nm0067: you should er welcome back happy new year my name's namex for those of 
you who i don't know which is most people er and i'm teaching this course this 
term and there are three handouts the first says at the top Aspects of European 
Cinema spring term nineteen-ninety-nine er Italian Cinema blah blah blah so 
where are the the handouts are still goi-, er is the first handout got to the 
end yet [laugh] 
ss: 
nm0067: great thanks thanks and then the second handout says at the top course 
outline er week one introduction to course neo-realism has that reached the end 
and the third er out-, the third handout which is just one sheet of paper says 
on one side neo-realism and on the other side it says Paisà thanks afraid your 
little er bobble has come off [laugh] okay now what i'm going to do in this 
session this music which is sort of playing gently in the background is all 
from er neo-realists' films it's a selection of various soundtracks from neo-
realist films er 
what i'm going to do in this session is first of all to er do what i think of 
as sort of housekeeping to sort of organizational matters er then secondly i'm 
going to give you a sort of very general introduction to neo-realism a kind of 
taster really of the first part of the course and then i'm actually going to 
introduce at a bit greater length both this afternoon's films and also the next 
two films after that er because as you're only seeing each of them once at 
least er er f-, at a formal screening it's quite important that er you're 
actually primed to look for things and so on and have a sense of where they're 
coming from you're rather being thrown straight in the deep end with not having 
a screening before term obviously so if we c-, if you could turn first then 
just on the sort of housekeeping front to the er the first handout Aspects of 
European Cinema it's that's what it says at the top just one or two points to 
make i'm not going to sort of read 
through all of this but just one or two points to make about this the first one 
is please read it all the information is there and if the information isn't 
there obviously please let me know what i have left out er but that is the 
basic sort of organizational things please do actually take the trouble to read 
it can i just draw your attention to two changes from last term one is the 
timetable which er er most of you seem to have re-, er remembered this change 
in the timetable but also i think i'm right in saying the screening is either 
earlier than i thought it was or earlier than it was last year on Friday was it 
twelve o'clock o-, on Friday always 
sf0068: mm 
nm0067: it was just me that thought it was two o'clock okay so there's there's 
only the only changes really are f-, today m-, er the s-, the lecture and 
screening the other change to take note of is the deadline for the long essay 
[cough] and that is actually a week later than it says in the course handbook 
it's actually the first Monday of the 
vacation and the reason for doing that is just quite simply that those that if 
that that if you wish to write about Fellini in general er obviously you can't 
really have the deadline when you're s-, when we're still lecturing and 
watching er Fellini movies so it's really to allow you the f-, maximum 
flexibility in what you choose to write about so the essay is actually a week 
later you can hand it in earlier if you wanted obviously but er the that the 
deadline is the first Monday of the vacation er otherwise e-, thing's i think 
are fairly straightforward i'm always perfectly happy to talk to people about 
other essay titles than the ones that are actually listed here if they if you 
if there are things you really want to pursue that i haven't actually signalled 
in the essays just come and see me and we can talk about the viability of it 
and so on but i'm always very happy for people to pursue their own ideas one 
other small thing i mean i've i've just put a little thing in 
brackets at the bottom of the first page er about the about conventions about 
how you write titles in Italian now i don't want you to be too sort of er 
traumatized by the prob-, the fact of using Italian language i mean think there 
might be at least one person here who won't certainly won't be traumatized but 
er most er most obviously most people here don't know Italian at all and i 
don't want you to get into a terrible state about it but nonetheless you should 
as scholars write the titles of films and of any books or texts that you refer 
to er in Italian a-, or-, and get the not only get it correct in terms of 
spelling which is just a question of looking but also get it correct in terms 
of the convention for represent-, for making titles in Italian and that is er 
explained on this sheet now one of the things about what we're actually going 
to call the films and you'll notice that er er i've s-, i sometimes slip 
between if you if you turn to the projection rota 
for instance er i sort of slip between giving the er Italian title then putting 
the translation in brackets or else just giving the Italian title and that's 
simply because of er kind of what has become conventionalized in other words no 
one calls la s-, no one in England calls La Strada the road which is what it 
