Toronto’s Lightbox Gets Real With Italians Not Named Fellini, Too

Realism: looking up the meaning of the word, there are probably a minimum of seven different definitions to choose from (at least, that is the kind of profuse selection that greeted me in each of the four name-brand dictionaries that I checked). Most of them quickly sum up the term’s associations to the major arts (theatre, literature, fine art, and – of the most interest to us for right now – cinema), while others do an even more diminutive job of describing its role in philosophy and logic. In its most universal context, it describes that which is physically ‘true’, things as they are, without abstraction or idealism. Long an ideal in several modes of representation, Realism has consistently ‘saved’ a medium from any number of Romantic, expressionistic, or abstract splurges.

First manifest in a sizeable scale in France with Poetic Realism, the trend eventually spread over to Italy after WWII. While in painting the advance into realism came mostly via technological advances (Renaissance perspective, photorealism), with film it came through thematic concerns (mostly classism) and a strictly anti-stylized aesthetic, not to mention more fatalistic resolutions for the characters. This lent films from these movements an unedited, documentary quality that separated them from Hollywood’s typical glorification of bourgeois lifestyles and happy endings, as well as German Expressionisms dazzling montage techniques that abstracted the events captured by the camera. The absence of complicated editing and elaborate sets (these films were often shot on location rather than in studios) actually positions cinema in direct contrast to painting’s strategy of better approximating reality: it removed the excessive utility of technology.

Beginning July 28 and running until the end of August, Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox are complimenting their Fellini bonanza with a concurrent programme that spotlights perhaps the purest, most stripped down movement in film history: Italian Neorealism. For Fellini, La Dolce Vita signalled a gravitation toward his thematic and stylistic tendencies for excess and the fantastic; with later films like 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits dominating the canon, it is easy to overlook the more timid first decade of his career. The juxtaposition of Fellini’s Double Bills with this showcase for Neorealismo serves not only as a logical contextualization for Fellini, but also it offers a chance to see rare prints of monumental Italian classics, many shipped straight over from Italy.

Featuring nearly two dozen films from nearly a dozen filmmakers, this exhaustive survey spans twenty years to chart the origins and fading of the movement. Ironically, the earliest film in the programme is 1943’s Obsession, (see pic below) and the oldest is 1962’s Mamma Roma, (see Neorealist “heroine” Anna Magnani in pic above) by Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini, respectively: two filmmakers, along with Fellini, whose legacies are tied more to Romaniticism and Rococo than realism. Films by Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Ermanno Olmi fill out the two decades in between those bookends with indisputable classics like Bicycle Thieves, Rome, Open City, and Il Posto, the latter of which gets particular attention in the Lightbox’s showcase as they’ve invited Italian film scholar Frank Burke to introduce the evening.

Il Posto, coming in late in the Neorealism timeline, is infused with the best that the movement had to offer. The narrative of a young man, Domenico, who seeks to enter the workforce, recalls the simplicity of De Sica, while its more expressionistic portrayals of the city and job-site as machines draw the film into more modern conversations. Meanwhile, the tug-of-war of ecstatic human emotions provoked by a crush with these de-humanizing machines – encountered simultaneously by and against Domenico’s will – push and pull at each other with striking ease and flow. Antonietta, the object of Domenico’s desire, is one of the most alluring banal female characters in all of cinema; every moment she’s not on the screen after we meet her, she is missed. We are complicit in Domenico’s aspirations without even questioning it.

Comparably pure and unaffected is De Sica’s Umberto D. Containing a graceful morning kitchen routine that spawned another league of realism twenty years later in the form of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the film glides miraculously along to Destination: Heartbreak, daring the audience to call it out as a full-blown documentary. Though it may as well be, thank God it isn’t, because then the tears really never would have dried (plot points left intentionally AWOL).

Visconti’s second feature film La terra trema employed long, extended shots to illustrate the lives of a small group of fishermen. The glimpses of everyday labor in the film take on an additional urgency because of Visconti’s style of filming, which falls in line with contemporaneous ideas of realism heavily advocated by André Bazin (a small tidbit: Bazin was a big fan of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North precisely for its long takes. An unbroken, eight-minute shot of Nanook hunting took on an element of shared time that editing of any kind would have doused with dishonesty.) Episodic and bordering on propaganda, the film sits as a serviceable entry of borderline poetic realism, but is nonetheless undermined by an agenda that extended beyond the personal (One also longs for the inclusion of Visconti’s far superior Rocco and His Brothers in this programme, which represented a return to realism after a brief detour with Senso.

Monochromatic, pessimistic, and decidedly grounded in the here-and-now, the Neorealismo league more or less introduced a widespread voice for the lower class and down-trodden. Coming in holding hands with the Lightbox’s celebration of Fellini, it offers a completely different, yet conjoined perspective on how to make a film. As a thorough exercise in context, it’s stands as an essayistic background to a huge presence in the history of Italian and world cinema. As a standalone programme, it just might have the highest quality-per-film average of any 20+ film selection that the Lightbox has yet put together. Spawning a national maestro, and future variations of realism in the national cinemas of America, France, and Romania (to name but a few), the Italian Neorealism retrospective at the Lightbox is a certifiable, no-brainer ‘must see’, regardless of one’s taste in movies.

Days of Glory: Masterworks of Italian Neorealism begins today. Visit the site for more details.