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CHAPTER ONE
THE VALIDITY
The
cinema was born with neo-realism.
The word "realism" is the most problematic in any
discussion of cinema. Because the first principle of filmmaking is the
photographic reproduction of something that exists—a street, a room, a
face—and the putting of that photograph into motion, the idea that film has a
close relationship to the physically real world is inescapable. On top of
this come the claims of widely different filmmakers that the narratives they
construct out of these moving pictures are themselves "real," that
they mirror, "the world," show us life, give us psychologically
valid characters. But such statements are founded on unexamined assumptions.
The photographic image is an image— physically and perceptually removed from
its origins in the world. Film narratives and their characters may be based
upon some aspects of actual behavior, but are in fact more strongly based on
conventional film narrative behavior and our expectations of how characters
in film ought to behave. They and their stories are no more real than any
other fictions. The
term is, however, constantly evoked (and occasionally revoked, for a
Hollywood filmmaker when threatened will claim that movies are only escapist
entertainment). "Realism" formed the basis of André Bazin’s
criticism. Bazin, whose theoretical position was grounded in the belief that
film could create images spatially and temporally faithful to the fullness
and richness of the world, was the major critical influence on postwar
European film culture and founder of the French New Wave. He drew his ideas
from a variety of filmmakers, from Robert Flaherty and Eric von Stroheim to
Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and William Wyler. But the films he most admired,
that seemed to authorize his theory, were those made in Italy beginning just
after the war, as part of a movement that took for itself the name of
neo-realism. This
movement is our starting point, for here is where the past and future of
European filmmaking fused and separated, and where modernism took hold.
Neo-realism, by its title, reclaimed the territory of reality, and in that
reclamation denied the claims of past filmmaking while announcing itself as a
beginning for filmmaking to come. Every serious filmmaker to follow had first
to understand what neo-realism was about before proceeding with his or her
own approach. When Giuseppe Bertolucci (Bernardo’s brother) said that
"the cinema was born with neo-realism," he was not indulging in
southern European hyperbole, but locating the origin of contemporary film.1 There
are few terms in the language of film criticism that have such general use
and recognition as "neo-realism," nor is there another so well
defined, placed, and understood; for the critical term was used
contemporaneously with the phenomenon it described, and by those involved in
creating the works so described. While the origins of the term itself are not
clear—David Overbey presumes the first time it appeared in print was in 1942,
but in the context of an Italian critic’s description of French cinema—what
it defines is.2 "Neorealism" refers to an aesthetic
movement that created a group of films in Italy between (approximately) 1945
and 1955. Its best known representatives are Roberto Rossellini’s Rome,
Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany, Year Zero (1947);
Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1947); Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine
(1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle in Milan (1950),
and Umberto D. (1951); Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953) and
possibly La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1956). There
are other films, less well known, and there are important antecedents, such
as Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), and even more important descendants.
These films were shot on location; they used non- or semi-professional
actors; they employed an unembellished narrative whose subject was the
working or peasant class in a state of extreme poverty and deprivation (with
a concentration upon children). There is an apparent reticence on the part of
the neo-realist filmmaker to comment upon the images he is creating, and the
narrative formed by the images seems to yield an objective, though certainly
not documentary, perspective. This apparent objectivity is countered,
however, by sentimentality, an almost melodramatic expression of love and
sorrow toward the subjects of the film. The
visual elements of neo-realism are immediately recognizable in any of its
representative films. The harsh grayness of the cinematography, the framing
of the characters amidst barren urban or country squalor, in ruined tenements
or desolate town squares, walking along a wall, the camera set or tracking at
a diagonal to the character and background, are all visual codes that
immediately signal a particular attitude and approach to the subject—that
signal, more than anything else, "neo-realism." The desolation of
the mise-en-scène (the structure and elements of the visual space,
which both defines the characters and is defined by them) does not so much
reflect as contain and surround the desolation of the characters. They are
their surroundings: poor, ruined, and seemingly without hope. But always
enduring. The suicide of the young boy, Edmund, in Germany, Year Zero is an
unusual act for a neo-realist character, mitigated by the fact that Edmund
comes to stand for Germany and the destruction it brought upon itself. In Rome,
Open City, the deaths of Pina, Manfredi, and Don Pietro at the hands of
the Germans are a sign of affirmation. Their humanity is transferred, within
the film, to the children who carry on their struggle, and, outside the film,
to the audience, whose understanding of their struggle validates it and their
deaths. The
violence and death in Rossellini’s war films are unusual and do not become a
major part of neo-realist narrative structure. Rather, the violence that is
most often committed on the characters is economic, and they are defined by
their poverty. Bicycle Thieves exemplifies the pattern: the only way
for the central character, Ricci, to work is to have a bicycle. When it is
stolen by someone even poorer than he is, there is absolutely no recourse to
anyone or anything. To get the bicycle out of hock in the first place, Ricci
and his wife had to pawn their sheets. When the camera pans up the shelves
and shelves of sheets pawned by others out of similar need an almost
universal condition is revealed. Ricci loses his bicycle and is lost. The
film observes his wanderings with his little son Bruno in their attempt to
find either the bicycle or the culprit, an attempt impossible from the start
and ending with Ricci in his despair trying to steal a bike, getting caught,
and walking off with Bruno, disappearing into the crowd. This essentially passive losing and
enduring of the poor provide an unalterable narrative structure for
neo-realist filmmaking. Like the formal construction of the narratives of
these films, the events of the narratives can be abstracted into immediately
recognizable patterns—so much so that, from the vantage point of many years,
neorealism seems to be nothing more than a genre, with all the predictable
conventions and responses that make up any other film genre.3 If it were only a film genre, one among so
many others, the movement would not be as important as I have said. It would
fall into place as a momentary coalescing of themes and structures, developed
out of certain historical events by a group of filmmakers with similar ideas
about what could be done with their medium, nurtured by a rather high degree
of international success. It is true that, like other genres, neo-realism
grew, peaked, and diminished. By the mid-fifties its practitioners had all
gone on to other kinds of films; controversy continued in Italy over what
they had done and why they were not doing it any more; and European cinema in
general went into a short creative retreat. When the New Wave broke in the
late fifties, little overt relationship to the Italian school was apparent.
