Neorealism essays

Neorealism essays Neorealism and Beyond-Bicycle Thieves and La Strada Webster's Dictionary - neorealism: a movement especially in Italian filmmaking characterized by the simple direct depiction of lower-class life Neorealism was a style that overtly rejected the illusionism of Italian fascist and Hollywood film, rejecting certain dramatic and cinematic conventions in order to challenge the audience. Neorealist films often used location shooting, non professional actors, deep focus with long takes and/or camera movement, and approximate real time. The use of long takes and deep focus are used as a way to respect the spatial and temporal relations of the situation being filmed. Likewise, the films emphasizes relationship between characters and their economic, political, and physical environment and the personal impact of social conditions. Some critical work on Italian neorealism has pointed out its relationship to the neorealist literary movement from the same period, in which social reality is dealt with in an overtly symbolic or mythical sense. These books also tend to use unreliable narrators in way that distinguish these stories from traditional realist novels of the 19th century, and they used language and form in ways that were not simply mimetic or realist. Similarly cinematic neorealism showed situations taken from daily life and political reality, but also explored cinematic form and the differences between representation and reality (Bondanella). Looked at this way, the movement does not have to be set apart form the diversity of Italian filmmaking in the 50s and 60s, as it often is. For one thing, the central years of neorealist filmmaking from 1945 to 1953 also encompassed a wide range of styles and philosophies, although they were united by a certain drive toward a more honest and confrontational use of film to represent social relations in postwar Italy. These films tended to deal with basic issues of the period: the...