means it it's never called that in film study i don't know why but it isn't on 
the other hand few er er few er er British people feel brave enough to say 
Ladri di Biciclette like that even even as bad as bad as that they'd rather say 
Bicycle Thieves so it's become a kind of convention so in terms of our speaking 
you don't need to get your head er head your mouth around biciclette er you can 
say Bicycle Thieves but in the essays you should write it er correctly in 
Italian er i think that's all i want to say about this sort of level of 
housekeeping except just to draw your attention to the structure of the course 
the course er is er in basically in three parts 
the last part of which actually relates to the first two parts the first two 
parts deal with first of all neo-realism which is the first four weeks er and 
then er popular genre cinema in the middle er three weeks although it's only 
two 'cause one of them's a reading week and there we're looking at a contrast 
of practices within Italian cinema in this period that's to say we're looking 
at what is most famous in Italian cinema in the period namely neo-realism this 
is the most famous thing that anyone knows about Italian cinema a great period 
of of cinema Italian neo-realism so we're starting with that kind of canonical 
moment and that was a moment which was particularly concerned with er make with 
sort of trying to capture the spirit of the Italian people trying to show the 
ordinary lives of ordinary Italian people so it was very much concerned with 
the idea of the popular classes with the popular in the sense of the life of 
the people however the people 
actually went to see epics and comedies and melodramas er and that's what we're 
looking at in the second part of the course particularly epics and comedies 
we're looking at the kinds of popular cinema the big box office hits er that 
were er that appeared at the time and some people have actually s-, been struck 
by this contrast of a of a pe-, of of a kind of filmmaking that is in a way 
about the people neo-realism and a kind of filmmaking that is for the people 
which is actually a comedy an epic and melodrama now as we as the course 
develops you'll re-, realize that it's that neat distinction is not quite that 
simple that a lot of neo-realist films were in fact very popular at the box 
office and were very melodramatic and could be comedies and similarly of course 
not every epic or comedy actually did very well at the box office so the 
distinction becomes more complicated when you look at it but that's the basic 
distinction i'm working with in the first two 
parts of the course in the final part of the course we're looking at the work 
of Federico Fellini and what's interesting about Fellini [cough] is that on the 
one hand he came out of neo-realism he was one of the scriptwriters even in 
Paisà which we're seeing this afternoon so he was very involved with neo-
realism he-, but at the same time he also made extremely popular films 
particularly comedies in the early part of his career La Dolce Vita was one of 
the biggest box office hits in the history of Italian cinema er but his later 
films and even when you look at them the earlier films are actually very 
ambiguous in what they really think about both neo-realism and popular genre 
cinema so Fellini quite apart from being a wonderful filmmaker is particularly 
interesting to look at in the context of having looked at neo-realism and 
popular genre cinema so that's why the three that's the relationship between 
the three parts of the course er and i'll keep 
signalling that as we go through the course okay well i'm to turn from that to 
er er saying something a little bit more about the course outline er now if you 
turn to the er er the sort of fattest bit really the course outline er i just 
wanted to make one or two again in a way organizational points about this the 
first is to say that about the readings now on the one hand this is not 
everything there is that could be read here b-, on all these topics er and it's 
not nor is it everything i expect you to read basically what i've put down here 
in the readings are very good starting points and starting points particularly 
related to the work i-, i-, i-, in each week so a-, as as we go through in each 
week so you should really see these er recommendations as recommended starting 
points rather than kind of this is the reading for this week and when you've 
read that you've read everything so on the one hand i'm not saying you've got 
to read that one 
you've actually got to des-, you've actually got to glance through things and 
think well actually this looks like the sort of thing that really talks about 
it in a way that i find useful so you've got to learn to discriminate between 
different texts different accounts and so on part of what becoming er you know 
a good student is is knowing how to distinguish between er different kinds of 
texts you may come across critical texts you may come across so i deliberately 
don't say oh this is the one i recommend this above all so on the one hand i'm 
not saying you must read this i'm saying these are good starting points for 
reading and i expect you to explore and obviously essays which show that people 