The new generation of filmmakers paid much homage to Rossellini (Godard had
him co-write the script for Les Carabiniers, 1963). But the young
French filmmakers seemed more concerned with Hollywood films than with
European, and neo-realism seemed to assume a comfortable, esteemed place in
film history, often referred to, but ignored as an influence. Yet
we have to look twice. There are two neo-realisms: one is the genre of films
made in Italy in the decade between 1945 and 1955. The other is a concept, an
aesthetics, a politics, a radical reorientation of cinema that changed the
perspective on what had gone before and made possible a great deal of what
came after. Occasionally concept and execution came close together in the
films made by Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, and others during that
decade, and I do not mean to imply that theory was more important than
execution. But we can only fully understand what we see in neo-realism by
looking at the images of its films through the theory, and the theory from a
particular historical perspective. Neo-realism is a pivot, a
"break," in the sense that Louis Althusser uses the term to express
the point at which a new consciousness begins to appear, in this instance, a
new consciousness of cinematic image-making and storytelling.4 In
order to understand this "break," we need to examine something of
the cinematic history that preceded neo-realism and something of the theory
of that history as well. Within that context the ideas of the
neo-realists will become clearer and their films can be examined not as an
isolated phenomenon, but as a considered response to what had preceded them.
In the brief survey that follows I wish to describe some alternate notions
about film history and hook together the jagged edges of schools, movements,
and the works of individuals who countered prevailing trends and rapidly
solidifying traditions. After presenting a context that helps to clarify what
the postwar Italians were doing as they (quite unconsciously) laid the ground
for the great period of European filmmaking that followed them, I shall try
to look at their ideas and films in the spirit in which these were expressed
and made. Then it will be possible to look at them again from a more critical
point of view and discover some things that went wrong, but which, in so
doing, made possible a further response and further altered directions in
cinema’s aesthetic history. Conventional
histories of film would indicate a straight line of development. From Lumiere
and Méliès through the great figures and movements to the present day, neatly
interlocking stages of filmmaking seem to move in orderly progression, with
various apotheoses reached along the way. In this perspective, Lumiére
started it all in 1895. His little shot of a train pulling into a station so
startled its first audience that they pulled back in fear. Méliès the
magician followed, doing tricks on film; he invented optical effects and
fantasy cinema. From these two sources developed the two major kinds of film:
documentary and fiction. The
rest, in the conventional view, flowed almost naturally. Edwin S. Porter
discovered the possibility of creating narrative structure by intercutting
sequences, thereby allowing different elements of story to coexist in an
illusion of simultaneity. D. W. Griffith further developed and refined the technique,
"invented" the closeup, and perfected parallel montage, that
fundamental element of film narrative construction in which two events
separated in space but coexisting in time are paralleled to one another for
contrast, suspense, and tension. In Weimar Germany, expressionist cinema
formulated psychological structures through artificial, highly stylized sets
that reflected characters’ states of mind. In post-revolutionary Russia,
Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein further developed Griffith montage into a
primary formal device by means of which the audience was led toward meaning
by the relationship or (in Eisenstein’s case) the collision of images. The
thirties marked the ascendancy of American film, the growing strength of the
studios with a concomitant strengthening of studio styles, the star system,
genres, moral structures and strictures, and, as important as all of these,
economic markets. Although there were major figures abroad, with Jean Renoir
foremost among them, European film was somewhat eclipsed in the thirties.
Fascism and World War II put a halt to most creative filmmaking in Europe
until the mid-forties and the rise of neo-realism. The fifties marked the
beginning of the fall of the American studios and the rise of major European
figures, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini in the forefront. With the
appearance of the New Wave in France and elsewhere, European film regained
the ground it lost in the thirties and forties, reasserting its influence and
its importance as the serious alternative to American film. There is nothing wrong with this skeletal
linearity. It plots out the major events and directions; it is, in fact, a
plot of sorts for a historical narrative, which, when fleshed out with detail
and analysis, provides the basic story of film. But the telling has itself
become something of a genre, with the same figures and the same
configurations recurring. In recent years some important variations and
revisions to the tale have been made. Subjects have been rearranged and new
ones introduced. Important questions have been raised about the primacy of
certain figures and discoveries, particularly in the early days of film. The
effects of technological developments on film form have been studied in an
attempt to overcome separation of technical history from the aesthetic. The
economics of the film business is no longer looked upon as a separate study,
but as integrally involved with both technological and aesthetic
developments.5 Among the. most important revisions in film
history are those involving the place of the viewer in that history. Every
change in the formal patterns of film narrative construction, and every
change in the content and subject matter treated and created by that
narrative construction, has meant changes in the way the viewer reacts to the
narrative, changes in what is asked of and what is done to him or her,
changes in the relationship of spectator to film being observed. Like
any narrative form, film is incomplete until perceived by a viewer.
Therefore, to understand the movements and stages of film history is to
understand how filmmakers wanted their cinema to be read. The creation and
arrangement of images by a Russian in the twenties and a Frenchman in the
sixties, or by F. W. Murnau in Nosferatu (1922) and Werner Herzog in Nosferatu
(1978), are not only to be understood in terms of periods, movements, and
subjective inclinations that dictate certain forms and approaches. A reverse
perspective is possible. We may ask what is dictated by the form and content
of a certain period or a certain filmmaker. How is the viewer expected to
deal with the images and their narrative structure? I do not necessarily mean
a specific spectator in 1908 or 1919, for that would demand a crude kind of
guesswork and create the danger of false premises. Although films do give us
clues as to what a culture was about at a given period of time—perhaps even
indicate what people were thinking—my point here is to inquire how those
images address the world, the viewer in the world, and most important, the
cinematic conceptions and preconceptions of how the world can be addressed.
Answers can be found in the films and the history that surrounds them.
