The more I’ve read about the movement — or oeuvre — or feeling, labeled “Italian neorealism,” particularly in recent months, the less of a grasp I feel I have on it. My confusion stretches back to my first encounter with the term. What is that prefix doing as a descriptor of movies that were released way back in the 1940s, when, as far as the young me understood, everything in cinema was new? That, at least, I can now answer. Neorealism as a principle extended to other art forms besides the movies, calling back even to nineteenth century realist literature. But even as the neorealist spirit tried to reclaim something from the past, its expression was contemporary in many ways. The tenets are typically summarized as follows: (1) filming on location in the streets, with regional specificity including dialect, (2) the use of non-professional actors to cut through the gloss of typical mainstream cinema, and (3) a commitment to depicting harsher realities about class and the state of Italian society after the fall of fascism. However, if I was expecting a simple list of rules to clear everything up, the waters quickly became even murkier.
Neorealism has an affinity with film noir in this way, the latter also lending itself to various lists of criteria despite an abundance of exceptions. The two categories of film developed almost simultaneously — in fact, the oft-cited first neorealist film, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, is an adaptation of James M. Cain’s crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Whether in America or Italy, these street-level films get at something about the psychology of post-war life. And neorealism could be said to have had some effect on the style of noir, perhaps subtler than that of German Expressionism or the crime films of the 1930s.
If noir, as the name suggests, largely came to be as a category due to French critics analyzing the films after the fact, neorealism was an at least semi-coordinated effort from the start. Italian critics and academics called for an alternative to the glib entertainments and bombastic propaganda of the Mussolini era. However, the fascists also recognized the value of naturalism and documentary effects when using film to their own ends, so it’s a little too simple to call neorealism a leftist or resistance movement. In both its origins and its results, neorealism offers a complicated picture. Its luster has dimmed somewhat over the years, the early triumph of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves in the very first Sight & Sound critics poll in 1952 ultimately losing out to later waves of cinema throughout the world. The two questions — what exactly is Neorealism, and what did it do — are still very much open.
Thus, in January and February of next year, I’ll be taking a closer look, celebrating the eightieth anniversary of Ossessione and the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bicycle Thieves. The fifty-nine films I’ll be watching (an arbitrary number, but one that happens to cover every night of those months) are at once too broad and too narrow a selection. There are comedies, melodramas and fantasy films listed below, period pieces in both black-and-white and Technicolor, and more than one Hollywood actor. I landed on many, but not all, of them by looking at various lists and articles about neorealism. The rest are appropriate at least in terms of counterpoint, on the assumption that sometimes it’s easier to define something by its opposite. The films of the major neorealist directors — Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, De Santis — are represented, as are the early films of younger soon-to-be-masters Antonioni and Fellini. But in casting a wide net (films ranging from 1943 to 1954), I’m sure I’ve missed plenty. In the winter 1979 issue of the journal Film Criticism, Ben Lawton writes that 90 films “can be described as neorealist in the broadest of terms” but doesn’t list them. Certainly some are obscure today, but I found roughly half of these 59 on YouTube, the Internet Archive, and Dailymotion, not to mention Kanopy and the Criterion Channel. And I’m pleased to say that I found English subtitles for all but two, one of which, Un americano in vacanza, has, as you might guess, some characters who speak English anyway. In past years, my comprehensive retrospectives on the French New Wave and Luis Buñuel each had to include several films without subtitles, so this is definite progress.
One regrettable omission is Giacomo Gentilomo’s 1946 film O sole mio, which is not a lost film (it has been shown at festivals), but doesn’t appear to have been released on video or online. It’s also, for reasons that should be apparent, a little more difficult to google than some titles.
| Title | Director | Year |
| Ossessione (Obsession) | Luchino Visconti | 1943 |
| I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us) | Vittorio De Sica | 1943 |
| La porta del cielo (The Gates of Heaven) | Vittorio De Sica | 1945 |
| La vita ricomincia (Life Begins Anew) | Mario Mattoli | 1945 |
| Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) | Roberto Rossellini | 1945 |
| Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters) | Mario Camerini | 1945 |
| Abbasso la miseria! (Down With Misery!) | Gennaro Righelli | 1945 |
| Il testimone (The Testimony) | Pietro Germi | 1946 |
| Sciuscià (Shoeshine) | Vittorio De Sica | 1946 |
| Un americano in vacanza (A Yank in Rome) | Luigi Zampa | 1946 |
| Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry) | Aldo Vergano | 1946 |
| Paisà (Paisan) | Roberto Rossellini | 1946 |
| Il Bandito (The Bandit) | Alberto Lattuada | 1946 |
| Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace) | Luigi Zampa | 1947 |
| L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina) | Luigi Zampa | 1947 |
| Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt) | Giuseppe De Santis | 1947 |
| Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth) | Pietro Germi | 1948 |
| Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero) | Roberto Rossellini | 1948 |
| L’amore (Love) | Roberto Rossellini | 1948 |
| Senza pietà (Without Pity) | Alberto Lattuada | 1948 |
| La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) | Luchino Visconti | 1948 |
| Proibito rubare (Guaglio) | Luigi Comencini | 1948 |
| Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) | Vittorio De Sica | 1948 |
| In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law) | Pietro Germi | 1949 |
| Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po) | Alberto Lattuada | 1949 |
| Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice) | Giuseppe De Santis | 1949 |
| Catene (Chains) | Raffaello Matarazzo | 1949 |
| Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli) | Roberto Rossellini | 1950 |
| Francesco, giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis) | Roberto Rossellini | 1950 |
| Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree) | Giuseppe De Santis | 1950 |
| Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair) | Michelangelo Antonioni | 1950 |
| Il cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope) | Pietro Germi | 1950 |
| Luci del varietà (Variety Lights) | Federico Fellini & Alberto Lattuada | 1950 |
| Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) | Vittorio De Sica | 1951 |
| La città si difende (The City Defends Itself) | Pietro Germi | 1951 |
| Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!) | Carlo Lizzani | 1951 |
| Bellissima | Luchino Visconti | 1951 |
| Umberto D. | Vittorio De Sica | 1952 |
| Roma, ora 11 (Rome 11:00) | Giuseppe De Santis | 1952 |
| Il Cappotto (The Overcoat) | Alberto Lattuada | 1952 |
| La Macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine That Kills Bad People) | Roberto Rossellini | 1952 |
| Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik) | Federico Fellini | 1952 |
| Europa ’51 (Europe ’51) | Roberto Rossellini | 1952 |
| La Tratta delle bianche (Girls Marked Danger) | Luigi Comencini | 1952 |
| La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camelias) | Michelangelo Antonioni | 1953 |
| Stazione Termini (Terminal Station) | Vittorio De Sica | 1953 |
| Ai margini della metropoli (At the Edge of the City) | Carlo Lizzani | 1953 |
| Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (A Husband for Anna) | Giuseppe De Santis | 1953 |
| I Vitelloni (The Young and the Passionate) | Federico Fellini | 1953 |
| I Vinti (The Vanquished) | Michelangelo Antonioni | 1953 |
| La lupa (The Devil Is a Woman) | Alberto Lattuada | 1953 |
| L’amore in città (Love in the City) | Various | 1953 |
| Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams) | Luigi Comencini | 1953 |
| La spiaggia (The Beach) | Alberto Lattuada | 1954 |
| Senso | Luchino Visconti | 1954 |
| La Strada (The Street) | Federico Fellini | 1954 |
| Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy) | Roberto Rossellini | 1954 |
| La Paura (Fear) | Roberto Rossellini | 1954 |
| L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples) | Vittorio De Sica | 1954 |
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