Italian Neo-Realism: FOUR PAGE PRIMER?!

So I'm supposed to read this four page primer about Italian Neo-Realism, where you CAN read here:

https://www.greencine.com/central/guide/italianneorealism

though honestly I don't know what would compel you to do so hahaha. It's vaguely interesting though, if you're a film nut :D

Onward with the assignment I say!

* List the key Ideology and Thematic Goals- (use quotes from article)

- Federico Fellini said "For my generation, born in the 20s, movies were essentially American. American movies were more effective, more seductive. They really showed a paradise on earth, a paradise in a country they called America."

- Anti-Fascist journalist Leo Longanesi urged directors to "go into the streets, into the barracks, into the train stations; only in this way can an Italian cinema be born."

- Calvino pointed out, "neo-realists knew too well that what counted was the music and not the libretto."

- André Bazin called it a cinema of "fact" and "reconstituted reportage,"

- Cesare Zavattini stated: "This powerful desire of the [neo-realist] cinema to see and to analyze, this hunger for reality, for truth, is a kind of concrete homage to other people, that is, to all who exist."

 - Fellini: "looking at reality with an honest eye - but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him."

* Describe the historical context of the movement

- Started in the 1930's but never fully recognized until 1943, ending in 1952. Cinema fully under control of the regime, and only a few movies were allowed to show[such as Treno popolare (1933) by Rafaello Matarazzo, Jean Renoir's Toni (1935) and Alessandro Blassetti's 1860 (1934)] Linked to the Resistance movement. World War II's immediate postwar period.

* List the Cinematic Techniques

-  "Cinematically, neo-realism pushed filmmakers out of the studio and on to the streets, the camera freed-up and more vernacular, the emphasis away from fantasy and towards reality."

* Identify key contributors and give a short summary of their contributions

- Cesare Zavattini: functions as a kind of godfather of the movement

- Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Giuseppe De Santis: Film-makers who contributed to the neo-realism arc.

- Guillio Andreotti: wrote the Andreotti Law (1949); personified the unhappiness some Italians expressed about the neo-realism era, which displayed their country is such a stark, horrible way.

* Identify the key films of the movement and why they were significant.

 - Roberto Rossellini's Roma: città aperta (Open City, 1946) shows most clearly neo-realism's link with the Resistance movement.

-In Paisà (Paisan, 1946), Rossellini directly engaged the effects of the American presence in Italy, complicated by the Yankee shift from enemy to ally, his overall theme being that war is an equal-opportunity brutalizer. 

- La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) took Luchino Visconti to Aci Trezza on Sicily. Far more documentary in style than the other neo-realist films.

- Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) orchestrated carefully, shooting some scenes with multiple cameras and drawing attention to its existence as fiction, not a documentary.

- Visconti's terrific Bellissima (1951), though not traditionally considered a neo-realist film, focused on people's lives in the wake of war, the sense of wanting to better oneself and the struggle to find a way out of the grind of poverty.

- Umberto D. (1951), which was De Sica's favorite film and is in many ways the masterpiece of neo-realism.

- Giuseppe De Santis's Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) was described at the time as the "last gasp of the neo-realist movement."