Further, by breaking into the linearity of history and counterpointing
movements and figures, the hidden history of the spectator’s role and the
filmmaker’s attitude toward it can be discovered. With
this in mind we can get a better notion of neo-realism’s place and its
demands. The conventional history tells us, quite accurately, that
Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti—all active in films during the fascist
period—wanted, after the war, to break from the studio and the ideologically
bound, middle-class cinema that had been prominent m Italy. It was called the
"white telephone" school, a term that sums up the decor of a cinema
of quasi-elegant bourgeois escapism that demanded little but that its audience
yield itself up to an elegant world of love affairs and romantic intrigue. As
a response to this kind of filmmaking, Rossellini, with scriptwriters Sergio
Amidei and Federico Fellini, and De Sica, in close collaboration with
screenwriter and movement theorist Cesare Zavattini, took to the streets and
to the working class. Rossellini, writing a script as the Germans were
fleeing Rome, begging raw film stock from American newsreel cameramen,
filming without direct sound (a tradition still followed in the now
technically sufficient world of Italian film production), created a film
about the work and deaths of Italian Partisans almost on the spot. He
followed Rome, Open City with two films that continued a kind of
immediate history of war’s end. De Sica and Zavattini concentrated on the
refuse of the war, the adults and children on the streets, in jails and
tenements. Visconti went a somewhat different route. A leftist nobleman, he
received his film training with Jean Renoir in the late thirties. In 1942 he
had made what is generally considered to be the first film with major
neo-realist tendencies. Ossessione is of strange heritage. It is based
on James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which had
been filmed earlier in France and was again filmed in 1946 by Tay Garnett at
MGM, with John Garfield and Lana Turner in the place of Massimo Girotti and
Clara Calamai (and filmed yet again by Bob Rafelson in 1980 with Jack
Nicholson and Jessica Lange).
Ossessione
is
a great sexual melodrama with wretched working class characters
who inhabit or wander through the poverty of the Po Valley. In it Visconti
achieves a texture, almost an aroma, of sweat and lust that is simultaneously
repellent and attractive, creating an intensity of image rarely seen in European
film up to that time. But Ossessione was only a preparation for
neo-realism. When Visconti made La Terra Trema in 1947, the first of a
never-completed trilogy on the workers and peasants of Sicily, he used a
non-professional cast and introduced the political element that only hovered
on the periphery of Ossessione. La Terra Trema is not a film of sexual
passion, but of a passion for liberation and independence. In taking their cameras outside, using
largely non-professional casts, and dealing with the working and peasant
class in politically and economically determined situations, these filmmakers
were indeed reacting against their own national cinematic tradition. But they
were reacting as well to the larger tradition of Western cinema originated and
perfected in Hollywood. They did battle against what they saw as a cinema of
escape and evasion, uncommitted to exploring the world, seeking instead to
palliate its audience, asking them to assent to comedic and melodramatic
structures of love and innocence, of unhappy rich people and the joyful poor,
of crime and revenge, the failure of the arrogant and success of the meek,
played by stars of status and familiarity in roles of even greater
familiarity. It was a tradition of cinema that asked little of the spectator
besides assent and a willingness to be engaged by simple repetitions of basic
themes, a tradition that located the spectator in fantasies that had the
reality of convention. The
polemics of neo-realist theory actively attacked this tradition In the early
fifties, Cesare Zavattini wrote: 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. This, among
other things, is what distinguishes neo-realism from the American cinema. In
effect, the American position is diametrically opposed to our own: whereas we
are attracted by the truth, by the reality which touches us and which we want
to know and understand directly and thoroughly, the Americans continue to
satisfy themselves with a sweetened version of truth produced through
transpositions .6 "Produced
through transpositions": the phrase captures precisely the problems the
neo-realists had with the film that preceded them. Their concern was with the
most fundamental process of narrative film, the methodology and ideology of
representation, and the ways the spectator was asked to observe and partake
in it. In the "transpositions" of reality into conventional images
that occurred in American film and, by association, in Italian cinema of the
thirties, they found only an evasion of reality and a diminishment of its
complexity. Their response was to challenge those evasions and to reevaluate
a history of cinema that ignored an entire class of people and denied its
audience access to certain realities of existence. It is a cinema most
familiar to most filmgoers, and while its origins and development are well
documented, they bear some repetition and reevaluation in order to understand
what the neo-realists and their followers were challenging.7 Films
were made, originally, for working-class audiences. But the economic reality
was that large amounts of money could not be made from peep shows in
working-class neighborhoods; profit and respect ability could come only from
an audience with money and respectability. Two things were immediately needed
to attract this group: elegant exhibition and a film content that combined
the blandest, seemingly most inoffensive morality with sexual titillation
which could in turn be defended by a high moral tone. In American filmmaking
(but by no means restricted to it) the result was an ideological leveling
that began in the early teens and continued with various dips and curves into
the early forties. The economic, political, and psychological complexities of
the film audience’s experience were largely transposed into images that
sweetened life by simplifying it and denied economic inequality by denying
that such inequality had any importance for happiness. It was a cinema of
amelioration in which good characters achieved marriage and a middle-class
life, where obedience and sacrifice were rewarded. The moral codes and
dramatic constructions developed by D. W. Griffith in the teens set a pattern
that popular cinema has embellished and continuously brought up to date. In the
dominant cinema that America created and shared with the world, the dominant
ideology was rarely questioned and a political context rarely recognized,
analyzed, or criticized. The
transposition of social and moral complexities into melodramas of virtue rewarded
and suffering transcended was accompanied by a transposition of another sort.
Filmmakers developed a style that became as manageable as the content the
style expressed. Narrative elements and their construction—the arranging of
shots and sequences— were experimented with in the early part of the
twentieth century, perfected by Griffith during his Biograph period
(1908-13), and became a universal standard by the time sound was adopted. The
mark of this style is continuity, an uninterrupted and unquestioned or
unquestioning flow of events, a narrative construction so smooth and assured
of its ability to promote its content that it becomes invisible. The flow of
images on the screen assumes the reality of the given, as immediate and
self-sufficient—self-evident—as the ideology it promotes. The
style grew out of trial and error, not complicity or conspiracy, and there
were as many varieties of it as there were studios in various countries with
filmmakers who attempted to impose some individuality on the work they did.
