Neorealism and Pure Cinema: The Bicycle Thief
What seems to me most astonishing about the Italian cinema is that it appears to have escaped from the aesthetic impasse to which neorealism is said to have led. The dazzling effects of 1946 and 1947 having faded away, one could reasonably fear that this useful and intelligent reaction against the Italian aesthetic of the superspectacle and, for that matter, more generally, against the technical aestheticism from which cinema suffered all over the world would never get beyond an interest in a kind of superdocumentary, or romanticized reportage. One began to realize that the success of Roma Citta Aperta, Paisa, or Sciuscia was inseparable from a special conjunction of historical circumstances that took its meaning from the Liberation, and that the technique of the films was in some way magnified by the revolutionary value of the subject. Just as some books by Malraux or Hemingway find in a crystallization of journalistic style the beat narrative form for a tragedy of current events, so the films of Rossellini or De Sica owe the fact that they were major works, masterpieces simply to a fortuitous combination of form and subject matter. But when the novelty and above all the flavor of their technical crudity have exhausted their surprise effect, what remains of Italian “neorealism” when by force of circumstances it must revert to traditional subjects: crime stories, psychological dramas, social customs? The camera in the street we still accept, but doesn't that admirable nonprofessional acting stand selfcondemned in proportion as its discoveries swell the ranks of international stars? And, by way of generalizing about this aesthetic pessimism: "realism" can only occupy in art a dialectical position it is more a reaction than a truth. It remains then to make it part of the aesthetic it came to existence to verify, in any case, the Italians were not the last to downgrade their “neorealism.” I think there is not a single...