Neorealism as Ideology: Bazin, Deleuze, and the Avoidance of Fascism

The Italianist, 35. 2, 182 –201, June 2015 NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY: BAZIN, DELEUZE, AND THE AVOIDANCE OF FASCISM LORENZO FABBRI University of Minnesota, USA Although the very existence of neorealism has been under scrutiny at least since the 1950s, an obstinate outlook on Italy’s cinema history still reduces all national films to anticipations, prolongations, or betrayals of this elusive new wave. Why is this the case? In this article, I explain the persisting critical hegemony of neorealism from the point of view of ideology critique. I argue that Bazin’s and Deleuze’s influential accounts of neorealism as a revolutionary, anti-narrative, zero-degree cinema have streamlined the fantasy of an innocent post-war Italy, of a child-like nation that redeemed itself from its past and was ready to start afresh. In this light, I suggest that the attachment to neorealism ought be recognized as a collective defence mechanism repressing the aborted ‘de-fascitizzazione’ of Italian postFascist society. KEYWORDS: Neorealism, Fascism, Deleuze, Bazin, film theory & history, ideology, historical guilt, trauma Neorealism as such does not exist. —André Bazin, In Defense of Rossellini1 No one is more responsible for the simultaneous appreciation and misunderstanding of the history of Italian cinema than André Bazin. No one, except perhaps Gilles Deleuze. Driven by the illusions of an Italian school of liberation or of the epochal transition from movement-image to time-image, Bazin and Deleuze contributed to the invention of neorealism and cemented it as a turning point in the history of European new waves and world art-house cinema. Neither Bazin nor Deleuze considered neorealism to be a monolithic phenomenon. Still, their cinema volumes sanctioned neorealism as an obligatory point of reference for anyone engaging with Italian film. Whether one discusses works from before the fall of Mussolini or after the liberation of Rome, from the time of the Kingdom of Italy or of the second Republic, from the silent era or the digital one, the tendency is to hold up neorealism as the touchstone against whose backdrop all Italian cinema ought to be situated, if not judged. Once Italian film history is viewed from the perspective of neorealism and neorealism rises to the status of ‘via maestra of Italian film’, one cannot but indulge # Italian Studies at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Reading 2015 DOI: 10.1179/0261434015Z.000000000115 NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 183 in nostalgic teleologies or genealogies.2 Anticipations of neorealism. Returns to neorealism. Betrayals of neorealism. Tributes to neorealism. The overcoming of neorealism. Neorealist hybrids. Post-neorealist cinema. Post-modern neorealism. Neo-neorealism. The pressure to refer to neorealism is so enormous that its traces are seen everywhere, as if there could be no legitimate discourse on Italian cinema without invoking it. When it comes to Italian film, a neorealist fever seems endemic. No similar phenomenon exists in the historiography of other national cinemas. I do not recall, for instance, ever encountering a history of French cinema written in the light of the nouvelle vague. The exasperation for this situation is best exemplified by Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe’s 2011 incendiary manifesto, ‘Against Realism’.3 In order to exorcise the ghosts of neorealism, O’Leary and O’Rawe provocatively propose a five-year moratorium on discussions of old and new Italian realisms. This move would prompt a general reassessment of the nation’s visual culture, especially of the much-overlooked popular cinema. One might sympathize with O’Leary and O’Rawe’s gestures, and especially with their disdain for cultural capital and orthodoxy. Yet by ignoring neorealism, Italian cinema studies would miss the opportunity for a radical displacement of the assumptions grounding the field. Consider the reservations advanced by Millicent Marcus and Charles Leavitt. Marcus points out that ‘O’Leary and O’Rawe replicate the very binary thinking that underlines the “privileging” of realism so vehemently opposed in their essay’. Leavitt argues that, notwithstanding its iconoclastic tone, ‘Against Realism’ buys into ‘the prevailing definitions and strictures of neorealist scholarship’.4 Instead of placing a moratorium on neorealism, a move that would implicitly refer to it and surreptitiously confirm its existence, I advocate a different strategy to upset the canon. I argue that scholars should dismiss neorealist-centred approaches because, simply put, neorealism does not exist. Or better said: Neorealism exists more in Bazin and Deleuze than it ever existed in film history; in books more than at the movies; on paper more than on celluloid. It is a forced category with very limited explanatory force that fails to capture the heterogeneity of Italian films produced during its supposed flowering. Yet ‘the critical priority of neorealism (and of its undisputed auteurs) thanks partly to its consolidation in France, firstly by André Bazin, and later by Gilles Deleuze, has remained relatively unchallenged’.5 Why is this the case? Why do so many scholars working on Italian cinema avoid decisive confrontation with neorealism and let Bazin’s and Deleuze’s inaccurate histories haunt their research? Why is it impossible to talk about Italian cinema without referring to neorealism, even if it is unclear what neorealism actually is and how many films (0? 250?) are to be included in the neorealist archive? In this article I propose a hypothesis as to why, despite the fact that Bazin’s and Deleuze’s blind spots have been highlighted by many, scholarship on Italian cinema continues to cling to the worn-out category of neorealism. First I go over the precariousness of Bazin’s and Deleuze’s frameworks in order to question the existence of neorealism itself. Then, taking my cue from Mario Mattòli’s 1945 film La vita ricomincia, I explain the on-going success of neorealism from the perspective of ideology critique. Neorealism, I argue, is not a theory in film or new wave in cinema history, but a narrative category: to understand neorealism’s hegemony one has then to consider the accounts of national history that such a category promotes.6 An unsuccessful framework for discussing film history, 184 LORENZO FABBRI the category of neorealism contributes to a retelling of Italy’s past that avoids any decisive confrontation with Fascism. It is for this reason, I conclude, that neorealism cannot but go uncontested. Although, as Bazin conceded, neorealism as such does not exist, it does exist as ideology. BAZIN’S BLUNDERS Marco Grosoli recently noted that 94 per cent of Bazin’s corpus still remains unknown and unstudied, especially in the Anglophone world. Out of the 2600 essays Bazin wrote, only a handful has been translated into English. Thus, to truly understand Bazin’s answer to the question ‘What is cinema?’, scholars would need to engage with an extensive and neglected body of writings. The recent new translation of Bazin’s canonical essays as well as the translation of essays of his that never appeared in English before add on to the general reconsideration of Bazin that started in 2001 with Philip Rosen’s Changed Mummified and Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time and culminated ten years later with Opening Bazin, the collective volume edited by Dudley Andrew and Herve JoubertLaurencin. After the 1970s outright rejection of Bazin (Screen theory, Baudry, Comolli), since the early 2000s scholars have been discovering in him a more nuanced — and less naı̈ve — theory of realism.7 A reassessment of Bazin goes well beyond the scope of this essay. My very limited objective in this section is to zoom in on the shaky foundation upon which Bazin, in the 1948 ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, constructs his account of neorealism. ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’ is arguably the most crucial building block for the institution of neorealism. Bazin begins his seminal essay by relating the emergence of post-war Italian cinematic realism to the crumbling of Mussolini’s dictatorship.8 At the same time, and to deny that Vittorio De Sica’s and Roberto Rossellini’s masterpieces spontaneously emerged from the rotten corpses of Fascism and the war, the French critic argues that neorealism was anticipated by the pre-liberation realist films of Alessandro Blasetti, Rossellini, Francesco De Robertis, and Mario Camerini. Bazin is well aware that Italian cinema from the 1930s had moved beyond the silent monumentality of Quo Vadis (Enrico Guazzoni, 1912) and Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914). He knew that Blasetti’s 1941 fantasy film La corona di ferro with its tasteless penchant for décor, reliance on celebrities, conventional scenario, and disregard for good acting did not represent the national ‘characteristics of films made beyond the Alps’.9 The national trait of Italian cinema is realism. It is on the grounds of this dubious claim that Bazin connects the supposedly most proper Italian cinema — neorealism — to realist films made under the Regime. Mussolini provided Italy with modern film studios. In these studios Fascism’s tasteless escapism and propaganda dominated. However, according to Bazin, Italian totalitarianism never sought, or achieved, the total control on cultural and artistic life that characterized Hitler’s Germany: ‘Fascism . . . unlike Nazism, allowed for the existence of artistic pluralism’.10 Outside Cinecittà, there was enough freedom for those directors who filmed contemporary subjects without ideological presuppositions and, thus, were the forerunners of neorealism. It is based on these insights that Bazin praises Gli uomini che mascalzoni (Camerini, 1932), Uomini sul fondo (De Robertis, 1941), La nave bianca NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 185 (De Robertis/Rossellini, 1941), and Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Blasetti, 1943) as typically Italian insomuch as they take place ‘on the streets’ and on location. For Bazin, neorealism ought to be understood as an intensification of currents already present at the margins of Fascist ideology and film industry, an intensification that after Mussolini’s deposition in 1943 imposed itself as a new wave of filmmaking. Until Italy’s entry into the war, realist films were ‘modest violets flowering at the feet of the grand sequoias’ of Fascist production.11 Then, with the war, Fascism’s forest of lies burned down, and more space opened up for realistic representations of national life. Eventually, the liberation taught realism to live up to its critical potential, and the revolutionary humanism of the resistance against Nazi-Fascism found its visual incarnation in De Sica’s and Rossellini’s films. So goes the story that Bazin propagated. By connecting the socio-political frescos of Roma città aperta (Rossellini, 1945) and Ladri di biciclette (De Sica, 1948) to the earlier Italian realist films, Bazin turns realism into an intrinsically progressive genre.12 In fact, he holds the realist impulse to be clearly incompatible with capitalist or political stupidity and therefore grants it an ethical value, sanctioning it as a stronghold against ideology and totalitarian propaganda dominating commercial production. While Bazin’s interpretation of neorealism as a new film school is problematic, his insight about cinema under Fascist rule is a blunder. Bazin misses how the social realism of Quattro passi fra le nuvole, Uomini sul fondo, Rossellini’s war trilogy, and Camerini’s early comedies was not in any way informed by a sheer love of reality or by the urgency to confront in an objective manner the facts of life. These films were supported by the Regime and were attuned to Mussolini’s project to re-make Italians and to frame them within racial narratives of national identity. Cinematic realism was indeed representative of Italy, yet not because it was a form of anti-ideological filmmaking, but rather because it was deployed to represent the Fascist nation. As documented by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, realism worked as an apparatus at the service of Fascist ideology and was an integral component of what Emilio Gentile defined as the Italian totalitarian experiment.13 Although I cannot here treat cinema under the Regime in detail, it is crucial to point out how the discovery of Fascist realism cannot but bear heavily on Bazin’s account of neorealism. As soon as the indexical link between realism and reality is problematized, it becomes difficult to uncritically accept the idea of neorealism as an ethic-aesthetic revolution, as a pure cinema not spoiled by ideology or fiction.14 Bazin’s phenomenological outlook on cinema led critics to think that the recourse to formal and rhetorical strategies such as location shooting, non-professional actors, and long takes, would allow films to attain a higher degree of proximity to reality itself. By acknowledging the existence of a Fascist realism and the continuity between pre- and post-Mussolini cinema, one must come to terms with the fact that the same visual strategies of the neorealist revolution contributed to paving the Italian way to totalitarianism. By extension, one could register the overlooked progressive import of so-called white telephone cinema and admit that these sentimental comedies often proposed articulations of Italianness far more liberal and transgressive than those to be found in realist cinema.15 However, it is not just a matter of accepting the old Italian realism as a State ideological apparatus, of questioning the ethico-political dismissal of genre fiction, and of correcting Bazin 186 LORENZO FABBRI accordingly. Christopher Wagstaff and Karl Schoonover take an additional key step in the demolition of Bazin’s framework by signalling that the new Italian realism is less stylistically realistic (Wagstaff) and politically progressive (Schoonover) than believed.16 Taking into account Wagstaff’s and Schoonover’s impressive interventions on neorealism, it becomes incredibly difficult to define the original Italian new wave and establish which films it comprises. Consider the bitter rhetorical questions posed by Lino Micciché in his preface to the new edition of the proceedings from the massive 1974 Pesaro Film Festival initiative which set out to rethink neorealism.17 Twenty-five years had passed since the innovative symposium and Micciché pondered the lack of an account that could do justice to neorealism as a complex but unified phenomenon. Is it really possible — he asks — that five decades from the end of neorealism, we are still missing a monograph able to capture the Italian new school? Another fifteen years passed, and a unifying theory of neorealism is still nowhere to be found. In four hundred pages of painstaking formal analyses, Wagstaff’s Italian Neorealist Cinema demonstrates that even the supposed strongholds of neorealism diverge from the neorealist dogma that for Bazin allowed cinema to close on pro-filmic facts. Paying attention to mise-en-scène, narrative technique, acting, cinematography, and locations, Wagstaff ascertains that neorealist films abide by the laws of genre that govern conventional filmmaking. It turns out that even De Sica and Rossellini are ‘dupes’ of traditional film technique, and consequently — on the basis of Bazin’s framework and thanks to Wagstaff’s cues — we should establish that they as well are ‘held back from any further discovery of reality’.18 The realization that neorealist films are also edited, staged, denotative, symbolic, and manipulative, is certainly a major blow to Bazin’s emphasis on the aesthetic revolution of the Italian new school. Schoonover, for his part, focuses on the ethics of the neorealist gaze. He not only points out that films by De Sica and Rossellini do seek to demonstrate certain a priori theses regarding the real. He also notes that their ideological import is far less progressive than one would think it to be: De Sica and Rossellini contributed to the representation of Italy as a helpless country in need of international aid, providing a visual authorization for the Marshall plan and the intervention of the United States in Italian domestic affairs. After reading Brutal Vision, it is impossible to observe the pain of neorealist bodies without considering the geopolitical antes being waged on Italy’s body-politic during the second half of the twentieth century. Brutal Vision and Italian Neorealist Cinema confirm the paradox that haunts Italian film scholarship: we know that neorealism is a fundamental moment in film history, we have a clear idea of what neorealism is and which films should be considered neorealist, but as soon as we bring the Italian liberation school under scrutiny, things get muddy. For instance, if we were to follow Bazin’s description of a neorealist aesthetic, the neorealist archive would rapidly shrinks to four films (Rossellini’s Roma città aperta and Paisà, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette and Umberto D), then to two (Paisà and Umberto D) and finally, perhaps, to few sequences from Paisà. If we tackle the issue from an ethical perspective, the category of neorealism becomes even more unstable. Schoonover highlights how none of the canonical post-war Italian films ignite the sort of engagement that Bazin attributed to them. If Bazin’s account of neorealism does not hold water, one is left wondering: What is this neorealism that Wagstaff and Schoonover so prominently display in their book titles? NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 187 Schoonover ambitiously aimed to rethink neorealism. Yet, his book fails in providing a definition of neorealism equipped to do justice to post-war Italian cinema: Brutal Vision does not provide the holy grail of a unified theory of neorealism