Realist Film Movements

1
Realist Film Movements

• Neorealismo (2)
• Films of Vittoria De Sica

2
Table of Contents

• 1) Neorealismo as personal film
• 2) Films of Vittorio De Sica
• 3) Ladri di biciclette
• 4) Cesare Zavattini

3
Neorealismo as Personal Film

• Traditional films - studio bound genre bound
  star bound
• Films made according to the studios concerns and
  intentions the requirements of a genre and the
  demand of stars.
• Personal films reflect film makers personal
  concerns. Neorealists PERSONAL CONCERNS and
  INTEREST
• are

4
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

5
Neorealismo as Personal Film

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

6

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

7
(No Transcript)
8

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

9

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

10

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

11
Neorealismo as Personal Film

• 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)

12
Neorealismo as Personal Film

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

13
Neorealismo as Personal Film

• 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.

14
Neorealismo as Personal Film

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

15
Neorealismo as Personal Film

• 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

16
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

17
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Sciusciá (Shoeshine, 1946) - two shoeshine 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.

18
Films of Vittorio De Sica

• Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) - a
  man in Rome found 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 all over Rome with his son. In
  desperation he himself turns to a bicycle thief.
  

19
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.

20
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

21
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.

22
Ceare Zavattini

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

23
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.
• Cezare Zavattini, Some Ideas on Cinema

24
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.'