have really explored explored the library explored the C-D-ROMs in the library 
and followed up on things they've found through that that shows in an essay and 
that's obviously something for which you get you get credit as well so the 
readings as i say are not sort 
of are not things that er you have to read they're good starting points and the 
point is for you to develop your own scholarship really in relation to the 
topic week by week and some things i don't really put at all for instance i 
don't bother to list all the books about Rossellini er that there are in the 
library and not even all the books about Fellini er the i did for instance for 
this week mention the Brunette book on Rossellini because i think it's 
particularly good er so in that particular case i suppose i am actually 
recommending it as a particularly good starting point but there are other books 
on Rossellini in the library and you may look at them and think they're better 
er so i certainly d-, things like genres directors and i don't certainly don't 
give you general reading on the notion of genre or authorship or something i s-,
assume you know all of that and don't need more theoretical input from me so 
er again the reading is not this is not meant to 
be you should not see this as a complete reading list on the contrary it's an 
ind-, indication of where to start and if there are particular areas that you 
take up an interest in and can't don't quite know how to find your way around 
the library obviously come and see me and we can talk about that er again i 
don't w-, e-, und-, under the films you'll see each week it's er there's 
there's reading which relates to the topic of the week and there's reading 
that's very specifically relates to the film of the week and again i don't sort 
of say oh well you might have a look at Peter Bondanella's general history of 
er what's it called Italian Cinema from Neo-realism to the Present oh yeah i d-,
i don't bother to list that for you to go and look and see what he says about 
Paisà i i assume that you'll realize that any general history or any general 
book on a director or a er an area or whatever may well be worth looking at in 
terms of the film of the week it's much more i try to er draw your 
attention to things that you might not come across otherwise like the chapter 
in Film Hieroglyphs you're unlikely just to casually come across that okay so 
what i've been doing so far is just organizational matters trying to explain 
the structure of the course something about er how the how we work and so on 
now i want to turn from that then to actually talking about the er er subject 
for er this s-, part of the course which is namely neo-realism now let me first 
er if you can just first get this lit up to be going on with 
nm0067: okay now i'm just going to begin by giving you a a flavour of er neo-
realism from just b-, by having partly the background music from the films and 
then just looking at one or two examples of posters or slides or stills from 
the films er basically neo-realism is a period of Italian cinema production 
usually dated from the mid-forties to the early fifties although again as we 
will be discussing next term [cough] quite a [cough] lot of er debate is really 
about 
when and when it starts and particularly when it finishes er and i come back to 
that in a moment many people see this film Ossessione obsession which is 
actually the second film version of The Postman Always Rings Twice there are 
actually four versions the first was French then this one then the two 
Hollywood ones were later er but this is son-, nonetheless seen as as something 
that was perhaps the first er Italian neo-realist film actually made in about 
nineteen-forty-one and almost instantly banned by Mussolini who thought it gave 
a degrading picture of er life in Italy but nonetheless and i'll show you an 
extract from that next week so there's an argument about whe-, whether it 
starts but it's usually er associated particularly with Rome Open City and 
Paisan which we're looking at but i suppose the film that most people have 
heard of is Bicycle Thieves er i guess it's the most famous Italian neo-realist 
film this is just the poster from it of course 
what's quite interesting about it is the graphic style the fact that it's 
actually done in this sort of for a film poster rather impressionistic style 
rather not actually of course quite sophisticated but nonetheless quite simple 
looking as a style there was none of the kind of grandeur and special effects 
that even by the forties had become standard in posters so even in the even the 
fact that you've just got rather ordinary people and it's drawn in this 
particular or painted in this rather daubed on style even that is an indication 
of a different kind of cinema from the from the popular grandiose entertainment 
cinema that had been popular both in Hollywood but also in Italian in Italy in 
er the period before neo-realism so the but this as i say is the is the poster 
for the most famous ex-, er Italian neo-realist film but there are an awful lot 
of Italian neo-realist films that actually most people outside of Italy have 
never heard of and that 
actually don't exist in subtitled prints and can't really be shown this for 
instance er is a film called Molti Sogni per le Strade many cares along the 
