Italian Neorealism by Charles L. Leavitt IV

Author:Charles L. Leavitt IV
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

a sound production, of the highest morals and at the same time appealing, one that fits within [...] the new Italian [neorealist] school, which is a credit to our film industry and much envied abroad, and which we too must value, ensuring that this formula can and does have a spiritual significance.

While Andreotti thus suggested a desire to promote neorealism, in practice his aim was to control it. He wanted films to carry an unmistakably Christian – or more accurately Christian Democrat – message, and he was prepared to exert significant financial and political pressure to make sure his goals were realized. This was already apparent in 1948, with his insistence on cinema’s “spiritual significance,” and would become all the more apparent a few years later in a confrontation occasioned by his public opposition to Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 film Umberto D. Andreotti chastised the director, and by implication his neorealist contemporaries, for what he saw as the failure to uphold “un qualunque principio se non di religione almeno di solidarietà umana [any standard, if not of religion, at least of human solidarity].”122 In public statements such as these, Andreotti may perhaps be said to have articulated an ethics of cinema. Yet his material interventions, as well as his private correspondence, make evident that this was all in the service of a factional and confessional politics of cinema. Indeed, in a 1949 letter to then pro-secretary of state Giovanni Battista Montini, later to become Pope Paul VI, Andreotti revealed his ambition to give confessing Catholics “un peso effettivo, nell’arte e nell’industria dello spettacolo [an effective weight in art and in the entertainment industry],” stipulating the need to “conquistare al cristianesimo le attività dello spettacolo in Italia [... e] formare e lanciare uomini ed iniziative chiaramente nostri o almeno indubbiamente vicini [take over the film industry in Italy (... and) shape and promote men and initiatives on – or at least unquestionably close to – our side].”123 These were far from empty boasts; Andreotti had the power not just to regulate but also effectively to reshape the Italian film industry. Recognizing in the humble rhetoric of some of Italy’s most celebrated neorealist filmmakers a bid for an alternative and potentially opposing authority, he intervened to attenuate their influence.

From the opposing side of the political spectrum, Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, acted similarly in response to the evident bid for power articulated by Elio Vittorini in the pages of Il Politecnico. Insisting that political authority be accorded to cultural innovation, and more to the point that it be accorded to cultural innovators, Vittorini was repeatedly reproved by Italy’s post-war political leadership, whose power, unlike Vittorini’s, was effectively unmediated, and who believed that intellectual investigation and artistic exploration should respond to political direction. Beginning in 1946, Vittorini was accused, in the pages of Rinascita, the official organ of the Italian Communist Party, of “intellettualismo [intellectualism]” – intellectual arrogance, obscurantism, fecklessness – for a series of editorial decisions that failed to conform to the party’s increasingly stringent demands.

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