Italian Films Comparative Essay

Compare and contrast the ways in which the films and filmmakers of both Italian Neo-Realism and French New Wave rejected the dominant Classical Hollywood model and their reasons for doing so.

With the fall of Mussolini and the end of the war, international audiences were suddenly introduced to Italian films through a few great works by Rossellini, De Sica, and Luchino Visconti that appeared in less than a decade after 1945, such as Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946); De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948), and Umberto D. (1952); and Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). Italian neorealist films stressed social themes (the war, the

But with the exception of Rome, Open City, they were relatively unpopular within Italy and achieved success primarily among intellectuals and foreign critics. "Back in 1942, when Vittorio Mussolini, the head of the film industry, saw Visconti's Ossessione, he stormed out of the theater shouting, "This is not Italy!" Most Neorealist films elicited a similar reaction from postwar officials. The portrait of a desolate, poverty-stricken country outraged politicians anxious to prove that Italy was on the road to democracy and prosperity. The Catholic Church condemned many films for their anticlericalism and their portrayal of sex and working-class life. Leftists attacked the films for their pessimism and lack of explicit political commitment".[3] In particular, De Sica was criticized for "washing Italy’s dirty laundry in public" by Giulio Andreotti, a Christian Democratic politician who was later to become one of Italy’s most powerful prime

Shortly after the liberation of France in 1945 this backlog of American cinema started to hit the country’s screens to the enthusiasm of French film-goers. This exposure to Hollywood films was a formative influence on the young critics who would become the directors of the New Wave in the late 1950s. For them, American cinema was more vital, more varied and considerably more exciting than the postwar productions of the French film industry which they derided as ‘le cinéma de papa’ (‘Daddy’s cinema’). Film culture in postwar France was bolstered by the growth in the number of magazines devoted to cinema (including Positif, the long-standing rival of Cahiers, founded in 1952) and the revitalisation of a network of ‘ciné-clubs’, where film screenings would be accompanied by public debates and lectures by critics. Between 1948 and 1949, an important ciné-club was established, ‘Objectif 49’, whose organisers included Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson, Roger Leenhardt, René Clément, Alexandre Astruc, Pierre Kast and Raymond Queneau. As Doniol-Valcroze stressed, this ciné-club would ‘constitute the first link in the chain which is resulting today in what has been called the nouvelle vague, the first jolt against a cinema which has become too traditional ... *and+ ... brought together all those – critics, film-makers and future