road which is actually a comedy and an awful lot of Italian neo-realist films 
when you start to look are in fact comedies er and er this actually stars Anna 
Magnani who is one of the biggest stars of er Italian neo-realism she is the 
kind of the unforgettable star of Rome Open City but she's she was actually a 
very well known star in the period generally as indeed was Massimo Girotti who 
plays the hero in Ossessione so often in fact movie stars despite what you may 
have read movie stars did appear in Italian neo-realist films and again it's 
something we'll come back to talking about this is another er just a sort of 
popular drama film that was nonetheless a neo-realist film it's means spring is 
here er so it's just another example but i'm just trying to suggest that 
there's a whole what we tend to talk about 
maybe six films as neo-realist cinema but there's a huge output of cinema a lot 
of it very popular er comic melodramatic whatever behind the kind of what has 
become recognized as the canon of Italian neo-realist cinema er particularly 
important moment was the casting of Silva Mangano who Silvana Mangano who 
became a a very big star later this is her ro-, her you know very famous still 
from er Bitter Rice which we'll be seeing in three weeks' time whatever it is 
and er of course the er i don't really need to point out to you the most 
obvious er feature of this picture but i mean the whole exploitation of 
sexuality within er neo-realism is also very important and particularly the 
whole celebration of er sort of beauty she she she like many of the stars of 
the late forties is an ex-beauty queen and that whole exploitation of the 
beauty queen the Miss Italia was very important and again is actually part of 
the neo-realist phenomenon it shouldn't just be thought of as 
something imposed on neo-realism or er something that neo-realism did just to 
get people into the cinema though no doubt it helped er and this is the poster 
for a film we're not going to see mir-, Miracle in Milan and what's interesting 
about Miracle in Milan which is a-, in on video in the library er is that it's 
a film which is actually involves fantasy so it's one of the clearest examples 
of a film that stylistically is absolutely clearly a neo-realist film and yet 
nonetheless involves the angel on the top of Milan cathedral coming to life and 
helping poor people to solve out their problems in other words something 
completely er fantastical at the same time so it's often seen as a a very 
interesting turning point and again we'll be talking about this whole question 
of when and why did neo-realism decline er later in the course and finally as a 
preview this is in fact from La Strada which is er one of the er films that 
we'll be seeing one of the f-, it's the 
first Fellini film we'll see on the course and it's a film we're seeing in a 
few weeks' time er and i'll leave that up there for the rest of the session and 
but i'll put the lights back on if i can find them [cough] okay so that's just 
to give you a very just a sort of general flavour as a sort of like a p-, a 
preview a preview of forthcoming attractions now what i want to say then is 
something a bit more then about really just to give you a very simple sketch of 
what is usually said about neo-realism in order to sort of get get you and get 
us into er being able to discuss it as i say it's normally thought to have er 
existed from about nineteen-forty-four to about nineteen-fifty-five there's a 
whole lot of dates of er and discussion about [cough] whether it is just 
something confined to that period whether you can see it going back even into 
the silent period whether in fact you can still feel its influence now i don't 
know if any of w-, any of you have seen The Child Thief Il Lardro di Bambini 
er which was actually er had some success has been on television made about 
four or five years ago very clearly still within the neo-realist tradition even 
though it's only about five years old so you can make a whole argument about is 
it a particular period is it something that runs through all Italian cinema or 
what but we're going to take start from the conventional w-, wisdom which is 
that it's essentially a a quality of a certain kind of output in Italian cinema 
between nineteen-forty-four and nineteen-fifty-five we'll start with that and 
sort of complicate it a bit as we go along in the next three or four weeks 
[cough] now what i've done here is just tried to convey to you some of the 
qualities of er of neo-realist cinema that are regularly referred to that is 
including this sort of er incredibly passionate dramatic music and this is i 
think actually Paisà er but i mean that's that that that is that is a very neo-
realist sound er in a way that some of the other things you've 
heard er are much less obviously so i'll come back to that question in a moment 
so what i want to do is just describe to you some of the things that most 
people would agree are true about neo-realist films er and as i say once again 
we'll be complicating this im-, picture as the term goes on but for the moment 
let's just take this and it's u-, it's ex-, ten-, it's assumed to be a kind of 
filmmaking characterized by the following first of all locate-, location 
