948
when the film is set.
And you can even go further.
Look more closely at the setting.
Did anything grow there?
It looked like they were walking across a wasteland of mud,
except for these high rise tenement buildings.
So we have high rise tenement buildings set down
in a kind of desert, a place in-- buildings that don't even
have running water in which the main water pump has
to be protected by barbed wire.
So that it's almost as if in this brief introduction
to the film, the whole socioeconomic environment
of the story has been established for us
without anyone giving us lectures about it
or calling our attention to it.
That's what I mean by multiplicity,
when the details of the film serve character and serve plot
and serve our sense of the environment.
So it's a rich moment.
It's a moment, it's a moment of art.
It's a moment of complexity.
It's a moment of human truthfulness
that resonates for us as the film goes on.
Well, there are many, many moments like this.
Virtually every moment in Bicycle
Thieves has this kind of density or texture,
has this kind of implication built
into the particular details.
I want to very quickly set the kind of the context
for-- I've already implied the context
for the neorealist movement.
The basic context is the end of World War II.
Most historians trace the beginnings
of the neorealist movement to films
that were made under Mussolini while the war was still
going on, and some people actually
date the very beginning of the movement
to a film made in 1942 by Luchino Visconti called
Obsession.
It's actually an adaptation of a very popular American pulp
novel called The Postman Always Rings Twice.
It's been made twice into an English language
American movie, most recently starring Jack Nicholson.
But the Italian version may be the most
important and interesting of the films made from the book.
The book itself is a rather tawdry noirish
story about the owner of a diner who's
an ugly middle-aged pug who's married to a beautiful
and somewhat younger woman who very unhappy with her husband
begins an affair with a drifter who
comes by, and ultimately encourages the drifter
to kill her husband.
And it's actually a rather heavy-handed male chauvinist
fantasy about, partly about, how cunning and dangerous women
are.
The Italian version is much more interesting, in part
because the working class dimensions of the story
are given much greater emphasis in Luchino Visconti's version.
And the film partly becomes a kind of meditation
on the fate of undocumented workers
and nonunion workers in Italian society.
In any case, the emphasis on ordinary people
and the emphasis on socioeconomic circumstances
in that film by Visconti came to be defining features,
among the defining features of Italian neorealist filmmaking.
But the movement really doesn't get going until after the war.
And the context of the war is very important.
We need to recognize that the film is really
set in a devastated society, a society in which, I'm talking
now about all of Europe after the Second World War,
unemployment reached 25% or 30% higher in some societies.
There was economic turmoil in virtually
every European society, profound terrible pressures
from black market activities of all kinds.
The war was so devastating that something
on the order of 35% of all the permanent dwellings in Western
Europe were destroyed during the war.
25% of the Polish population was killed.
A tremendous proportion, virtually every-- Well,
a very large number of Italian cities were damaged very badly,
including, of course, Rome itself.
And these abject and terrifying economic conditions
were, of course, in Italy doubled by the problem
that Italy was on the losing side of the war
and therefore faced even more difficulties
in the recovery than a culture like the French culture
or English society.
So the devastation of World War II and the turmoil
and the dislocation caused by World War II
is the fundamental fact.
What is still operative in Italian society, what
institutions still work, is one of the implicit questions
that the film explores.
And the film suggests that a lot of the official institutions,
like the police and especially the religious institutions,
have broken down and are not really helping people
very much, as you'll see when you watch tonight's film.
But there are other forms of help and aid
that people get, mostly in some sense from their,
the film suggests, from their local communities
and from their immediate families.
Well, to this basic sort of setting
of devastation and turmoil and economic uncertainty,
we need to add two other contextual factors,
both of them having to do with the film
traditions against which neorealism set itself,
against which it understood itself to be
in a kind of profound argument.
The first tradition was the tradition of fascist film
under Mussolini.
These were almost all studio films.
They were shot inside studios.
Neorealist films are shot outdoors.
And they were largely escapist fare
focusing more often than not on the upper social orders.
In fact, there was a genre of films so devoted
to the romantic entanglements of aristocrats
that they came to be known as white telephone films.
