Excerpts from “A Few Words about Neo-realism”
by Roberto Rossellini
[…] Neo-realism is the greatest possible curiosity about individuals: a need, appropriate to modern man, to speak of things as they are, to be aware of reality, in an absolutely concrete manner, conforming to that typically contemporary interest in statistical and scientific results; a sincere need, as well, to see men with humility, as they are, without resorting to stratagems in order to invent the extraordinary; to be aware of being able to arrive at the extraordinary through inquiry itself; a reality, whatever it is, in order to attain an understanding of things. To give anything its true value means to have understood its authentic and universal meaning.
[…] The subject of neo-realist film is the world; not story or narrative. It contains no preconceived thesis, because ideas are born in the film from the subject. It has no affinity with the superfluous and the merely spectacular, which it refuses, but is attracted to the concrete. It does not remain on the surface, but seeks out the most subtle aspects of the soul. It refuses recipes and formulas in its search for the motivating forces in each of us. Briefly, neo-realism poses problems for us and for itself in an attempt to make people think.
[…] Anyway, it cannot be doubted that I began by putting the accent on the collective above all. It was the war itself which motivated me; war and resistance are collective actions by definition.
TERMS AND PARAMETERS
Rossellini's Roma, citta' aperta represents one of the first expressions of what came to be labeled "neo-realism".
Though not all prints of the film carry this, some display the following narrative at the beginning of the film
projected over scenes of Rome, the eternal city, and symbols of Christianity
"While the Nazis held Rome in their iron grip after the summer of 1943, a group of Italian film-makers were planning underground a motion-picture record of the terrors inflicted on their compatriots in the declared “open city”. Working behind barred doors, in cellars and attics, in ravines and hills outside Rome, they prepared their scenario.
The day the Allied Armies marched in, the producers and actors went ahead using equipment much of which had been
stolen from the Germans at the cost of Italian lives. Without studio lights, with electricity often unobtainable, and
restricted to old scraps of film, they completed Open City, the 1st post-war Italian picture. Except for a handful
of principals, the cast consists of ordinary Roman citizens picked off the streets and the scenes were filmed at the
exact location of the particular incidents."
This intro to the film gives a brief definition of the scope, technique and rhetoric that guided the production.
Rossellini's own definition of Neo-realism was:
"an interior state, a way of feeling, a humble representation of the world, an act of courage that aspires to accept man
as he is" ... which can be read as a commitment to the immediate socio-political situation in which he lived and functioned...the end of Fascism.
Neo-realism, as a filmic technique/style that proposed to represent "a slice of life" set in the present, also included in
its arsenal some of the following...on location shooting, use of non-actors, emphasis on popular speech, the rejection of contrived or elaborate plots, frequent improvisation, objective camera...
Useful terms associated with neo-realism:
realism, naturalism, verismo, Italian Socialist Party (PSI), Italian Communist Party (PCI), Christian Democrats (DC), Benito Mussolini, March on Rome, Antonio Gramsci, LUCE (L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa), CSC (Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico), CLN (Committee for National Liberation). history from below.