What is more, it is a complex style, based on conventions that, because they
were repeated so often and accepted so thoroughly, are looked upon by most
viewers and filmmakers as the natural way to tell cinematic stories. Cutting
from an establishing shot into various parts of the action; always completing
actions by, for example, following a character in matched cuts from one place
to another so that all action is accounted for; breaking up a dialogue into a
series of over-the-shoulder shots, from one character to another, with
eyelines perfectly matched—these and other small details of construction make
up a pattern of storytelling that the neorealists felt the need to
reconsider. They realized that, whether practiced by MGM, Rank, Ufa, Gaumont,
or the studios of Cinecittà, the classical style—the zero-degree style, as it
has come to be called—was a complex of conventions, of formal and contextual
choices, made, repeated, and naturalized: a transposition, to return to
Zavattini’s phrase, of the various realities of human experience and their
expression into the simplified, expectation-fulfilling discourse of cinema.8 National cinemas were dedicated to a comfortable
situating of the spectator’s gaze in a cinematic world where space was whole
and enveloping (even though it was made up, particularly in American film, of
short, fragmentary shots), time complete and completed in an easily
apprehendable order. Within this small but complete world the passions of
both character and spectator would be large but manageable, directed in
assimilable curves and, above all, predictable and resolved. The neo-realists were certainly aware that
while this style was dominant, it was not all-inclusive. Small matters, such
as the use of the over-the-shoulder shot—the so-called ping-pong method of
dialogue construction—were not universally adopted by the European studios.
More important, there were early reactions to the dominant form that prepared
the ground for their work. The most significant is found in the films and
critical theory of Sergei Eisenstein, who provided the first major
alternative to the kind of cinema being developed by Griffith in America. He
understood, more thoroughly than did Griffith himself, the possibilities of
editing, regarded montage as the essential structuring principle of
filmmaking, and sought to use it to transpose reality into a cinema that
prodded consciousness, attacked traditional politics and morality, and
stimulated thought as well as emotion. In the collision of images that made
up the structure of his films, Eisenstein sought to create a dynamics that
would impel the viewer to a recognition and understanding of revolution. His
films were a structure of and for change, the opposite of Griffith’s, which
were a structure of and for rest and resolution Discussing the classical
closeup, Eisenstein wrote in his 1944 essay "Dickens, Griffith and the
Film Today": The American says: near, or
"close-up." In
this comparison immediately the first thing to appear clearly relating to the
principal function of the close-up in our Cinema is—not only and not so much
to show or to present, as to signify, to give
meaning, to designate. It
is not the comfortable situating of the spectator’s gaze that concerns
Eisenstein, but the meaning of the gaze, the reason the spectator s
seem" a particular structure of images at a particular time in the
course of a film. On Griffith’s cross-cutting he wrote: ...this quantitative accumulation [of
images] even in such "multiplying" situations was not enough: we
sought for and found in juxtapositions more than that—a qualitative leap. Where
the American style creates suspense by multiplying incidents, provoking the viewer
to experience tension with the promise that the tension will be eased with
rescue and affirmation of security, Eisensteinian montage structure exposes
the notion of security. The rhythm of images is the rhythm of historical
analysis and revolutionary change. Rather than tension, Eisenstein’s cutting
provokes a movement through situations to a resolution that is itself further
movement. Thus the people of Odessa celebrate the mutiny of the Potemkin's
crew; they are attacked by Cossacks, who in turn are fired on by the ship;
the ship's uprising is then joined by the rest of the fleet. And each
sequence is formed by a dynamic, often violent, rhythm of images that provoke
the spectator and demand an intellectual and emotional reaction to the
events. There
was no doubt in Eisenstein's mind that Griffith's cinematic forms also
revealed an ideology. In social attitudes Griffith was always a
liberal, never departing far from the slightly sentimental humanism of the
good old gentlemen and sweet old ladies of Victorian England.... His
tender-hearted film morals go no higher than a level of Christian accusation
of human injustice and nowhere in his films is there sounded a protest
against social injustice....But montage thinking is inseparable from the
general content of thinking as a whole. The structure that is reflected in
the concept of Griffith montage is the structure of bourgeois society. . . .
In actuality (and this is no joke), he is woven of irreconcilably alternating
layers of "white" and "red"—rich and poor. . . . And this
society, perceived only as a contrast between the haves and the have-nots, is
reflected in the consciousness of Griffith no deeper than the image of an
intricate race between two parallel lines.10 Eisenstein
appreciated Griffith for his ability to make the narrative elements of film
into flexible, expressive structures. But he saw that these structures never
moved beyond the self-satisfied repetition of middle-class social ideals. The
close-up "showed" and punctuated emotional response. Cross-cutting,
or parallel montage, manipulated cinematic space and time, creating a
suspense that was resolved when the "space" of danger and
"space" of rescue were finally joined and the hero rescued the
heroine (or the reverse in the "Mother and the Law" section of Intolerance).
Griffith's montage was sufficient to his ideology: pietistic, racist,
conservative, closed off from most political and social concerns (only
rarely, as in an early Biograph short, A Corner in Wheat, could
Griffith break out of this enclosure, creating a montage of rich and poor in
something like a political context. The pleas against injustice voiced in Intolerance
are so broad and sentimental that they avoid any analysis or adequate
understanding of history). The forms of his films were themselves
manifestations of Griffith’s social, political, and psychological attitudes,
and Eisenstein was the first writer on film to understand that form is
ideological. In response to American film, he promoted not only an explicit
political content, but a political form and an alternative to the conventions
of continuity begun by Griffith and advancing through the twenties. Against
the pretenses of illusory realism—the form that hides itself so that content
may appear to emerge effortlessly and without mediation—Eisenstein held out
the possibility of a realism of the cinema itself, which spoke clearly in its
own voice, not hiding its means, but using them to manifest and clarify
political and social realities, transposing them into the dynamism of the
image. "Absolute realism," he wrote, "is by no means the
correct form of perception. It is simply the function of a certain form of
social structure."11 American film attempted to erect its
"realism" as an absolute, as the universal way to tell cinematic stories. Against this attempt
Eisenstein, and other major figures outside America (and a few inside),
fought. The neo-realists did not explicitly
recognize Eisenstein as a cinematic forebear. (Few postwar filmmakers did.)