The reason for this is that in the old days before cellphones
and before multicolored phones, all telephones were black.
And it was a mark of astonishing aristocratic privilege
that the people in some of these films had white telephones.
They were such unusual objects for the time
that the film's came to be labeled as white telephone
films.
And they were largely, as I said,
escapist movies with beautifully made up actors and actresses
in artificial light, performing what were essentially
artificial stories.
The second tradition against which the neorealists are
responding, against which they are reacting,
is the tradition of Hollywood glamor.
There's a wonderful moment in The Bicycle Thief
as you'll see tonight when Ricci finally
goes off to get his job.
He recovers his bicycle from hock.
He's pawned it.
And that's why he's so nervous.
He knows where the bicycle is, but he
doesn't know how they're going to get out of pawn.
And you'll see how his wife solves
that problem in the very next sequence beyond the one I've
just shown to you.
When Ricci finally goes to work for the first time,
he has someone with him giving him instructions,
and what he is a bill sticker.
He puts up posters, great pos-- In fact,
the poster that he's putting up is
a poster for an American movie.
And it has a great American, a famous American movie
star of the '40s and '50s, Rita Hayworth, on it.
And as he's putting the picture up--
you put paste on the board, then you--
he's given these stupid instructions.
Anyone could do this job, but the man giving him instructions
acts as if he's explaining something really difficult
like rocket science, when all he's doing
is telling him how to paste a poster up on a board.
But his instructions include systematic remarks
about being sure not to leave any wrinkles in it.
And I've taken that myself to be a kind of implicit complaint
against Hollywood.
They'll say the Hollywood female has no wrinkles.
The Hollywood female, the Hollywood star, the Hollywood
movie is so glamorized that you never see wrinkles or defects.
And this couldn't contrast more shortly
with the ordinary faces of the actors
that we see in neorealist films.
So two traditions of glamor and escapism
are essentially the antagonist that
help to explain how neorealism defines itself and understands
itself.
It's worth briefly mentioning that neorealism
has distinguished origins in at least three
different national cinemas.
The first is in Italian cinema itself.
There was a movement during the silent era,
a kind of documentary movement, that wanted to talk--
a quasi-documentary movement.
They were still fiction films.
But they wanted to talk more openly and honestly
about contemporary events in contemporary society.
And the movement was called the verismo movement, the truth
movement.
And it occurred between 1914 and 1916 in Italy.
And this--
When the neorealists began to articulate their own manifestos
and to explain theoretically what they were up to,
they sometimes reached back to the verismo movement,
as a way of saying we're actually
traditional as well as new.
A second fundamental influence on neorealism,
a kind of earlier version of neorealism,
occurred in the German tradition at the end of the silent era
in a series of films made in the 1920s by the director GW Pabst,
P-A-B-S-T. The most famous of these films is a film produced
in 1925 called The Joyless Street.
It partly deals with prostitutes, and it talks,
it tries to dramatize in realistic ways
the conditions of the lower social orders.
And of course the final originating source,
this also explains the richness of neorealism
that there are other film traditions that
are feeding in to it and enriching it, is French,
and it's the kind of French film that we
associate with Jean Renoir and with the traditions
of poetic realism.
Some of the neorealist, at least one of the neorealist directors
Visconti, had worked as an assistant director
for Jean Renoir at one point in his career.
And I believe, I'm not sure this is accurate,
so don't take this as absolute fact,
but I believe that it was Renoir himself
who gave a copy of The Postman Always Rings
Twice to Visconti, which led to the creation of what
many people would identify as the very first neorealist film.
The basic practices and traditions of poetic realism
are carried over in neorealism.
And in one sense, one can see neorealism
as an extension of poetic realism.
The difference is that neorealism
has a more political and social orientation.
It's more conscious of having a political and social ambition.
It wants to-- And sometimes neorealist films
can seem a bit preachy because of that.
There's clearly a kind of sentiment
deeply sympathetic to the lower social orders, deeply
suspicious of the hierarchies of capitalism.
