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Let's Get Neo-Real

In a discussion concerning Italian Neo-Realism, I responded to the following message:

Posted Nov. 19, 2002

Personally, I don't believe it is at all possible to portray reality through the cinema, and that any attempt is futile. Furthermore, I find the "ideal" neo-realist aesthetic to be incredibly dull. This doesn't mean I don't understand it's purpose or how it came about -- I've been reading a great deal on it and have simply come to the conclusion that stylistically speaking, I don't care for the idealized neo-realist form. I find it rather ineffective and much prefer the likes of Fellini and Antonioni who came afterwards. Not to give away what I'll be reviewing next week, but I just saw what I consider to be the best neo-realist film I've seen to date, and yet it seems to be rather unacknowledged. The film in question is Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice, which infuses melodrama into a neo-realist story, and does away with the common formal properties that a neo-realist film is supposedly bound to. This is kind of an intermediary step in between neo-realism and, say, Rocco and His Brothers, which cinematically speaking is 100 times the film La Terra Trema is. For me, Visconti's films are all about form, and while I understand his intentions with La Terra Trema were to purposefully deny his audience any kind of narrative satisfaction, I personally loathe this idea and the style he used to materialize it. Ê Ê

My response:

(Wed Nov 20 11:08:35)

"Personally, I don't believe it is at all possible to portray reality through the cinema, and that any attempt is futile. Furthermore, I find the "ideal" neo-realist aesthetic to be incredibly dull."

These are big, swinging-for-the-fences declarations that need some unpackaging. I'm not even sure were to begin with the first one. As to the second, well, those are your words, so what is this so-called "ideal" neo-realist aesthetic and who says so? Ê Ê

While you work on that, I'll offer my considerations on your first statement. Maybe I'll do it by way of responding to:

"This is kind of an intermediary step in between neo-realism and, say, Rocco and His Brothers, which cinematically speaking is 100 times the film La Terra Trema is. For me, Visconti's films are all about form, and while I understand his intentions with La Terra Trema were to purposefully deny his audience any kind of narrative satisfaction, I personally loathe this idea and the style he used to materialize it"

I think we'd both agree that LA TERRA TREMA was a crossroads for Visconti, and looking at what direction he took his aesthetics with SENSO and ROCCO, I'd say he did what he felt was right, taking you happily along while leaving me high and dry. So now all we have to do is account for the difference. Ê Ê

cue music: Mahler's 1st Symphony, 2nd movement (quintessential Viscontian sound) Ê Ê

First of all, where did you get the idea that LA TERRA TREMA is meant to "purposefully deny his audience any kind of narrative satisfaction"??? That's certainly not what I felt. Ê Ê

If you are going to talk about "cinematically speaking" it helps to have a definition, otherwise I have to guess at what you're getting at based on whatever it is I think ROCCO is "100 times" greater at than TERRA TREMA. My guess is, a grand sweeping, operatic narrative scope invested in emphasizing the drama, investing ordinary characters with larger than life feelings and ideas, the stuff that would go on to inspire Coppola, Scorsese and Cimino. I'll grant you that that's one way to value "cinema" (more or less the Pauline Kael way), but it's not the only way. Ê Ê

ROCCO certainly excels in that department of "cinema" though in the process it exploits certain presuppositions about male and female roles that make me groan at the inherent institutionalized misogyny employed for the sake of amplifying the emotional impact of the tragedy among men (though that certainly left a lasting impression on the makers of THE GODFATHER and THE DEER HUNTER). But perhaps what's more critical is that for me, the heavily symbolic significance of these characters got in the way of my accepting them as real people whose cinematic existence included something other than to advance the storyline. While I can't argue that Visconti's effects are, well, very effective (the final scene with the brothers is deliriously moving), that doesn't assuage my feelings that this is a world more written than lived. You see it as Visconti ditching the false idol of realism and concentrating on the "cinematic" effects that really matter. I have no problem with films that fully embrace their artifice and seek to make an impact on the viewer; but here he seems to be trying to pass off a very thin veneer of "realism" that's as convincing as what a movie starring Jennifer Lopez as a hotel maid could accomplish. There was just too much gloss getting in the way; I grant that this might make it "presentable" to an audience wanting an aesthetically appealing view of the slums, but simultaneously it renders it unbelievable for me. In any event, Visconti seemed to be having his neo-realist cake and eating it. Ê Ê