His intrusive style, his insistence that the shot—the single unit of a
recorded image—is only the raw material to be manipulated into the montage
construction, went against their desire to use film as a disengaged observer
of social existence. But if they did not explicitly recognize his importance
to their own work, it is there nonetheless. If the style of neo-realism owes
little to Eisenstein’s means of expression, it owes a great deal to his
desire to express a political alternative to the dominant cinema. That was
what the neo-realists wanted to do, and Eisenstein’s work made doing it
easier for them, even if only as an unacknowledged model. So did other major
attacks against the American style, less political than Eisenstein’s and
somewhat more in line with what the neorealists would be doing; they provide
further examples of the dialectics of perception and response that make up
the history of cinema.
This
animation represents a montage based upon dynamic structures of diagonal
line.
Potemkin (1925)
At first thought, German expressionism
could not appear more different in intent and execution from postwar Italian
cinema. Yet it is an important precursor. The opposite of Eisenstein’s style,
expressionism operated through the exaggeration of mise-en-scène. The shots
made by Eisenstein and his cinematographer, Edward Tisse, though always put
to the service of the larger montage structure, are carefully constructed and
composed, dynamically calibrated reinventions of historical events—or events
that should have occurred in history. Even in Ivan the Terrible, which
reflects an expressionist influence, the images are at the service of
history. But expressionism denied history, at least the history of external
human events, and created instead closed and distorted images of psychological
states. The exaggerated mise-en-scène, the use of painted sets to create
distorted reflections of emotional stress and imbalance, provide a third term
in the developing cinema of the twenties. To the growing strength of
Hollywood melodrama and its obsessive continuity, to Eisenstein’s clash of
the images of history, expressionism opposed a cinema of legend and myth,
presenting cultural archetypes and psychic struggle in the form of tableaux.
In films like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (a nightmare
fairground of the mind, originally intended to be a somewhat revolutionary
statement about the madness of authority, but changed by its producer into
simply a vision of madness); Der Golem; Fritz Lang’s version of Nordic
myth, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge, and his myth of a
proto-fascist future, Metropolis; Murnau’s version of Faust and
his Nosferatu, the first Dracula film, the world is expressed in
gesture and design removed not only from familiar perception, but from the
perceptual conventions emerging in film outside the expressionists’
experiments. "The declared aim of the Expressionists," writes Lotte
Eisner, "was to eliminate nature and attain absolute abstraction."12
This
is of course an aim different from those of both American cinema and
Eisenstein. For them "nature," the "real" world, were
starting points, just as the neo-realists later claimed the real world to be
their point of origin. But in their attempts to avoid the world as it was and
instead build their own with the artifice of paint and light, the
expressionists were concentrating attention on the image and inviting the
spectator to examine and react to that image as a notion of a state of
mind—an intent not totally different from Eisenstein’s or the neo-realists’,
despite the different ways each pursued it. This requires some explanation,
for Eisenstein’s montages of revolution or the neorealists’ images of poverty
and despair are rarely considered akin to the expressionist world of bizarre
shapes and shadows. But the dependence upon the image in all three forms an
important link. It is a peculiarity of perception that what one tends to
recall from an Eisenstein film is a shot rather than a montage sequence: a
face; the movement of the woman’s long hair over the opening drawbridge in
October; the boots of the Cossacks stomping down the Odessa Steps, the
falling baby carriage, and the woman’s bleeding eye in Potemkin.13 This may be because visual memory cannot
store a montage, but only continuous movement. More likely it is because of
the power of Eisenstein’s images. When one thinks of an expressionist film,
one recalls a background (or more accurately a backdrop), the shape of a
window painted on a wall or a frozen gesture. Expressionist film was the
cinema of the designer; in it the formal organization of strained lines and
figures is of predominating interest. It ran counter to all the other
cinematic movements of the time. Even the French avant-garde of the twenties,
who borrowed from expressionism, still based their images very much on the
possibility of things actually seen. The images of expressionist film have
little effect apart from themselves, apart from the fascination of the image
itself. Expressionism was a short-circuited form, and as such has been
reviled by most critics and filmmakers of a realist bent. Yet the
expressionists’ dependence upon the image actively counters the classical
American style, which attempts to subordinate image to character and both to
an unimpeded progress through narrative conflict to resolution. The
irony is that expressionism has had more of an influence on film than
Eisenstein has. Eisensteinian montage became a debased form which was used in
the thirties most often by Slavko Vorkapich in Hollywood to create
"symbolic" episodes (like Jimmy Stewart’s tour of Washington in Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington), or for rather effective special effects (as in
the earthquake sequence of San Francisco). While the internal dynamics
of Eisenstein’s cutting have taught many filmmakers a great deal, its
political possibilities have been largely ignored. Expressionism, on the
other hand, had an effect on the Hollywood style. Its major directors were
brought to America, and their style influenced the Universal horror films of
the thirties and was taken up by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, which
in turn influenced forties film noir, which in its turn
influenced the New Wave filmmakers. When the German cinema was revitalized in
the seventies, expressionism became more than an influence; it emerged as a
problematic. Werner Herzog struggled with it, going so far as to remake
Murnau’s Nosferatu, imitating some of it and simultaneously removing
many of its essential elements. Rainer Werner Fassbinder understood the
expressionist urge. He never copied the style, but knew its intent, and
created a mise-en-scène of observed entrapment that is in the
expressionist tradition. However, Fassbinder, like his contemporary Wim Wenders,
may have gotten his expressionist tendencies as much from American film
noir as from his own cinematic tradition. These
cries-crossing influences will be examined in more detail as we proceed. Here
it is important to note that in its emphasis on the function of the image,
expressionism was one part of the response to the American tradition that
touched neo-realism, particularly as it modulated in the mid-twenties into a
form called Kammerspiel (chamberwork), a smaller, more open narrative
structure that concerned itself less with aggravated psychological or mythic
states and more with the immediate desperations of life in the Weimar
Republic. (Kammerspiel was part of a larger artistic movement at the
time called Die Neue Sachlichkeit—the "new objectivity," or
"matter-of-factness.") In this form its potential influence on
neo-realism became even greater.14 There were still other responses and
influences, in particular two figures who were part of the movement leading
toward neo-realism. The reactions to the Griffith tradition examined so far
all came from outside the United States, but the approach to cinema he
fostered did not go uncontested in America. Erich von Stroheim, who had been
Griffith’s assistant, provided a strong contrast to the work of his mentor.
