Country: Italy
Director: Luchino Visconti
The postwar Italian neorealist school of cinema has to be one of the most influential movements in film history. Neorealism came about almost by accident when the Italian film industry resumed after Liberation and directors were forced by the lack of studio facilities and a dearth of trained actors to turn to real locations and nonprofessional actors. What began as an adjustment of subject and technique to practical necessity quickly became a full-blown aesthetic, as these filmmakers, most of whom had experience making documentary films, found inspiration in events of the war and the immediate postwar era and sought to break down—or at least create the illusion of breaking down—the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in movies.
Within ten years, though, neorealism in its original form no longer existed. Roberto Rossellini had moved on to more personal stories starring his wife, Ingrid Bergman, while Vittorio de Sica, with his more sentimental brand of neorealism, had progressed to projects of greater universality like Umberto D. Luchino Visconti's directing career followed a similar path. His first fiction film, Ossessione (1942), was based on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. This was a proto-neorealistic work that, in its use of actual locations and unglamorous, often untrained actors, looked ahead to the first truly neorealist film, Rossellini's Open City (1945), while approaching Cain's theme of doomed, obsessive love in a more conventional way, treating it with an eroticism and emotional pitch of near-melodramatic intensity. From the 1950s on, Visconti made films that departed ever further from neorealism, films with an increasing emphasis on ornate pictorial values and almost operatic emotions. (Visconti called the style of these later pictures neoromanticism.) But between Ossessione and his later, more sensuous and grandiose movies, Visconti made a film that is the purest expression of neorealism I've seen, La Terra Trema (1948).