that Micciché longed for. Schoonover’s filmic archive is quite limited (he discusses only four ‘first-generation neorealist films’ in detail); his broader claims about the neorealist politics of vision appear generalizations: Schoonover’s framework would not work for other ‘neorealist’ classics, such as Luchino Visconti’s 1948 La terra trema and Giuseppe De Santis’s 1949 Riso amaro. Wagstaff’s Neorealism. An Aesthetic Approach does not provide any general definition of neorealism either and is content with pointing out the limits of Bazin’s insights. Overall, Wagstaff’s and Schoonover’s excellent books symptomatize the double-bind that ties Italian film studies to neorealism: on the one hand, it is impossible to define neorealism and constitute a neorealist archive; on the other hand, it is impossible to give neorealism up. While the invocation of neorealism is the inaugural speech-act in any discourse on Italian cinema, it is very arduous to grasp what neorealism is after all. Before concluding that neorealism cannot be defined because it does not exist, one additional step is necessary. After reviewing Bazin on neorealism, one would have to confront the other great attempt to capture neorealism: Gilles Deleuze’s taxonomy of cinema. DELEUZE’S SAMPLES Neorealism plays a fundamental part in Deleuze’s history of the cinema’s transition from the movement-image to the time-image. For Deleuze, neorealism is not merely an important phenomenon in film history but the hinge connecting the two epochs of the cinematic image. As a matter of fact, Deleuze uses neorealism as a bridge to edit together his cinema volumes and give continuity to the narrative progression that they establish. Neorealism emerges as a response to a crisis: while the crisis of the movement-image is the cliff-hanger which ends Cinema 1, its resolution launches Cinema 2. Deleuze makes the crisis of the movement-image dependent on conditions provoked by great transformations in history. It is a societal trauma that drives the modernization of classic film-form. In fact, the emergence of cinematic modernity is connected to the impossibility for human beings, in a specific geo-historical context, to come to terms with their life situation: ‘[t]he modern fact is that we do not longer believe in this world’.19 Instead of perceiving reality as a stage where action is possible, we experience it as a realm in which it is impossible to intervene. Reality appears too powerful, too painful, too exceptional. The senses convey certain stimuli from the outside world to the brain, but the mind does not know how to process them. It cannot figure out which muscles to activate and how the body should react to the new environment. The link between humanity and the world is broken, Deleuze comments, and then concludes that the time-image arises from the weakening of a society’s sensory-motor automatisms. The more the frames necessary to interpret the world and to act within it become useless, the more ‘action films’ will be inappropriate for that time. The images that are appropriate in critical moments are those resonating with, rather than diverging from, the newness of a certain historical juncture. The new film-form is as dispersive, elliptical, 188 LORENZO FABBRI wavering, and floating as the new reality it emerges from. While previously we had an action cinema in which characters were able to modify their living contexts, now we have a cinema of idleness wherein characters wander around and wonder about the unprecedented environments they face.20 Within the age of the time-image the relation of characters to their diegetic reality is analogous to the relationship spectators establish with a film and their own historical reality. The general attitude in modern times and modernist cinema is bewilderment. It takes time to figure things out after formerly automatic behaviour patterns have become useless. Cinema bears witness to the time-consuming process of restoring faith in the world and through time-images stages the labour of the mind. What time-images ultimately capture is a society’s awakening. Helplessness and paralysis are quite productive affects, according to Deleuze. Only when one disconnects from all pre-established frames of references, can one eventually discover reality as an open work, as a chaotic flux of possibilities. The people of the time-image are like history’s new-born children: ‘in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing’.21 To make the case for the connection between history and the imaginary, Deleuze goes on to signal that different national cinemas are reborn at different times. ‘The timing is something like: around 1948, Italy; about 1958 France; about 1968, Germany’.22 The aftermath of Nazism, Vichy, and Fascism respectively left Germany, France, and Italy in a profound state of confusion. The reactions to these wreckages were significantly different, and this explains the chronology of cinematic modernity within these countries. After the war, Germany was in such a shock that it seemed to have lost its imaginative faculty altogether. According to Deleuze at least, German cinema had been completely compromised by its stalwart support of Nazism, and therefore it experienced the impossibility of imagination after Auschwitz. Only in the late 1960s and with a new generation of filmmakers did German cinema face its own spectres and fears. When that happened, the timeimage arrived in Germany. On the other end of the spectrum there is France. At the end of the war, France had the ambition to belong to the circle of victors. It was easy for General De Gaulle to persuade the French people that they were not responsible for Vichy and that the nation unhesitatingly enlisted in the Free French Forces and decisively contributed to the victory of the Allies. France had to appear to have won the war. This narrative, the ‘French dream’ in Deleuze’s words, did not leave room for much self-questioning. The conditions were not favourable for a renewal of the cinematic image and thus the reboot of the film-form had to await the resurfacing of France’s repressed ambiguities and contradictions. Deleuze does not register this, but the nouvelle vague explodes right in the middle of the Algerian war (1954– 1962), when enlightened French citizens were forced to confront the nation’s status of brutal occupying force. Without decolonization, no French new wave. After World War Two, Italy found itself trapped between the burden of evil and the palliative of glorification: ‘It could certainly not claim the rank of victor; but, in contrast to Germany, on the one hand it had at its disposal a cinematographic institution which had escaped Fascism relatively successfully, on the other hand it could point to a resistance and a popular life underlying oppression’.23 It is precisely this ambiguous position that pushed the Italian cinematic imaginary to become NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 189 modern sooner, to mutate earlier from action-ridden récits, to stories based on reflection. Italy’s confused state prevented the perceptions of its citizens from being translated into action, and instead placed them in relation to thought. Within the realm of cinematic images, action films gave way to a cinema of speculation. Italian cinema needed a new type of tale, a style appropriate for the nation’s special historical situation: cinema had to rethink itself, rejecting all the worn-out tropes of the American tradition. Deleuze endorses Cesare Zavattini’s definition of neorealism as an art of encounters but adds one caveat. The crucial encounter taking place in neorealism does not involve people; rather, it is the encounter of perception, time, and thought.24 As soon as the perception-reaction schema of Italians grew weak, once Fascism’s hegemony on national life crumbled, it became possible for the people to encounter reality as an unlimited set of possibilities. For Deleuze, neorealism bears witness to this situation and manifests the under-codification of Italian reality after the fall of Fascism; neorealism takes place in the imaginative interval between different arrangements of Italian reality. Accordingly, as it was for Bazin, it is the only appropriate cinema for a nation in its year zero. Deleuze’s treatment of neorealism is surely breath-taking. The attempt to think neorealism philosophically and to situate it within a global history of the imaginary is audacious. What if one considers his Cinema volumes as if they were a simple history of film and investigates their ability to capture Italian post-war cinema and do justice to actual neorealist films? On the one hand, Deleuze brilliantly illuminated certain sequences from Italian films — a white squall, a walk on a volcano, the sudden discovery of a dusty inn along the Po river. On other hand, the sequences that Deleuze discusses do not exist in isolation. One can fully appreciate their meaning only by contextualizing them within the general narrative economy of the films to