Perhaps we can agree that, when put side-by-side, LA TERRA TREMA posits questions about stylistic approach to a certain subject matter that Visconti would find answers to in ROCCO; as you said, LTT is an intermediate step in Visconti working out his cinematic issues. I just happen to find the raw, out-in-the-open questions more provocative and enlivening than the smoothed-over answers presented in ROCCO. I see Visconti being more honest as a filmmaker in LA TERRA TREMA; I can see him asking himself questions about how to present these people that doesn't take these people's lives, their reality or their humanity for granted. In contrast, ROCCO feels like it was made in a vacuum, everything's laid out fairly neatly, even the emotional and moral turmoils seem pre-programmed. So despite Visconti working the Big Cinema boilerroom at full steam to get those Big Movie Moments, I feel there's still something kind of lifeless in the center. Ê Ê

I freely admit that all this tells you as much about my tastes than it tells you about Visconti's accomplishments. To me, I think that LA TERRA TREMA's strained attempts to capture "reality" are more praiseworthy than ROCCO's self-assured attempt to pass itself off as real. This gets back to your statement, "Personally, I don't believe it is at all possible to portray reality through the cinema, and that any attempt is futile." On a fundamental level I agree with this, while wondering what the ultimate point of this statement is, what is it then that we should strive for? You have your own answer, but for me, once the futility of film's attempt to capture reality is realized, then I think the next logical step is to explore the relationship between movies and the "reality" they are supposedly trying to capture: and by "reality" I mean not just the factual stuff normally left to documentaries, but feelings, emotions, sensations, etc, the "reality" of human existence. These are all aspects of the human experience from which the director chooses his content, and then must choose a technique to illuminate them as he/she sees best. Ê Ê

Seen in this light, I find the image of Alain Delon bawling his eyes out while cradling his murderous brother very moving... but I don't find it as honest as one shot in LA TERRA TREMA that I find equally moving, and more profound. It's a long panning shot of fishermen on the shore as they prepare their nets. I'm sure there are people who consider a shot like this to be one of the most boringly artless shots they've ever seen, muttering stuff like "Even I could do that," that it's another cliched neo-Realist attempt to capture "real life" which after all is a false enterprise to begin with. But I think this shot tells you as much about Visconti and how he sees these fisherman than it tells you about the fisherman, and it's exciting for me to share in his way of seeing life, because it makes me realize how I myself see life. I find it more honest and sympathetic than how he takes Rocco's family and beats them over their heads until both they and we are crying. In other words, just because reality is an illusion doesn't mean that we turn our backs on it and indulge in blind sensation; when I do that, personally, I feel like less of a human being in the long run. Ê Ê

As a peace offering, here's a quote from an online article on the "realism" of movie death scenes, which discusses Visconti in a way that may please both of us:

"To my mind, the cinema's greatest death scene is Dirk Bogarde's chaise lounge funeral in Visconti's Death in Venice (1971), and not simply because it is attractively upholstered with the borrowed longing of the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth. As he dies, an ecstatic deathly fever sweats the dye and makeup from Bogarde's freshly primped brow and temples, which then trickle down his face like tragic blood turned bilious. The scene is truthful because its visual expressionism, undercutting the languorous influence of the music, reminds us of artistic illusions instead of hiding them. He bleeds the made-up falsity of the screen, the literally painted persona of the actor, and in doing so acknowledges the illusions of art, the deception of all appearances, as opposed to plastering them over with the second illusion of fake stage blood pretending to fleshly catharsis. As he fades away next to an antique camera positioned under the dying sunset, we realize the film is signifying the frame of its own photographed artifice and not "realistic" life, the first confession all works of art must make." Ê

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