Some of the neorealists were Marxists
or Marxist sympathizers, and that
helps to explain the political orientation
of neorealist films.
But the basic features of poetic realism,
the use of an outdoor camera, the interest in a mise en scene
style, and in a film made by, which I mentioned I think last
time, made by Renoir in 1935, a film called Toni T-O-N-I.
We have a French version of neorealism, because that film,
as I mentioned last time, is about Italian quarry workers
in the south of France, and it has a lot of nonprofessional
actors in it, something that became a key feature
of neorealism.
So the neorealist movement then has this powerful context
which creates a kind of moral and aesthetic energy
that helps to explain the power and the excitement
of these films.
It has two very clear antagonists,
the glamor of Hollywood and the false and aristocratic glamor
of the film under Mussolini.
And it also draws as well on older traditions
of film in Italian, in German, and in French
that set earlier examples for the kind of thing
that the neorealists wanted to do.
I've already talked about the key features of neorealism
just a second ago when I spoke about poetic realism.
But let me mention some of those key features in a little bit
more detail.
One way to think about neorealist films
is to recognize that their emphasis on reality
is one which insists on trying to create
an illusion of a plausible actuality.
And what this meant to them was, listen,
people have warts on their noses.
People are not beautiful the way they are in Hollywood.
So one thing we need to do is we need to roughen up
the look of our performers.
And in fact, professional actors, it was felt,
often bring a kind of smoothness or a fluidity
to their performance that is inherently artificial.
So many neorealist films have no or virtually
no professional actors in them, or sometimes only
professional actors in the major roles.
In the film you're going to see tonight,
the star is a nonprofessional actor.
He actually ended up having a tragic life.
The film won the Academy Award as the best foreign film
of the year in America in 1948, and the man who
played Ricci became an international star,
but he fell into hard times and ended up not really making
much money from his very brief stardom,
and my understanding is that he never again
made a film as remarkable as The Bicycle Thief.
But one of the things that is absolutely
astonishing about the performance
is that this man is not an actor.
You would never guess it.
I mean, it's an absolute-- or maybe you would,
but you would guess it only after having been told that.
Because he performs with such naturalness and such grace.
So the use of nonprofessional actors
is one of the key features of neorealism.
A second key feature is a rejection of studio filming.
All neorealist films, like almost
all poetic realist films, were shot outdoors in natural light.
Partly because they wanted natural light,
and partly because studios lie about the texture of the world.
We want the texture of the world in our films,
the neo-- Our films are really about reality,
so we can't shoot indoors.
A third-- nonprofessional actors,
outdoor camera, a third feature would
be what we might call a fundamental mise en scene
style, taken directly from the stylistic habits established
by Jean Renoir and other French directors who
worked in the same style.
Relatively modest forms of editing.
The forms of montage that you see are not disruptive.
You won't get jump cuts or disorienting moments.
The camera, the camera is, as with Renoir, constantly
restless and in motion, but often in very gentle ways.
There's a wonderful moment in the scene
I mentioned a moment ago where we see Ricci putting up
his first poster when the camera is watching them,
and he's getting these instructions
from his comrade about how to put the thing up,
and it's really boring.
Well, one reason that you know it's boring-- well, obviously
as a viewer, you begin to probably feel it
without registering that it's boring,
but the reason that you know it is
is that the camera suddenly looks away.
What happens is the camera discovers something interesting
happening on the street and while the conversation
continues on the soundtrack, the camera
shifts away from Ricci and his instructor,
and follows a wealthy man and two children
who are walking behind him.
And they're really beggars trying to get money from him.
And the camera just found it interesting,
so it looked at it, a very Jean Renoir-ish move.
There are other moves like this in the film,
as if the camera, like Jean Renoir's camera,
is so interested in the world that it's
capable of being distracted.
There's a sense that the world's complexity is always
threatening the coherences and meanings that the film is
releasing for us.
So nonprofessional actors, outdoor filming,
a mise en scene, a profound serious mise en scene style
influenced deeply by Jean Renoir,
and finally, we might maybe another-- not finally,
one more, a fourth feature, we might say
is what I was trying to indicate when
I talked about the social or political bias of these films.