which they belong. Instead, Deleuze isolates a few scenes from each film — he samples them, so to speak — and then re-assembles them into his own personal version of world cinema history. Deleuze’s cinema volumes are extraordinary works of montage. As in Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinéma, images constitute the building blocks for another imaginary construction: ‘[t]he fable that tells the truth of cinema is extracted from the stories narrated on its screen’.25 By detaching sequences from stories and reconfiguring them in a new narrative assemblage, Deleuze ends up with the history of a cinema that never existed. A continuous metonymic displacement presents particular ‘petit objects’ as representative of the whole. It is this extrapolation protocol that allows Deleuze to make a list of the five distinctive features of neorealism (dispersive situation, weak narrative links, voyage form, consciousness of cliché, and condemnation of a plot).26 Alas, in the midst of this masterful process of extrapolation, neorealism loses any specificity and becomes conflated with Italian auteur cinema. Deleuze, on his part, loses track of the films he set out to investigate. The contact of a woman’s hand with her pregnant belly stands for Umberto D. The arrival of Rocco’s family in Milan stands for Rocco e i suoi fratelli. A carnival party stands for I vitelloni. It is only through a generalized forgetting of the bigger picture that Deleuze can claim that neorealism’s greatest innovation consists in the introduction into cinema of the disbelief in the possibility of acting upon the world.27 Had Deleuze treated neorealist films as films rather than sources for samples, it would have been 190 LORENZO FABBRI impossible for him to miss that their balades do lead somewhere. No matter how slowly they proceed, or how reflexive they are, the films that Deleuze extrapolates from do not merely register unprecedented audio-visual situations, they also narrate the actions and reactions of characters to their environment. In that respect, they are no different from classic action Hollywood cinema. For Cesare Casarino, Deleuze rightly singled-out neorealism as a cinema of idleness and potentiality: ‘whereas the primary political import of pre-war cinema consisted in the presence of the people . . . the political import of post-war cinema lies precisely in drawing attention to the conspicuous absence of the people, in knowing how to show that the people are what is missing’.28 Mobilizing Millicent Marcus against Deleuze, Alessia Ricciardi instead signals that film scholars should not overlook the role that post-war Italian cinema played in the reconstitution of Italy as a newly imagined and imagining community in the aftermath of WWII. The development of a new national consciousness also calls for the institution of certain behavioural automatisms, the establishment of reaction patterns to the perceived reality. Then, one would have to conclude that De Sica and Rossellini did not only describe the Italian real as an open set of possibilities; they also prescribed specific, and often conflictual, arrangements of national life. In her very subtle receptionhistory of neorealism in France, Ricciardi asks: Do Ladri di biciclette, Paisà, Umberto D, and Roma città aperta exhibit an historical incapacity to act, or are they rather explorations of new modalities of being in history? Do these films really witness the rupture of the sensory-motor schema so much as provoke new regimes of movement and action?29 Jacques Rancière betrayed a similar scepticism towards Deleuze’s emphasis on idleness and inactivity when mapping the importance that movement and action have in Rossellini.30 Rancière does not challenge the presence of time-images in Roma città aperta or in other post-war Italian films. He holds that a film is structurally constituted by the alternation of movement-images and time-images, action and suspense, resolution and paralysis. Accordingly, any attempt to isolate the essence of a film from the stories it tells is a work of de-figuration that violates the film as a whole. The verdict, for Rancière, is that Deleuze’s neorealism exists far above and beyond actual neorealist films. THE (SCI-)FICTION OF NEOREALISM ‘In short, cinema has not yet been invented’. André Bazin, The Myth of Total Cinema31 Bazin and Deleuze are surely very distant in their accounts of neorealism. They are separated not only by forty years but also by clearly incompatible philosophical frameworks (Catholic humanism versus Nietzschean post-structuralism). Still, their working protocols are quite similar. In fact, it is only by purging all traditional and stereotypical aspects from post-war Italian cinema that they can establish a theory of neorealism. Bazin repressed the generic aspects of Rossellini’s and De Sica’s films. Deleuze overlooked the narrative movements in their films. Bazin feared that traditional narrative techniques would prevent cinema from achieving the Platonic dream of an objective rendering of all reality’s ambiguities. To preserve the myth of a total cinema, he erased from De Sica’s and Rossellini’s works all the stains of NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 191 conventionality and directorial manipulation. Deleuze considered classic narrative progression as the domain of clichés and naturalized behaviours, and forced Italian auteurs to stand for the possibility of a modernist cinema that captured the real as a ‘chaosmotic’ open work. There is a common suspicion of plots at the centre of Bazin’s and Deleuze’s accounts of neorealism. Surprisingly enough, Zavattini — the author of so many neorealist scenarios — expressed a similar suspicion of narratives, with one fundamental difference. Zavattini never pretended that neorealism succeeded in renouncing classic narrative arches. Consequently, neorealism in film, for him, had not yet been achieved. By 1952 critics were claiming that neorealism had exhausted its energies. Interviewed on the matter, Zavattini provided a different account of its life cycle. Critics were wrong. Neorealism was not dead. It never had been born. The so-called masterpieces of neorealism were insufficiently neorealist because they still relied on fiction to communicate the large or small facts of everyday life. Life cannot be captured through scenarios. Cinema’s business is not to tell stories, Zavattini exhorts. Neorealist directors were aware of this, and had explored strategies to allow life to expose itself, unmediated, to the camera. Unfortunately, no one had yet fully succeeded in such an enterprise. Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti had started the battle to conquer reality. And, now, behind them there was an army of directors ready to go on the attack and win the neorealist war.32 The victory would, however, also coincide with the death of cinema. For Zavattini, the birth of neorealism would imply the elimination of the whole technical-professional apparatus of cinema, screenwriters, directors, and actors. Thus, to have neorealism, to translate neorealism from manifestos to reels, one would have to renounce cinema. Bazin was well aware of this paradox, and believing to have found neorealism in Ladri di biciclette commented: ‘No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema’.33 But then he admitted that one had only glimpses of what neorealism might be: there are fragments of neorealism in Umberto D, two or three sequences that bear witness to a cinema transformed into a mirror of life.34 Neorealism begins when plots end. Bazin, Zavattini, and Deleuze would agree on this. Only beyond the threshold of subjective narrative mediation does authentic cinema becomes possible. Such a crossing — unrealistic as it is — remains a categorical imperative, the urgency that forces theories of neorealism to speak in the future tense. In Bazin, such a futurity takes the geometrical shape of an asymptote, the curve that tends to approach another line without ever connecting with it. After his initial grandiose interventions, Bazin betrayed all sorts of doubt on the actual import and composition of the Italian new school. He acknowledged to have made ‘some rather naı̈ve statements in the past’ and retraced his steps, aware of the problems his framework brought along. At times, he proposed less stringent criteria to identify neorealism (natural settings, realistic make-up and costumes, non-professional walk-ons) with the goal of accommodating films as disparate as Augusto Genina’s 1948 biopic on virgin-martyr Maria Goretti Cielo sulla palude and Curzio Malaparte’s 1950 propagandistic Cristo proibito.35 Other times, in his reviews of particular films by De Sica and Rossellini, Bazin ridiculed the idea, his idea, that realism and neorealism could be identified through specific stylistic features. 