shooting now we of course are so used to location shooting that we might think 
it's almost not worth mentioning but you have to remember that in Hollywood in 
this period but also certainly in Italian cinema throughout the thirties and 
forties in fact well into the sixties the norm was to shoot in the studio the 
studio you shot in the studio because you could control everything in the 
studio you could the get the sound synchronization right you could get the 
lighting perfect you could take 
and retake if you hadn't got problems that it might rain or kids suddenly run 
across the back or a dog whatever so the the norm in filmmaking up until er 
really the seventies was to shoot in the studio so in the forties to actually 
shoot on location er was extremely impactful and in fact neo-realism had an 
incre-, extraordinary impact on world cinema generally and often the impact is 
the idea that you might go into the streets to make a film of course 
documentarists had done it but feature filmmakers very very rarely had ever 
done that actually made a story film conventional feature length in the streets 
or in the c-, in the countryside so the location shooting was a kind of 
extraordinarily important er impact and act er which was important because it 
was unusual and because in many ways it felt like a rejection of fascist cinema 
it felt like a rejection of the cinema that had gone before so it's not just 
that it was an innovation but that in some ways it 
actually felt because it was so different from what had gone before within 
Italy it felt like a conscious rejection of it now of course many cynics come 
along and say well actually the studios were actually er being used for er 
prisoners of war or people who had boos-, been bombed out of their you couldn't 
use the actually you couldn't use the studios er they had to shoot on if they 
wanted to make a film at all they had to do it on location which is in fact 
true but the significance in a way is what they did with that fact the fact 
that they actually saw as it were it's the kind of you know necessity is the 
mother of invention because in a way they had to shoot on the streets they had 
to shoot on location they actually then made that the foundation of an 
aesthetic and saw what was significant about it in terms of the kinds of 
conventional filmmaking that people were wa-, had been watching up until that 
time because it's on shot on location the 
light that is used tends to be of the available light so there's no actual 
assisted light and you have to remember again this is before highly sensitive 
film stocks that could adjust themselves to the l-, to even quite low levels of 
light and indeed to high levels of light this is ve-, very crude film stock and 
actually Rome Open City is made up of very different kinds of film stock er so 
that it sort of gives to it a very raw rough quality so but nonetheless they 
used the light that was available in the scene or occasionally some maybe one 
or two at most extra lights now if you actually see shooting on location now 
there's a n-, whole battery of lighting effects and boun-, er things to bounce 
light and so on so that even on location now there's a kind of smoothing out of 
appearances er if you s-, if think of a film like i don't know Sense and 
Sensibility or something like that all the location work yes it's on location 
but it's all been er lit and smoothed out in the process whereas 
the point about a lot of neo-realist films is often you can't see them very 
well there's a sudden jump in the quality of the image you know there's there's 
a kind of roughness and rawness now again y-, one view is that it's just crappy 
filmmaking but another view is ah no it's really alive it's really raw it's 
really kind of get in there and catching the reality so again it's an idea of 
turning that disadvantage in a way to an aesthetic purpose the third er thing 
is the use of non-professional actors that a lot of the main characters in 
these films were played by people who were not in fact actors that's true of 
nearly all of the characters in er Paisan it's true of the hero of er Bicycle 
Thieves er there was i s-, mentioned earlier and i come back to it it's not 
true of everybody in these films nonetheless it's er was very very common to 
use non-professional actors again on the idea that somehow non-professional 
actors would get you past the kind of glamour 
system would get you past all the er you know all the kind of tricks and er 
theatricality and actorliness of actors of course there's a certain paradox 
about non-professi using non-professional actors on the one hand they bring a 
kind of guarantee that they are as it were real people not actors okay we'll 
leave aside the fact that actors are after all real people nonetheless it 
brings along that sort of notion and there's a feeling of this is a guarantee 
of er you know we're really getting the real people now on the other hand of 
course most non-professional actors act dreadfully so in fact they're terribly 
stiff and in fact they look more like they're acting than does someone like 
Anna Magnani or Giulietta Masina who is er the star of La Strada so there's of 
course the paradox that that we because we have learned certain ways of acting 