One might say that these films have a more profoundly
documentary flavor.
I don't mean that we feel we're watching documentaries.
But we do feel we're watching a slice of life,
that the economic and moral and social and personal
circumstances of the characters we see in neorealist films
are a version of what we would find if we walked into Rome not
in a movie and just looked for people
of this class, a documentary flavor.
So that's four features.
And a final feature, I suppose I would want to add,
has to do with the relation between plot and character.
It's not quite true to say that these films are plotless,
they're not, and one of the most magnificent things
about The Bicycle Thief is the economy of its plot,
and I'll talk a bit about that tonight,
but it's nonetheless true that in neorealist films,
you do not feel that action drives events.
What you feel is that character drives
events in some sense, what the plot aims
for is a natural unfolding.
You're never supposed to feel in a neorealist film
that some event in the plot has been introduced arbitrarily.
You're never supposed to step back and say, oh,
that could never happen, or how implausible is that,
or I guess they did that because they wanted to show x.
The kind of response you often have
watching certain forms of Hollywood entertainment
and other forms of merely escapist entertainment fare.
But you don't ever have that feeling in a good neorealist
film.
What you feel is that the events of the plot
unfold naturally out of the economic and social realities
the characters live in and out of their characters.
And you can test this generalization
against tonight's film, and I'm sure that you'll
find that it's a compelling one, that it really describes
this movement's respect for the complexity of character
over plot, for the complexity of character
and therefore for its commitment to a kind of movie
that is more interested in character
than it is in story or event in a narrow sense.
The central figures of neorealism
are important to mention.
And maybe especially the fellow that I have first on my list
here, Cesare Zavattini, because he's the least well-known
of the names I've listed there.
The other three names are all famous directors.
And of course De Sica is the director of Bicycle Thieves,
and I'll talk about his career this evening.
But Zavattini was the theoretical genius
behind neorealism and a figure for whom I still
retain a tremendous sympathy and affection.
He was a novelist and an essay writer
as well as a screenwriter.
He collaborated with Vittorio De Sica on almost every one
of De Sica's significant films.
Not on every one, but on virtually every one
that is truly outstanding, and there are a number of them.
He's the scriptwriter on.
And he had a particularly symbiotic relation to De Sica.
Zavattini also articulated what came
to be understood as the manifesto of neorealism.
And in one such essay, I don't know
if it was titled Manifesto of Neorealism,
but that was its effect.
He said this to try to summarize what
he thought the ambitions of neorealism were.
He said, a good film ought to be focused
on the life of an ordinary man to whom nothing happens.
Now, he didn't really that nothing would happen.
It's not an early version of the Seinfeld program.
What he's trying to get at is this idea
that plot does not dominate, that character dominates,
that the events of the story grow organically
out of the materials of the text,
both out of character, and out of social realities.
So Zavattini was in many ways a visionary figure,
an overt Marxist for a good part of his life,
and probably the central intellectual influence
on the neorealist movement.
Visconti, the director whose dates
I've put there is sometimes suggested-- it is often
said that not all of Visconti's work fits neatly,
maybe none of it fits neatly into the category
of neorealism.
And this partly has to do with a kind of flamboyance
in Visconti's visual style, and maybe also a fondness
for decadence, and for elaboration that does not
comport with the social meanings that
are implicit in neorealism.
Of the main neorealists, he's the one who fits least well,
but he's often said to be the best of them.
And there are many historians of film and scholars
of film, including David Cook, who
believe that The Earth Trembles, the film he made in 1948,
La Terra Trema, The Earth Trembles,
is the greatest of all neorealist movies.
I have sometimes been tempted to show it,
but it's less characteristic of neorealism, so I don't show it.
But it is a very remarkable film,
and Visconti is a very important figure in this movement,
even though he probably could be said in his later films
to move beyond neorealist concerns.
Roberto Rossellini who also had a very rich long career
as a filmmaker, and I've only listed one film there,
because I want to show you a clip from it.