192 LORENZO FABBRI To achieve realism, one has to be concerned with making cinema the asymptote of reality, ‘in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it’.36 Realism is to be understood as a faithful rendering of life in film, with the consequence that any new form of sincere, thesisless documentation of reality could be considered neorealist: ‘given the fact that the movement toward the real can take a thousand different routes, the apologia for “realism” per se, strictly speaking, means nothing at all’.37 Bazin’s definition of realism in terms of correspondence to reality is obviously circular. Since the epistemological task of the cinema is to reveal the hidden meanings in people and things, and we can access the meaning of reality only insofar as it is represented, we have no way of determining the faithfulness of film to reality in itself. But more importantly: the definition of realism as cinema’s dream and the figure of the asymptote suggest that for Bazin cinema is merely able to approach reality, without ever being able to fully connect with it. Once Bazin acknowledges that the reel cannot register the real, that integral realism is always ‘to come’,38 it is difficult to come up with criteria to clearly distinguish faithful from unfaithful rendering of reality on screen, and — at last — to prove the existence of neorealism. The problem is that as long as human hands control the movie-camera, cinema will be a human, and thus imperfect, representation of reality. Only a new form of life, a redeemed humanity will be able to invent a cinema that is true to its originating dream, and finally reproduce life on the screen. Until then, neorealism as such cannot exist. In Deleuze there are no traces of the Platonic and Christian overtones informing Bazin’s longing for pure image facts. Yet even in Deleuze’s description of neorealism as the realm of idle time-images, one can hear the silent ring of futurity. Deleuze’s Cinema volumes, in fact, are not only a natural history, a taxonomy of images; they are also an axiology of life. For Deleuze certain images are closer to thought than others; they are more thought-provoking, more philosophical, and have more intellectual value. Since images are connected with the specific historical conjuncture that a community is facing, their differential complexity and reflectivity must be brought back to the plane of lived history. The modes of the imaginary must be, in other words, connected to the plane of life. It is the thoughtfulness of different historical forms-of-life that Deleuze seeks to map out, using the imaginary as the crucial marker to assess each of them. The issue to consider at this point is which form-of-life could endure in time-images without falling back into movement-images and naturalized behaviours. If the time-image emanates from lives that, however briefly, ponder the world rather than automatically reacting to it on the basis of customs and habits, a pure time film could be completed only by an absolute life, a life absolutely detached from reflex action and absolutely committed to reflection. The ‘beyondness’ that the time-image motions to is the future of life, and neorealism as the actualization of such a beyond can only take place after the death of man. It is for this precise reason that Deleuze cannot help but connect neorealism with science-fiction. Deleuze’s odyssey into the time-image begins with a kitchen sequence in a Rome apartment (Umberto D) and, through Michelangelo Antonioni, ends with a day in the life of an interplanetary traveller heading beyond Jupiter while watching himself eating, dying, and being reborn as a star child. This child is naked. It could not have been otherwise since this ‘new life’ gave NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 193 up any habitus whatsoever. In order for neorealism to be a cinema of time-images, the creatures responsible for it ought to be as new and naked as the majestic formof-life being born at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the last scene from Stanley Kubrick’s film, Deleuze writes, ‘the sphere of the foetus and the sphere of the earth have the chance of entering into a new, incommensurable, unknown relation, which would convert death into a new life’.39 Deleuze treats neorealism as the proof that the absolute new life Kubrick alluded to is indeed possible: from Fascism’s death, to neorealist life, and beyond. Bazin held that neorealism is the cinema of a redeemed humanity. For Deleuze, it is the cinema appropriate for the Nietzschean superman. In both cases, neorealism can only occur after a radical transformation of humanity as we know it. In fact, Deleuze’s emphasis on neorealism as the cinema of a childlike nation unmistakably resonates with Bazin’s insistence on neorealism as the cinema of a reborn Italy. For both Deleuze and Bazin, it is neorealism rather than the introduction of sound that is the crucial event in the history of the cinema, the event that separates old from modern films. And the modernity of neorealism cannot but be connected with the newness of the nation from which it emerged: post-war Italy appears in Bazin and Deleuze as a sort of miraculous void in which the essence of humanity, or the potential of an inhuman life, is set free. Their neorealism bears witness to a totally unprecedented reality: a pure origin, a clean break, a blank slate untouched by the evil of either capitalistic wickedness or naturalized habits. It only takes a closer look at their frameworks to notice that Bazin and Deleuze are writing about a zero cinema, a zero nation, and a zero people which never existed. ON THE USES AND ABUSES OF NEOREALISM FOR NATIONAL HISTORY ‘In one sense Italy is only three years old’. André Bazin, An Aesthetic of Reality40 ‘The cinema had to begin again from zero’. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image41 Neorealism stands strong. Although it belongs to a messianic future or to sciencefiction more than to the history of the cinema and exists in theory more than in practice, in books more than at the movies, in Bazin and Deleuze more than in De Sica and Rossellini, Italian national cinema is still aligned with neorealism and an accepted frame of mind persists in reducing all Italian films either to anticipations, prolongations, or betrayals of this imaginary movement. It would be precipitous to dismiss the centrality of neorealism in Italian cinema studies as a branding strategy to sell books or as intellectual laziness by scholars, critics, and spectators. The obsession with neorealism is more than just an ingrained habit in film scholarship. To really understand it, one should integrate a formal analysis of ‘the repeated occlusions implicit in neorealism’s accepted definitions’,42 with an explanation of the reasons behind its success. Why does an empty floating signifier that, at best, refers to a couple of films is so ubiquitous in any discourse on Italian cultural history? I would like to propose the following hypothesis: neorealism’s hegemony does not come from its explanatory power as an analytical category, but rather stems 194 LORENZO FABBRI from its capacity to sustain self-serving accounts of national history that work well both within and without the nation’s borders. Neorealism does not have any specific content in itself, yet it still stands because it functions as a placeholder for a foundational national fantasy. In this light, the most crucial insight on neorealism’s critical hegemony is by Peter Bondanella, who insisted that the scholarly denigration of Fascist cinema and the critical emphasis on the exceptionality of what succeeded it should be connected with the exigency of erasing the continuity between totalitarianism and democracy.43 The centrality of neorealism would be thus due to the way it streamlines accounts of the nation’s past that avoid any serious confrontation with the persistence of Fascism in post-war Italy. It is in this sense that I interpret neorealism as a narrative category, a category that allows certain rewritings of national memory, rather than a concept in film theory or history. It would be grotesque to argue that accounts of neorealism like Bazin’s and Deleuze’s consciously supported the removal of Fascism from Italy’s collective consciousness. I am not suggesting this. Instead, I seek to highlight how the reference to neorealism cannot but authenticate the narrative trope of post-1943 Italy as the nation’s year zero, a point of departure for all sorts of self-specious versions of national history: theories of neorealism prompt the same sort of reassuring account of the national past that heritage cinema also ignites.44 The proper location of neorealism is, therefore, ideology. Louis Althusser’s classic definition of ideology runs as follows: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.45 I would suggest that neorealism qua ideology, represents the imaginary relationship of the transatlantic community to Italy’s historical conditions of existence. Believing in neorealism — thanks to Bazin or Deleuze, among others — as a radical rupture is to believe that Italy after 1943 had radically transformed itself and