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PARTISAN REVIEW
safe. One of the best films of this kind,
Il pianto delle zitelle
(The
Lament of the Old Maids), by G. Pozzi-Bellini, which tried to describe
the famous yearly pilgrimage of a whole population of Central Italy to
the sanctuary of Montevergine, could never be shown to the public.
The taste for the documentary film still remains at the basis of the neo–
realist tendency. What the neo-realists really want is to get the camera's
eye anywhere they like, to be free to explore the remotest corners of
Italy, and bring back as much photogenic material as they can. As a
young movie-critic puts it: "We have the factories of Milan and Turin.
But we have also, together with the cave-dwellers of Apulia and Cala–
bria, a village on the Gargano promontory which was literally discov–
ered the other day by a doctor. This village has been practically cut off
from the external world since time immemorial. People there do not
know about electric light or the razor, and live like a poor tribe about
100 or 200 A.D.... Neo-realism to us means simply that we have
found a way of bringing such facts into the open, and don't want to shut
up for a long, long time." Or, as Cesare Zavattini, one of the most suc–
cessful scenario-writers, puts it: "We want to empty the bag." But,
as it has been shown in the case of
Anni Difficili
and
Ladri di Biciclette
in Italy, the urge to shut people up, and keep bags sealed, has not died
with Fascism.
Nicola Chiaromonte