In his major films of the late teens and twenties—Blind Husbands, Foolish
Wives, The Merry Widow, The Wedding March, and Greed—he
responded to Griffith’s pastoral landscapes, studio-set cities, and fanciful
recreations of historical periods by creating two alternative worlds. The
most predominant was a fantasy, late-nineteenth-century Middle Europe, a
place of aristocratic decadence, the diabolical corner of the operetta
kingdom—the dark capital of Ruritania, where noblemen drank blood and
crippled girls were forced into marriage by pitiless fathers engaged in
whorehouse orgies, and murdered bodies were deposited in sewers. Too
grotesque for melodrama (though permitting just some sentimentality),
smirking at the morbid moralism of Griffith and his followers, von Stroheim’s
lurid universe created a corrective dialectic. Cruelty takes the place of
virtue, squalid death the place of rescued honor, perversity wins out over
innocent passion. In Greed the corrective has a
different quality. Its world is contemporary, its characters working class,
its physical detail built out of locations as well as sets. While too much
ought not to be made of this—much of silent film was shot outdoors, on
location—Greed goes further than most in turning locations into environments
that detail the characters’ social condition. The tenements, offices, bars,
amusement parks they inhabit reflect their economic and social status as well
as their diminished spirits. The inhabitants of Greed are among the
meanest and most brutal in cinema, American or European, up to that time.
They are perverse and obsessed, murderous in the extreme. The final shootout
between the two male characters handcuffed together in the middle of Death
Valley presents images grim in their expression of a willed, unsentimental
destruction. Grim, but with a sense of von Stroheim’s delight in the
nastiness he portrays and his cold observation of aberrant behavior. Perhaps
this emerges as a major legacy of von Stroheim’s: a distance from the
characters and their surroundings, an ability to observe with some humor and
some horror the details and charms of perversity in a manner that cuts
through the simplicities of melodrama that were developing under Griffith’s
tutelage. Von Stroheim’s films ask of the viewer a willingness to observe the
details of degeneracy with no hope offered for relief. The inhabitants of Greed
are observed rather like insects under glass, and von Stroheim asks us to
share with him the entomologist’s pleasure at viewing his specimens. Greed
and his other films are a prophecy of Luis Buñuel’s unpitying exorcising
of bourgeois pieties. His
ability to observe detail recommended von Stroheim to Andrea Bazin, who in
turn recommended him to a new generation of filmmakers: "But it is most
of all Stroheim who rejects photographic expressionism and the tricks of
montage. In his films reality lays itself bare like a suspect confessing
under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police. He has one
simple rule for direction. Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so,
and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness. One
could easily imagine . . . a film by Stroheim composed of a single shot as
long-lasting and as close-up as you like."15 The last part of this statement may be truer
to Bazin’s conception of von Stroheim and where he fits into Bazin’s
aesthetic history of cinema than it is of the director’s work. And as far as
influence is concerned, von Stroheim’s was almost as diffuse as Eisenstein’s.
Perhaps only Buñuel picked up directly the line of happy perversity that runs
through von Stroheim’s films. Otherwise, von Stroheim was a principal in the
movement of antimelodrama, the kind of filmmaking that turns away from
conventions of easy emotional manipulation and the deployment of
stereotypical characters with whom the viewer can "identify." But
however indirect, his influence is apparent in the neo-realists’ work. Like
von Stroheim in Greed, they are attracted to working-class characters,
though they come to these with a compassion von Stroheim would scorn. Even
more important, the sense of detail, the environment that does not exaggerate
the characters’ state but defines it, the ability to make observation
function in the place of editing are all qualities the neo-realists looked to
adapt. It
must be noted in passing that von Stroheim played another major role for
future filmmakers to observe, understand, and use to their benefit, that of
Hollywood martyr. He was the first major figure to suffer from the growth of
filmmaking into a heavy industry, with the capital-conservation,
maximum-profit, minimum-expenditure mentality that goes with such growth. Von
Stroheim was fired from both Universal Studios and MGM for his obsession with
detail and his profligacy with time and money. Greed was originally
forty-seven reels long. Von Stroheim himself cut it almost in half; then
Goldwyn Studios, at the point of the merger which would create MGM, had it
cut to ten reels, the only form in which it is available, the rest having
presumably been destroyed. The few films he was able to direct after that
were almost all re-cut by their studios.16 With the coming of sound and the complete
normalization of production, von Stroheim’s directorial career was over. He
was too slow, too meticulous, too arrogant for the line. What happened to him
in Hollywood, as well as what happened to Eisenstein (his footage for Que
Viva Mexico was stolen from him and his idea for a film of Dreiser’s
American Tragedy given by Paramount to the safely non-revolutionary Joseph
von Sternberg) and then to Welles (who was removed from RKO for making
extravagant, non-commercial films), did not go unheeded by European
filmmakers, who attempted with some success to keep control over their work. The
economic and industrial aspects of filmmaking played as important a part in
the emergence of a new cinema after the war as did the aesthetic movements
and the work of major individual filmmakers. The neo-realists reacted as
strongly against the methods of American film production as against the form
and content of the films those methods produced. In turning away from studios
to location shooting with non-professional players they joined economic
necessity and aesthetic desire in an attack against the complex of events
that made it difficult for a filmmaker like van Stroheim to work. And so his
career had a double influence. Both what he did in his films and what was
done to him and his films by the studios gave future filmmakers much to consider. Von
Stroheim’s career directly converges with that of another formative figure
who remains to be acknowledged along the way to neorealism. Jean Renoir has
stated that von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives was a major influence on his
early work, and his admiration was directly recognized when he gave von
Stroheim an important role in The Grand Illusion (1937). But Renoir’s
work goes beyond von Stroheim. His career reflects the political, economic,
and aesthetic shifts that have occurred in cinema over a great period of
time—almost its entire history, from the silent era to the late sixties. Only
the work of Hitchcock and Buñuel also spans so great a period, though their
longevity is the only thing they have in common with Renoir. Renoir’s cinematic embrace of the world is
more open and gentle than that of either his contemporaries or von Stroheim.
