Realist Film Movements

1
Realist Film Movements

• Neorealismo (2)
• Films of Vittoria De Sica

2
Neorealismo as Personal Film

• Classical American films - studio bound genre
  bound star bound
• Films made according to the studios production
  interest and plan genres requirements and the
  demand of stars.
• Neorealismo - personal films reflecting film
  makers personal concerns. Neorealists PERSONAL
  CONCERNS and INTEREST
• are

3
Neorealismo as Personal Film

• Ordinary lives in the post-war era
• Social issues - unemployment, immigration,
  poverty, social and moral decay, political
  corruption
• Lives of ordinary people in ordinary situation

4
Realism in Neorealismo

• Influence of French lyrical (poetic) realism
• Films in the 1930s by Julian Duvivier, Jean
  Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean Vigo and others
• They did in cinema what some realist painters and
  writers had already done.

5

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Valpinçon
  Bather (1808)
• Academy Painting

6
(No Transcript)
7

• Jean-Louis David, Marat Assassinated (1793)
• History Painting

8

• Jean-Paul Marat, a Swiss-born radical journalist.
  He was murdered in a bathtub by Charlotte
  Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, in 1793.

9

• Gustav Courbet, The Meeting, Bonjour Monsieur
  Courbet (1854) Le Réalisme

10
Jean-François Millet, LAngelus (1859)
11
Honoré Daumier, Le Wagon de troisiéme classe
(1864)
12
Realism in Neorealismo

• What is realism in literature?
• more extensive and socially inferior human
  groups to the position of subject matter in
  literature. (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis The
  Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
  p.491)

13
Realism in Neorealismo

• Jean Renoir, La Bete humaine (1938)
• Based on Emile Zolas naturalist novel, it is a
  story about an engineer who murders his wifes
  godfather.

14
Realism in Neorealismo

• Jean Renoir, Toni (1935)
• Based on a police dossier, it is about a crime of
  passion. An Italian immigrant worker in a
  Provencal quarry is entangled in complicated love
  affairs and jealousy.

15
Realism in Neorealismo

• Marcel Carne, Le Jour se leve (1939)
• A foundry worker is forced to murder a man who
  betrayed and tricked him.

16
Realism in Neorealismo

• A captain of a canal verge in Jean Vigos
  LAtalante

17
Realism in Neorealismo

• Subject matters ordinary people who are in
  ordinary situation but fail to gain ordinary
  happiness.
• Stories of ordinary people in authentic settings
• No idealization, no flattery, not
  larger-than-life portraying

18
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Vittorio de Sica (1902-1974)
• A matinee idol turned into a film director.
• The collaboration with Cezare Zavattini lead to
  the three great neorealist films

19
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Sciusciá (Shoeshine, 1946) two boys save money
  by delivering black-market goods to buy a horse.
  They are caught and sent to overcrowded boys
  prison. One boy betrays the other and after
  their release the latter kills the former by
  mistake.

20
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) - a
  man in Rome finds a job after two years waiting
  on the condition that he has his own bike. It is
  stolen on the very first day in his job. He
  searches it all over Rome with his son. In
  desperation he himself turns to a bicycle thief.
  

21
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Umberto D (1952) - a retired civil servant,
  pensioner, finds difficult to make end meet in
  ridiculous inflation. He is kicked out of his
  apartment and has to abandon his dog, his only
  possession and companion.

22
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Elements which made Ladri di biciclette a
  realist film in its day
• ?    the subject matter
• ?    the narrative strays
• ?    the use of non-actors and location shooting
• ?    no facile solution to the problem
  illustrated
• ?    other aforementioned techniques

23
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Lamberto Maggiorani was a factory worker found by
  De Sica.
• No solution to unemployment is presented - the
  ending is open-ended as our life is.

24
Ceare Zavattini

• Screenwriter, director, painter, writer and
  theorist
• Collaborated with Vittorio De Sica in Sciusciá,
  Ladri di biciclette and Umberto D
• Teacher at Centro Sperimentale di Cinema
• Critic at Bianco e nero

25
Ceare Zavattini

• A well-know American producer told me, This is
  how we would imagine a scene with an airplane.
  The plane passes by a machine gun fires the
  plane is crashed. And this is how you would
  imagine it. The plane passes by the plane
  passes by the plane passes by once more. He
  was right. But we have still not gone far
  enough. It is not enough to make the aeroplane
  pass by three times we must make it pass by
  twenty times.
• Cezare Zavattini, Some Ideas on Cinema

26
Cesare Zavattini

• The dream of Zavattini is just to make a
  ninety-minute film of the life of a man to whom
  nothing ever happens. (Andre Bazin on Cesare
  Zavattini)
• The duration of actual time is equal to that of
  films narrative time.
• Little-man principle a hole in the wall of
  a family house in order to peep inside.