Part of a trilogy of films he made
at the very end of the war called,
it was called his Roman Trilogy or his Rome Trilogy,
and the first one was-- or his World War II
Trilogy-- the first one was called Rome, Open City,
and then there were two other.
The third one was called Germany, Year Zero.
And they all had sort of a political and social ambitions.
They wanted to dramatize the postwar conditions
and show the devastation that followed
aftermath, that was the aftermath of the Second World
War.
Open City had a tremendous impact
what it was first released, especially in Italy,
because it told an anti-fascist story.
It's a somewhat melodramatic film
that ends in a very melodramatic death,
in a very melodramatic murder, or an accidental murder.
And partly for that reason, it's a less powerful and less
compelling film totally than something like Bicycle Thieves.
But its importance can't be overestimated.
It established the basic principles
that I've been talking about.
It was actually begun before the war
was over when it was illegal to-- when
the German authorities, the fascist authorities
were still controlling Rome and Italian society.
And you weren't supposed to-- you couldn't
film without a license, and some of the early scenes from Rome,
Open City were actually shot illicitly
on very bad film stock from behind doorways and around
corners, so the people behind the camera
wouldn't be caught by the authorities.
And then the film was completed after peace came,
after the defeat of the Axis forces.
I'm going to show you a clip from that sequence,
from that film, from the very beginning of that film
to give you a feel for what the film was like as well.
And I think that that clip will also show you
why the film was so successful.
But I'll partly explain it now.
I think the Italians love this movie
because it told a useful myth.
It made it appear that very few Italians collaborated
with the Nazis and that most Italians were really
on the side of the saboteurs who were trying
to blow up fascist waterworks.
This is probably not entirely historically accurate
since Mussolini was during much of his career
a very popular figure in Italy, but you can certainly
understand why it would have hit a sympathetic chord
among Italians, many of whom, I'm sure,
felt terrible ambivalence and shame over the events
of the Second World War.
The Italians were always much more reluctant anti-Semites
than the Hitler fascists were, and the story
of Italian anti-Semitism is much more complicated
than the story of German anti-Semitism in this period
especially.
So I think that one reason for the success of the film
had to do with the way it told a kind of anti-fascist fable
that worked particularly well for this postwar society that
wanted to put fascism behind it, that
wanted to repudiate that past.
that felt-- There were certainly segments of the population
that had never gone along with that past anyway,
so the film sort of mobilized a new kind
of feeling of Italian patriotism,
and maybe even in some sense a kind of,
despite the catastrophe in which it
ends, a kind of hope for the future,
because the film takes place entirely within the period when
the fascists were still in control of Italy.
And the catastrophe that occurs at the end
is an act of fascist murder, an assassination,
an indifference to humanity.
So Rosselini went on to make many, many films,
and I feel a little guilty only mentioning this one not totally
characteristic film of his, but it's
important in the history of neorealism.
Rosselini is a director I much admire,
partly because he moved away from fiction.
And at the end of his career, he was
making what he thought of as educational or instructional
films.
But with the dazzling technique of a great fiction filmmaker.
So he's a very interesting figure to study,
and I hope some of you will look at more neorealist films
and consider looking at Rosselini.
De Sica is the final figure that I
want to mention as a fundamental energy in neorealism,
and I'll only say about him that he's probably
the most various and gifted of all the neorealist figures,
partly because he had been a very successful actor before he
became a director.
And I'll talk a bit more about De Sica this evening.
What I want to illustrate now in the time we have left
is an aspect of the neorealist aesthetic,
if we could use that term, that I've talked about
before when we discussed Renoir and that I
implied in earlier comments that I made this afternoon.
It's what I call the neorealist counter plot.
And by counter plot, what I really
want to call attention to are all those elements
in the film that seem not to take part
in the forward momentum of the story.
We might even think of them as retarding
elements in which these films sort of pause
to smell the roses.
A version of what I mean, of what
I mean by this neorealist counter plot,
might be said to be embodied in that astonishing camera
move we studied at the end of Boudu Saved
from Drowning last week where the camera makes
180 degree swerve, becomes interested
in the beauty of the river, becomes interested
in the scenery, almost as if it's forgotten its character.