Hitchcock’s gaze discovers the terrors of seeing too much, revealing anarchy
and irrationality; Buñuel and von Stroheim delight in these very things; but
Renoir’s look reveals a world in which the violence we see and do is at the
service of a larger understanding of bourgeois frailty and proletarian need.
"Everyone has his reasons," says Octave, the character played by
Renoir in The Rules of the Game (1939)— one of the most quoted lines
in any film—and it stands for Renoir’s notion of human behavior, from the
anti-bourgeois anarchy wrought by Michel Simon in Boudu Saved from
Drowning (1932), to the justified murder of the odious boss Batala by his
employee in the Popular Front film Le Crime de M. Lange ( 1935), to
the elegies for a dying aristocracy in The Grand Illusion and The
Rules of the Game. Renoir’s is a cinema of understanding, of the
embracing attempt to comprehend history and the function of men and women in
it. The other movements and figures we have been observing are limited in
comparison. He has ranged through a variety of stylistic approaches and
subjects, through them all seeking ways to make the spectator’s eye
participate in the image, which embraces a large field, probes and
elaborates, but does not close it off. The relationships of Renoir’s
characters to each other and to their environment are determined by a
narrative and visual openness, a sensitivity to shifting attitudes and
allegiances and the movements that indicate them. His use of camera movement
and cutting creates a scope of activity, an interplay of face, gesture, and
landscape that invite connection and enlargement. Bazin writes: Renoir . . . understands that the screen is
not a simple rectangle.... It is the very opposite of a frame. The screen is
a mask whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it. The
significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves
hidden. But this invisible witness is inevitably made to wear blinders; its
ideal ubiquity is restrained by framing, just as tyranny is often restrained
by assassination17 The
image, even Renoir’s, cannot show everything, and in the dialectics of the
seen and the not-seen lies an important part of his talent. In his use of
deep focus, his persistent but gentle panning and tracking, the respect he
shows to the spaces his camera organizes and to our orientation as spectators
within those spaces, he indicates always an awareness of more. In his films
of the thirties there is always something beyond what is immediately before
the camera. But what is beyond is not a fearful otherness, but a withness,
a continuation and an expansion. Griffith enclosed his world within the
melodrama of parallel montage, framing the heroine’s face and the hero’s,
separated, but needing to come together, overcoming the world’s opposition.
Von Stroheim locked in on the details of sordidness. The expressionists
denied an expansion into the world by ignoring it. For them reality was the
space created within the frame; if not a stage space, certainly a staged one.
Eisenstein was open to the realities of history, but his montage encouraged
the viewer to create an intellectual, historically relevant space from the
dialectical images juxtaposed on the screen. He provided the material and its
initial structure; the viewer completed the design. Renoir
is, therefore, one of the first major filmmakers to open up screen and
narrative space, to give his viewers room, to allow them active
participation. Like Eisenstein, he requires the spectator to aid in the
completion of the film’s total design; but unlike Eisenstein’s, his films
have spatial continuity, and the spectator need only continue the connections
Renoir provides. The viewer is somewhat more passive before a Renoir film
than before one by Eisenstein, and the combination of this passivity and
Renoir’s openness leads often to a sense of ambiguity in his work. The
elegiac attitude toward class structure in The Grand Illusion, the
open embrace of the multitude of political and social perspectives in The
Rules of the Game, do create problems of ascertaining point of view. But
there is no uncertainty about the fact that Renoir introduces the important
elements of trust and respect into his cinema. He is a director of movement
and attitude, of characters who work through and are affected by historical
as well as personal change. He is able to create formal structures expressing
process, alignments and realignments, movements of characters and of the
audience’s responses to characters that are more open than melodrama permits.
Renoir moved away from the rigid and determining structures of the figures
and schools that preceded and surrounded him and replaced them with observed
emergences of characters and situations that are fluid and changing. The
closest formal analogy to The Rules of the Game is a symphony.
As in a complex work of music, the inhabitants and events of this film work
by statement and variation, through themes and characters taking dominant and
recessive positions, through the crossing and re-crossing of lines of
movements (It is no accident that Octave is a would-be orchestra conductor.)