moved beyond its Fascist past. Neorealism stands for Italy’s redemption and it is the very need to believe that such a rebirth actually happened that explains the urge to hold on to neorealism, notwithstanding the unstable grounds upon which it is established. This would mean that we got it all wrong. Neorealism is not a consequence of resistance; it is resistance that is an invention of neorealism. Ultimately, the constant reference to neorealism and its ground-breaking aesthetics consolidates a deceptive account of Fascism’s demise and the establishment of a democratic regime, thus exorcising the spectres of the failed ‘de-fascistizzazione’ of Italian society that materialized under the Christian Democratic Party’s 44-year long rule over national life.46 Neorealism in fact supports the illusion of a post-war Italy populated by a pure humanity or by purely potential forms of life; of a nation pure at heart that, having left its past behind, is fully prepared to move forward and fully deserves the economic support coming in from the Marshal plan. A zero cinema for a zero nation: the myth of neorealism reinforces the narrative of 1943 (or 1945?) as the year zero for a new Italy. Unfortunately, Italy’s actual history shatters the ‘zero year mythology’ that accounts of neorealism propagate. Had Bazin and Deleuze considered such a history more attentively, they would have discovered a troubling continuity between Fascist and post-Fascist Italy and would have conceded that the idea of neorealism as a placeholder for Italy’s fresh-start is an ideology-ridden and historically untenable fiction. July 29, 1945. Milan. The dead bodies of Benito Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, Nicola Bombacci, Achille Starace, and Alessandro Pavolini are hung upside-down NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 195 and exhibited in Piazzale Loreto. On that same day, the German occupation forces and the Salò puppet government surrender unconditionally to the Allies in Caserta. The war and the occupation were finally over. What to do with Mussolini’s corpse? It had to disappear. It had to disappear insofar as it was an unbearable reminder of Italy’s recent past as well as of the violent civil war the resistance actually was. It had to disappear because it bore witness of a history which could hardly function as the grounding myth of the new Italy.47 A few months after this disappearance, Mario Mattòli’s La vita ricomincia arrives in movie theatres. Incredibly less known and accomplished than other concurrent films dealing with Italy’s transition from totalitarianism to democracy, Mattòli’s film is a more transparent materialization of a generalized feeling within the country: the urgency to forget and return to normal life as soon as possible, as if the last twenty years of national history were nothing but a momentary blunder, a ‘parenthesis’ in Italian history — as Benedetto Croce had earlier declared.48 La vita ricomincia takes place in post-liberation Rome, and features two of the most celebrated film stars from the Ventennio: Fosco Giacchetti and Alida Valli. Paolo Martini (Giacchetti) returns home after six years spent in a British detention camp in India. Life seems to return to normal until the police arrest Paolo’s wife Patrizia (Valli). Murder is the charge. While her husband was away, she sold herself to a rich aristocrat. She needed money for her ill son, and prostitution was the only option. Yet Patrizia’s client wants to continue the arrangement even after the return of her husband. Patrizia confronts the man and kills him during a heated exchange. Eventually, all charges will be dropped. Patrizia is found to have acted in self-defence. Paolo forgives Patrizia for whatever she did, she had to do. As their Neapolitan philosophy professor friend (Eduardo De Filippo) explains, the past is the past, and it is now time to rebuild a normal life from the ruins. This applies not only to Patrizia, as she is not the only one who finds absolution in Mattòli’s film. It is Italy’s past in its entirety that La vita ricomincia prompts the spectator to forgive and forget, on the behest of a philosopher from Naples. Here, De Filippo plays the part of a Croce in disguise and Mattòli popularizes Croce’s views on Fascism, contributing to the establishment of collective memory in post-war Italy through a colossal denial of what the Ventennio actually was. Patrizia acted in a state of necessity: obviously, she could not allow her son to die, nor could she agree to sell her body again after the emergency situation had been resolved. Paolo cannot be held responsible for what happened to his family and to his country because he had been detained in a British camp since 1939 — the very year when the Pact of Steel was signed. He was captured before Italy’s military campaigns had begun, so he has no blood on his hands. Lastly and most importantly, the absolution affects all Italians. Whatever they did, they did it to survive. They had no other options, the philosopher suggests. This oblique reference to Fascism is the closest this film gets to reminding Italians that they wore black shirts for twenty years. In La vita ricomincia, spectatorial pleasure comes about in the guise of acquittal and denial. The idea that Italians were not responsible for the ruination brought upon them is obviously a self-excusing account of the nation’s recent past, a historical mythology very similar to the one proposed in the concurrent Roma città aperta. Yet, while in Rossellini’s masterful hands ideology is concealed and needs to be detected, 196 LORENZO FABBRI Mattòli does not do anything to hide his address to the nation. Through De Filippo, La vita ricomincia literally tells Italians what they should be doing: forget the past. It is this very ideological frankness that makes La vita ricomincia — which placed second at the box offices in 1945 –46 after Roma città aperta — an important and overlooked document in Italian cultural history.49 ‘Chi ha avuto ha avuto ha avuto, chi ha dato ha dato ha dato, scordiamoci il passato, siamo di Napoli paisà’ states a famous Neapolitan song from 1944, lyrics that the philosophy professor from Mattòli’s film repeats almost verbatim. Yet, it is not merely national and personal histories that La vita ricomincia insinuates should be forgotten. The memory of past Italian cinema undergoes a similar suppression: Valli and Giacchetti — among the most popular stars of Fascist cinema — might be charged, but the characters they interpret shall be acquitted. ‘Nothing, it’s life that starts again as before. Nothing happened, nothing took place’, suggests the Neapolitan philosophy professor at the end of the film. And the past indeed disappeared into nothingness. Memory was rewritten and the political responsibility of Italian film industry was forgotten rather than confronted. Notwithstanding the initial call for purges issued by various film journals and directed especially against those who had followed Mussolini north to Salò, ‘the industrial rebirth of Italian cinema passed through a re-composition of all political parts, creating an even wider spectrum than the one detected by Bazin, who believes that in all neorealist films there were at least one priest and one Marxist’.50 The film industry was left untouched by any attempts of ‘de-fascistizzazione’, and the work of the purge commission chaired by Umberto Barbaro, Mario Chiari, Mario Camerini, Mario Soldati, and Luchino Visconti granted substantial amnesties. Although Pavolini, the Fascist Minister of Popular Culture, had been hanged at Piazzale Loreto, the directors who had made films to suit the exigencies of the Regime were all alive and well. It was not only a matter of reabsorbing Fascist Italians into national life; it was also a matter of isolating and marginalizing the most radical voices of anti-Fascism at the movies, those authors and intellectuals who were denouncing the persistence of a more subtle and discreet form of Fascism within the country. Giulio Andreotti, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat reminds us, launched a mini-purge of communist intellectuals within the film industry: for the preservation of the status quo, their voices were more troubling than the presence of high-ranking Fascist officials in key positions within the film establishment.51 Life begun again, indeed. The process of normalization was fast. While ‘no one dared speak openly in favour of conservation and restoration’,52 a radical renovation of Italy took place only within the imaginary realm of ideology and guilty consciousness. ‘Il neorealismo è l’Italiano’, Alberto Farassino wrote in 1989 after pondering the omnispresence of neorealism in any discourse on Italian cultural history.53 With such a suggestive identification, Farassino did not imply that a film, in order to be truly Italian, had to be neorealist. He did not mean that neorealism is the best Italian cinema possible; nor that Italian cinema in its totality first tended toward, and