Now, what I mean by the counter plot
is this impulse in these films and especially
in these Italian films to complicate
the social and political and even
the psychological processes of the story simply
in order to give us a sense of what
the experience it's describing is like, as if it's
a version of what I'm interested in when I talk about how
the camera can distract itself.
One way I can illustrate-- So what I mean by counter plot
then are energies that retard or slow down the basic story
or that seem not to directly contribute to the basic story,
but remain part of the film's desire to represent the world,
to represent reality and something of its complexity
and something of its nuance, even
in something of its contradictory incoherence.
In other words, I don't really want
to call these moments incoherent moments, they're not,
because they build a much larger and more complete
picture of the whole world you're looking at.
And in that sense, they're not incoherent.
But they are a kind of counter to the ongoing pressure
to find out what happens next, what happens
next, what happens next.
Well there are many, many examples
of this principle in The Bicycle Thief
and in other neorealist films.
But I want to show you one very dramatic one, also
to give you a flavor for an earlier
neorealist film other than the one you're
going to see tonight.
This is from the very beginning of Open City.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
DAVID THORBURN: These residents of Rome.
They've heard an explosion.
There's sabotage going on in Rome now.
It's near the end of war, and the war's not over.
And now the saboteurs return home,
and look who they turn out to be.
And of course, that's why, Anna Magnani was the actress,
was worried about where the children were,
because they suspected.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
DAVID THORBURN: There's already a counter plot operating here.
I hope you see.
Look at these little chil-- innocent faces.
So these saboteurs have now come home.
Watch.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
DAVID THORBURN: All right.
Stop.
I'm stopping it a little early.
This scene continues.
You actually go into another room in a moment,
and you see children in a kind of dormitory
like room in which there's one little child sitting
on a potty.
I think it's the first potty scene in Western film.
They do something very disturbing too.
They pick him off the potty and put him back in bed
without wiping him.
But leave it.
Maybe there was no toilet paper in postwar Italy.
But your laughter indicated to me
that you sort of got the point.
But talk to me a little bit about what you see there.
It's a wonderful example of what I
was trying to illustrate at the beginning as well,
this principle of multiplicity.
What's happening in this sequence?
What do we learn?
What about living conditions in Rome, what do we learn?
Nobody gives a lecture about it.
You think there is a housing crisis in Rome?
Seven families living together in the same room, an old man
in bed, lying in a bed, in the parlor, in the space,
in the living space of the place.
That's clearly where he stays.
He's very ill.
What else?
The deviation into comedy.
The extent to which a kind of a series of comic encounters
occur after what, after a moment of political sabotage.
And the incongruity of these little children
who are the ones who are the saboteurs
is also part of the comedy even before we see them fully return
to the condition of children when their parents start
slapping them in the face and say,
how dare you stay out so late.
I didn't mean to suggest that the parents actually
know that the children are saboteurs, although, some may.
But I think the point is that being outside at night
is very dangerous for little children in this environment,
and that's why they're so concerned
But the fact that even the children are
partisan anti-fascist fighters becomes a part
of what the film is about.
Now, you can't tell from the very beginning,
from this beginning, what the real sort of plot energy
of the film is yet, can you?
And it will take a bit longer before it finally turns out.
The man that she's about to marry is a secret agent,
and he's under-- he's being hunted
by the fascist authorities, and the film is
about how the good Italians try to hide him.
But we don't learn that yet.
What I want to suggest to you is something of life's variety,
something of life's comedy, something of life's incongruity
emerges for us in those moments.
It's what I want to call a counter plot,
because we take delight in those moments.
We don't get impatient and say, come on, film,
tell me where you're going.
Because what the film teaches us is
that it's not in that narrow sense about plot at all,
but it's about life in its infinite complexity.
The greatest neorealist films embrace this principle as well
as any films I've ever known, and, in addition, they
have a kind of moral authority that's very rare.
I'm very jealous of those of you in this course who have never
seen The Bicycle Thief, because it is a remarkable film
and I'm sure you'll remember for the rest of your lives.
I'll see you tonight.