Unlike music, of course, these movements are created by human figures acting
with and reacting to each other in a precise narrative pattern. But in
orchestrating their movements and actions rather than setting them on a
trajectory within a predetermined space, Renoir is able to create an illusion
of multiplicity and interdependence. The movements of the participants in the
rabbit hunt, the interpenetration of servants and masters during the ball,
the seemingly spontaneous series of decisions and mistaken identities that
lead to the shooting of Jurieu, mark out a pattern of social imbalance,
collapsing order, and characterological weakness that grows from no fixed
point, but instead a number of points, moving, converging, departing. The
Rules of the Game is a rich film; Renoir made no other as rich. Yet all
of his best work creates to some extent this flow of chance and
counter-chance and shares a generous visual and narrative field with the
viewer. Chance
and counter-chance and the generosity of visual and narrative space became
major elements of the new cinema of the sixties, and Renoir reigned as a
guiding figure. Truffaut attempted to emulate him most directly, while Godard
took his openness of form to its limits. All the major filmmakers of the
sixties shared to some degree the respect Renoir had for his viewer. The
neo-realists provided the bridge between him and them, and one film of
Renoir’s was of particular importance to their work. Although, as Raymond
Durgnat points out, the subject of Toni (1934) is romantic passion and
the crime passionnel, Renoir smuggles it through a quasi-objective study of
working-class life in the manner the neo-realists were to favor.18 He observes his characters’ passions within,
and determined by, a particular milieu and a particular class. The film is
about a migrant worker in France, whose barren life in a quarry is mitigated
by opportunities for love, ruined (and here Renoir cannot escape from
thirties stereotypes) by a fickle woman. But more important than the story of
the film is its treatment. Shot on location and creating a mise-en-scène that
does not merely place its inhabitants within a landscape but implicates them
in it, the film observes a physical detail of character and place that looks
forward to Visconti’s Ossessione. In fact Visconti is the only one of
the neo-realist directors who knew of the film prior to 1950, and Ossessione
may be a source for the transmission of Renoir’s ideas to the neo-realists.19 But it is even more likely that Renoir came
upon some notions of cinema which in theory and execution predated what the
neo-realists came upon independently some ten years later. Twenty years after
making Toni, Renoir himself spoke about it in the language of a
neorealist: Good photography . . . sees the world as it
is, selects it, determines what merits being seen and seizes it as if by surprise,
without change.... At the time of Toni ... my ambition was to
integrate the non-natural elements of my film, the elements not dependent on
chance encounter, into a style as close as possible to everyday life. The
same thing for the sets. There is no studio used in Toni. The
landscapes, the houses are those we found. The human beings, whether
interpreted by professional actors or the inhabitants of Martigues, tried to
resemble people in the street.... No stone was left unturned to make our work
as close as possible to a documentary. Our ambition was that the public would
be able to imagine that an invisible camera had filmed the phases of a
conflict without the characters unconsciously swept along by it being aware
of its presence.20 Renoir expresses more of a documentary urge
than the neo-realists would have cared for, and in reality Toni is nothing
like a documentary, for its melodramatic content finally causes its attempted
objectivity to collapse. Yet in Renoir’s statement of intent—as well as in
some aspects of the film—we can see parallels to the neo-realist desire. Here
is Rossellini writing in 1953: "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."21 However, despite what Renoir says, the
"concrete" in Toni is almost an afterthought, as if he had a
story and sought an interesting way to present it. There is no sense of it
being born "in" the film. Nevertheless neo-realism lies as a
possibility in his work, as it does in expressionism and Kammerspiel, in
Eisenstein, and even in the dominant melodramatic forms of American cinema.
For in cinema, as in any art, the creation of any one form predicates the
possibility of a response to that form. As each major movement or individual
dealt with the notion of realism, interpreting film as a reflection of the
"real" world or the creation of a new reality that would clarify
experience, the function of the image changed; and each change represented
another notion of what the image was capable of. The neo-realists wanted the
image to deal so closely with the social realities of postwar Italy that it
would throw off all the encumbrances of stylistic and contextual
preconception and face that world as if without mediation. An impossible
desire, but in it lay the potential for yet other assaults on cinema history,
another modification of the role of filmmaker and spectator. We
are in a position now to look again at neo-realism proper. I have noted some
of its basic elements—location shooting, poor working-class subjects played
by non-professionals, use of the environment to define those subjects, an
attitude of unmediated observation of events—and have examined some movements
in cinema that preceded it. But something was needed to bring those various
elements and the responses to earlier movements together, and that immediate
cause was the end of World War II and the defeat of fascism. Only once before
had a major historical event created a new cinema—when Eisenstein, Dziga
Vertov, and their colleagues responded to the Russian Revolution with
cinematic languages that spoke of changed perceptions of individual and
social life. The end of the war in Italy did not signal major change, only
devastation; years of repression were ended and an occupied country was
suddenly on its own, free to look at itself and its past. The left and
liberal sectors shifted their attention from the bourgeoisie and attempted to
come to terms with the social and cultural conditions of those suffering most
after the war. With the right momentarily in retreat and the center beginning
to form, something of a Marxist position was able briefly to take hold. In
film, that position was made manifest in the choice of the working class as
subject and expressed formally in a desire to observe representatives of that
class in day-to-day activities of survival without, as Rossellini says, the
interference of the superfluous and the spectacular. Perhaps even without
melodrama. At such a time misery could no more be embellished than it could
be ignored. The poverty and neglect were real, and the ideology responsible
for them was no longer operating to negate its responsibility and to
transpose reality into a mockery of itself. Fascism is essentially a politics
of melodrama and spectacle. In its political shows, its emotional excess,
demand for sacrifice, and apotheosis of death as the most noble act of the
hero, it manipulates emotion toward predetermined ends. The neo-realists
wanted no ends predetermined; not even means. They wanted to observe the
postwar world freed of the mediations and diversions that had helped create
the war in the first place, and felt that if they allowed the movie camera to
gaze at the world without interference, the lives of the poor would reveal
themselves and their stories would grow from the simple act of observation. Thus
melodrama and any sort of formal demagoguery were to be avoided; they wished
their new cinema to be non-directive in its attitude toward its subject and
to allow its audience the freedom to respond to that subject with as little
extraneous guidance as possible. Some neo-realist theory called for doing
away with anything that might interfere with the raw material of raw
life—even narrative itself. Zavattini wrote: ". . . the neo-realist
movement recognized that the cinema should take as its subject the daily
existence and condition of the Italian people, without introducing the
coloration of the imagination, and thereby, force itself to analyze it for
whatever human, historical, determining and definite factors it
encompasses."22 In 1948, an Italian Catholic critic, Felix A.
Morlion, wrote: the Italian neo-realist director prefers
simplicity. He is not eager to obtain effects through sensational editing in
the manner of Eisenstein and Orson Welles. His goals are different: humble
cinematography, seemingly unoriginal editing, simplicity in his choice of
shots and his use of plastic material [the visual design of the film]: all go
to give his interior vision substance. . . .
The
Italian neo-realist school is based on a single thesis diametrically opposed
to that thesis which regards the cinema only in terms of lighting effects,
words, and purely imaginary situalions. Neo-realism’s thesis is that the
screen is a magic window which opens out onto the "real"; that
cinematic art is the art of recreating, through the exercise of free choice
upon the material world, the most intense vision possible of the invisible
reality inherent in the movements of the mind.23 |
