628
PARTISAN REVIEW
"realism" is founded on, and tempered by, a profound belief in the
spiritual nature of reality.
People who are neither theologians nor aesthetes, however, insist
that "neo-realism" means just four or five excellent movies, and that it
was born out of two facts: poverty and the collapse of fascism. Libero
Solaroli, a modest and intelligent movie-maker, in the course of a con–
versation put it in the following way: "All this talk about 'neo-realism'
doesn't make much sense. Foreigners admire our movies because their
subject matter is new to them, much as the Roman
asteria
looked new
and exotic to Stendhal. This is fine. But, talking among ourselves, the
first thing to say is that we had a big stroke of luck: the destruction of
the movie studios, plus the talent of men like Rossellini and De Sica. But
neither De Sica nor Rossellini were new to the movies when they made
Open City
and
Shoe-Shine.
De Sica had been first an actor in the legit–
imate theater, and then an actor in the movies for fifteen years. He
started directing pictures in 1940, and it seems to me that he belongs to
the same family as Rene Clair rather than to the so-called 'neo-realistic'
school. As for Rossellini, he started directing in 1941, and if you mean
that, the movies being essentially a realistic medium, and Rossellini a
good director, he is necessarily a 'neo-realist,' it's all right with me, hut
what's the point of it?
"The truth is that neo-realism is not a style of picture-making. It
indicates a moment in our history: the war with its miseries, and
it~
brutal undressing of social conventions and the human character. Movie
directors lived in the streets and on the roads, then, like everybody rlse;
They saw what everybody else saw. They had no studios and big instal–
lations with which to fake what they had seen, and they had little money.
Hence they had to improvise, using real streets for their exteriors, and
real people in the way of stars. Of course some people were better than
others at seizing the opportunity that was offered them. More than this
I wouldn't say, especially since success itself is a danger, and a sound
Italian motion picture industry still remains to be built. What we have
now is on one hand one of those felicitous improvisations at which we
Italians excel, and on the other hand a marginal speculation on the part
of a number of capitalists for whom the sale of a few movies abroad is
just a trick to get around Government regulations on the export of
valuta."
However questionable as an aesthetic formula, "neo-realism" certainly
corresponds to a state of mind which was already widespread among
Italian movie-fans in the years of fascism, became contagious around
1942, and found its first aggressive realization in 1943, with
Obsession,