then descended from neorealism. Farassino was not even implying that neorealism is able to capture Italians in an uncompromising way. Farassino’s cryptic statement is more easily deciphered if one inverts the terms of his equation: the Italian is neorealist. NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 197 After highlighting the implicit nationalism underpinning the exaltation of neorealism, Farassino earmarks the ways in which neorealism was deployed to solidify the tall tale of a redeemed country: post-war Italian cinema was mobilized to stand for the Italian genius that, against the backdrop of a ruined country, reveals its indestructible vitality. After the war, Italy had two options; either to face its Fascism or repress it. It could address the reasons for Mussolini’s success or forget twenty years of black shirts. This alternative also implied a political bifurcation. Faced with the options on how to handle an uncomfortable past and an uneasy present, the country could either undertake a radical renovation of national life or indulge in a superficial retouching. By glorifying the Italian genius’ redemption and downplaying Fascism’s diffusion in the nation’s body, Italy missed an occasion to move beyond it. The Italian is neorealist, then, insofar as neorealism provides an alibi for the country, allowing it to avoid any serious confrontation with its traumatic history. If, as I am arguing, the critical exaltation of neorealism favours a conservative agenda and contributes to preventing radical changes in the country, how can we explain the fact that the Communist Party was the greatest proponent of the neorealist myth? In his important 1973 essay ‘Ideology and Aesthetic Hypothesis in the Criticism of Neo-Realism’, Mario Cannella investigated precisely the fetishist attachment to neorealism betrayed by communist critics in democratic Italy. ‘All or nearly all “left” criticism has sought to identify, between neo-realism and Resistance (anti-fascism), a series of organic links’.54 According to Cannella, the positing of organic links between neorealism, anti-Fascism, and resistance made it possible for leftist criticism to reappropriate the resistance and have it appear as communist betrayed revolution. The trope of the resistance as a betrayed revolution, Cannella continues, allowed the Communist Party to claim a moral authority over national life, after the Christian Democratic Party had conquered political hegemony in the country. But most importantly, by indulging in the illusion of neorealism as a cultural revolution, leftist criticism found a way to repress the role that culture and intellectuals (many of whom were now enlisted in the Communist Party) played during the Fascist regime. Cannella detects in the leftist critical reception of neorealism ‘a unconscious psychological withdrawal on the part of a whole generation in order to justify their own responsibility as intellectuals for the ensuing events’.55 Here we come to the heart of the matter, says Cannella: the myth that throughout the Fascist era Italian culture had remained neutral and that, thanks to the communist resistance, it rose up again. It is within the context of such a bipartisan urgency to avoid the nation’s recent past that neorealism was authorized as representative of a new Italy that finally broke the papier-mâché regime of misrepresentation perpetuated by Fascist cinema. The Italian is neorealist because neorealist images were treated as documentary sources for writing national history. Neorealism must be the truth about Italy as much as Fascism was its lie. The reality of Italy and Italians must coincide with what one might hope represented in neorealist films. It does not matter that in several instances the depiction of Italians in films by Visconti, De Sica, De Santis, Antonioni, Fellini, or even Rossellini is far less absolving than one might have hoped (let us think for instance of the evil child in the restaurant scene from Ladri di biciclette; the Fascist bosses in La terra trema; or the partisans shooting in coldblood a policeman in Roma città aperta and two snipers in Paisa). The important thing is that neorealism works as a placeholder for Italy’s redemption and rebirth. 198 LORENZO FABBRI Anyone can avoid the difficult labour of confronting the nation’s past and present by basking in its legacy. It is no surprise then that the critical focus illuminated neorealist films as mirrors of the pro-filmic rather than as aesthetic artefacts. In a rare moment of self-reflexivity, Rossellini in his odd La macchina ammazzacattivi (1952) tells the story of a magic camera with the power of making disappear the evil-doers it photographs. The photographer working the special camera turns it on his entire village that soon becomes depopulated. The critical acclamation of neorealism works a similar magic. It erases the nation’s guilty body politic and provides the illusion of a new people starting from scratch. To capture the exceptional originality of Italy’s year zero, zero degree films were necessary — a cinema of reportages which would turn its back on the artifices of Cinecittà and factually present the truth of the real in all its raw novelty. The legend of neorealism as a cinema zero degree legitimizes the idea of post-1943 as Italy’s year zero, and vice versa. Moreover, these two ‘zero’ mythologies are grounded on a similar two-fold simplification: the relegation of Fascism and its film culture to the realm of inauthenticity (authoritarianism, falsehood, superficial consensus); and the pretension that Fascism and its film culture disappeared in Italy with Mussolini’s death. It is not surprising that a more traumatic version of the transition years like the 1945 omnibus Giorni di gloria is virtually invisible and consistently excluded from the canon of Italian national cinema.56 In this light, I would like to conclude by reiterating that the continuing critical priority assigned to neorealism needs to be read against the backdrop of relieving accounts of post-Fascist Italy. While history makes the past more complicated, commemoration makes it simpler, and the commemorative reference to neorealism is a way to simplify Italian history in order to make it nontraumatic and acceptable. We keep hearing that neorealism is an anti-narrative cinema, a cinema of seers rather than actors, a cinema that confronts the facts of actuality without any a priori preconceptions. It may be we should pay more attention to Zavattini confessing the imbrications of neorealist films with fiction. By highlighting that post-war Italian cinema had invented stories about Italy and Italians, and that Bazin and Deleuze had invented stories about post-war Italian cinema, I tried to show how the category of neorealism fulfilled a precise memorializing function within contemporary Italian culture. It is not only a matter of highlighting the unstable foundations of Italian film studies, but also to point out the very ideological grounds on which Italian (cinema) history is produced and transmitted. After one switches off the blinding light of neorealism and abandons year zero and zero cinema mythologies, what would Italy’s history look like? How to narrate the nation? ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Edward Dimendberg, Jennifer Row, Ingrid Diran, and David Rojas for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece. NOTES 1 André Bazin, ‘In Defense of Rossellini’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 93– 101 (p. 99). 2 3 Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. xvii. Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe, ‘Against Realism: On a “Certain NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 4 5 6 7 8 Tendency” in Italian Film Criticism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16.1 (2011), 107 – 28. See Marcus, ‘Response. Against Realism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16.1 (2011), 121 – 23 (p. 123); and Charles L. Leavitt IV, ‘Cronaca, Narrativa, and the Unstable Foundations of the Institution of Neorealism’, Italian Culture, 31.1 (2013), 28– 46 (p. 41). O’Rawe, ‘“I Padri e i maestri”: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies’, Italian Studies, 63.2 (2008), 173 – 94 (p. 178). For a review of the status of Italian film studies confirming neorealism’s persisting centrality in the field, see Dana Renga, ‘Italian Screen Studies in the Anglophone Context: 2008 – 2013’, The Italianist, 34.2 (2014), 242 – 49. My treatment of neorealism as narrative category with a specific ideological import is modelled on Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London – New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 40 – 44. Marco Grosoli, ‘André Bazin: Film as Social Documentary’, New Readings, 11 (2011), 1– 16 (p. 1). See also André Bazin, Oeuvres Complètes d’Andre Bazin (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 2014); Bazin, What Is Cinema?, ed. and trans. by Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009); Bazin, André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. by Bert Cardullo (London – New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); Bazin, Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews From the Forties and Fifties, ed. by Bert Cardullo, trans. by Alain Piette and Cardullo (London –New York: Routledge, 2014). Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, pp. 16– 40. Gray’s translation of Bazin’s essays on neorealism is quite accurate, so I have decided to rely on it given its widespread availability. Gray’s translation does not include all of Bazin’s original notes, so the reader interested in them should turn to the 2009 Cabose edition. 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 199 Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, 18. Current scholarship on German cinema under the Reich confutes Bazin’s claims on the Nazi monopoly over the film industry: see Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Linda SchulteSasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, 19. For an uncommon acknowledgment by Bazin of realism as a potential vehicle for propaganda, see his 1950 ‘The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema’, in Movies and Methods: An Anthology Vol. 2, ed. by Bill Nichols, trans. by Georgia Gurrieri (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 29– 40. See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922 – 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista (Roma: Carocci, 2008); and Marie-France Courriol, ‘Documentary Strategies and Aspects of Realism in Italian Colonial Cinema (1935 – 1939)’, The Italianist, 34.2 (2014), 122 –41. The ideological import of Bazin’s concept of realism was highlighted as early as the late 1960s in connection with the emergence of the New Left. See for instance Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, trans. by Alan Williams, Film Quarterly, 28.2 (1974), 39– 47 (the original French appeared in 1970); and Mario Cannella, ‘Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of Neo-Realism’, Screen, 14.4 (1973), 5– 60. I circle back to Cannella’s article later in this essay, which appeared originally in Italian in 1966. See David Forgacs, ‘Sex in the Cinema: Regulation and Transgression in Italian Films, 1930 – 1943’, in Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. by Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana 200 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 LORENZO FABBRI University Press, 2002), pp. 141 – 71. For Adorno-sounding condemnations of the Fascist cultural industry see Claudio Carabba, Il cinema del ventennio nero (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1974); and Lucia Poli, Paolo Poli, and Ida Omboni, Telefoni bianchi e camicie nere (Milano: Garzanti, 1975). Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Lino Micciché, ‘Sul neorealismo oggi’, in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, ed. by Lino Micciché (Venezia: Marsilio, 1999), p. xxi; quoted in Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema, p. 48. Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, p. 27. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 171. Ibid., pp. 1– 25. Ibid., p. 3. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The MovementImage, trans. by Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 211. Rancière aptly noted that Deleuze resorts to the same films as sources for both movementimages and time-images, a gesture that is clearly at odds with the attempt to draw a linear history of modernism in cinema. See Jacques Rancière, ‘From One Image to Another? Deleuze and the Ages of Cinema’, in Film Fables, trans. by Emiliano Battista (New York: Berg, 2006), pp. 107 –24. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 212. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 1. Rancière, ‘Prologue. A Thwarted Fable’, in Film Fables, pp. 1– 12, (p. 6). Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 210. Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972 – 1990, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 51. Cesare Casarino, ‘Three Theses on the Life-Image (Deleuze, Cinema, 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Biopolitics)’, in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. by Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 157–67 (p. 166). Alessia Ricciardi, ‘The Italian Redemption of Cinema: Neorealism from Bazin to Godard’, The Romanic Review, 97.3/4 (2006), 483 – 500 (p. 493). Rancière, ‘Falling Bodies: Rossellini’s Physics’, in Film Fables, pp. 125 – 42. André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 17 – 22 (p. 21). ‘Ma non siamo ancora al neorealismo. Il neorealismo è oggi come un esercito pronto a mettersi in marcia: i soldati dunque ci sono. Sono dietro Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti. Occorre che questi soldati partano all’assalto; allora la battaglia sarà vinta.’ Cesare Zavattini, ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’, in Neorealismo Ecc., ed. by Mino Argentieri (Milano: Bompiani, 1979), pp. 95– 107 (p. 99). For an English translation, see Zavattini, ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, trans. by Pier Luigi Lanza, Sight & Sound, 23.2 (1953), 64 – 69 (p. 66). Bazin, ‘Bicycle Thief’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, pp. 47– 60 (p. 60). Bazin, ‘Umberto D: A Great Work’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, pp. 79 –82 (p. 82). ‘I myself have made some rather naı̈ve statements in the past about De Sica’s sentimentality’: Bazin, ‘Cruel Naples’, in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, pp. 155 – 62 (p. 162). See also Bazin’s reviews from André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, specifically ‘A Saint Becomes a Saint Only After the Fact: Heaven over the Marshes’ and ‘Neorealism, Opera, and Propaganda’, pp. 89 – 93 and pp. 94 – 102. Bazin, ‘Umberto D: A Great Work’, p. 82. Bazin, ‘The French Renoir’, in Jean Renoir, ed. by Franc ois Truffaut, trans. by William H. Simon and W. W. Halsey II (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), pp. 74 – 91 (p. 85). NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, (p. 21). Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 205 – 6. André Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, pp. 16– 40 (p. 20). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image 2, trans. by Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 211. Leavitt, ‘Cronaca, Narrativa, and the Unstable Foundations of the Institution of Neorealism’, p. 41. Peter Bondanella, The Films of Roberto Rossellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. by Lester Friedman (London: University College Press, 1993), pp. 109 –29. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 127– 88. See Roy Domenico, Processo ai fascisti (Milano: Rizzoli, 1996); and Hans Woller, I conti con il fascismo. L’epurazione in Italia, 1943– 1948, trans. by Enrico Morandi (Bologna: Il mulino, 1997). Mussolini’s corpse was returned to his family in 1957: see Sergio Luzzatto, The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, trans. by Frederika Randall (New York: Picador, 2006), pp. 117 –52. Benedetto Croce, ‘Chi è fascista?’, Il Giornale di Napoli, 29 October 1944. On the mythical import of Roma città aperta, see Forgacs, Rome Open City (London: British Film Institute, 2000). For a comparison of Rossellini’s and Mattòli’s film focusing on the represen- 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 201 tation of prostitution, see Danielle Hipkins, ‘Were Sisters Doing It for Themselves? Prostitutes, Brothels and Discredited Masculinity in Postwar Italian Cinema’, in War-Torn Tales: Literature, Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II, ed. by Gill Plain and Danielle Hipkins (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 80– 103. Salvatore Ambrosino, ‘Il cinema ricominica: Attori e registi fra “continuita” e “frattura”’, in Neorealismo, cinema italiano 1945– 1949, ed. by Alberto Farassino (Torino: EDT, 1989), pp. 60– 77 (p. 62). Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, p. 207. Cannella, ‘Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of NeoRealism’, p. 11. Alberto Farassino, ‘Neorealismo, storia e geografia’, in Neorealismo, cinema italiano, pp. 21 –36. Cannella, ‘Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of NeoRealism’, p. 9. For a discussion of Cannella’s position in relation to the emergence of the New Left and the critique of late 1960s ‘compromesso storico’ see Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 196 –97. Cannella, ‘Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of NeoRealism’, p. 12. See Lara Pucci, ‘Shooting Corpses: The Fosse Ardeatine in Giorni Di Gloria (1945)’, Italian Studies, 68.3 (2013), 356 –77. For the latest iteration of the zero degree mythology, see Giuliana Minghelli, Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero (London– New York: Routledge, 2013).