as a kind of the normal way to represent how human beings are when we don't see 
that we're 
often conscious of the kind of awkwardness of the of the non-professional 
actors the stiffness the woodenness of the non-professional actors now that's 
of course an interesting paradox and again does one say well actually it just 
isn't very good or does one say yes but there's a kind of authenticity in the 
woodenness and i think there is a view that even that authe-, even that 
woodenness is nonetheless worth a price worth paying for having a sense of 
you've got real people er a fourth quality is the organization of the narrative 
in a much more elliptical episodic way than we would be used to certainly from 
classical Hollywood cinema a feeling that you know there is a story but it's 
not all that driving an awful lot of what happens hasn't got much to do with 
the story a lot of the time the camera just sort of er looks at something and 
it's not really terribly relevant to the story it's just there so that sense 
that it can be a bit more rambling it 
can be a series of episodes it doesn't have to be driving towards a goal 
according to the model of classical cinema is er said to be characteristic of 
er neo-realist films there tends to be a lack of close-ups it's not that there 
are no close-ups in Italian neo-realist cinema but there tend to be much less 
of them er the camera stays back [cough] and the the importance of this really 
is that er it it emphasizes people as social performers rather than as 
individual er psychologies so the close-up tends to take you in on the interior 
thoughts of someone into the detail into the the individualization often of 
course celebrated in the case of stars whereas if you stayed back there was a 
sense at any rate the idea was that this always meant the people were seen in 
their context in their social context and er they were often seen interacting 
with other people they weren't just isolated individuals so it was a much more 
social concern with character er achieved partly through 
the use of medium and long shots or the er the the privileging of them and 
finally very often say finally for this first little group which is quite 
formal er [cough] the charact-, the camera will often hang in a scene will just 
kind of l-, just let the thing r-, roll on quite after any er plot business has 
been dealt with or even before any plot business is dealt with i'll show you a 
bit from a moment from Umberto D which is a very famous sequence which is 
completely irre-, it's quite long yet it's irrelevant to the the film in a 
certain way and yet in it's often seen as the quintessential neo-realist moment 
of just staying and watching and just looking at ordinary life taking the idea 
that Zavattini who was one of the main theorists of neo-realists said everyday 
life is interesting that was kind of one of the credos of ne-, Italian neo-
realism that as it were ordinary life everyday life was interesting now all the 
things i've listed there are formal qualities and 
they also relate to ideas of realism which i'll expand upon much more next week 
but it is worth signalling that nonetheless er id-, er neo-realism did in fact 
use stars er stars that who were v-, who were very well established for 
instance in Rome Open City the two main stars of that are Anna Magnani and Aldo 
Fabrizi and they were actually famous as movie stars but as comic stars and 
indeed as comic stars in theatre revues and one of the reasons they agreed to 
do Rome Open City is that it was rather good publicity for their revues that 
they were just putting on in Rome so you have to have the idea that you know 
you are dealing here with actually really major stars although it's interesting 
which stars did in fact end up making er er neo-realist films and which didn't 
there were some who were felt to be too artificial too beautiful often er 
whereas the er stars who became big in neo-realism were often seemed to have 
more of the common touch and often were associated with 
popular theatre and popular theatre traditions not of the kind of er smart West 
End farce type but much more like music hall really so although they were 
professionals they were professionals and although they were film stars they 
nonetheless tended to come from the music hall vaudeville side of things more 
than from the high theatre or er mainstream er fascist er er cinema but the 
other thing that's really striking [cough] and difficult perhaps for us to 
understand about something called neo-realism is that they are in fact very 
melodramatic and er we'll talk about that in two or three weeks' time but the 
the thing the first thing to s-, just one thing to signal to you now is that of 
course melodrama means er drama with music and melodrama is often used 
interchangeably in Italy with the term opera well of course in other words 
opera which is also of course is drama to music and it's worth knowing that 
Verdi who i suppose is regarded as the greatest of all opera directors opera 
composers er was thought to be a realist he's referred to as er his his work is 
referred to as verismo realism now i'll talk about the paradox of that er in a 
couple of weeks' time and try to think through what can that possibly mean 
opera realist how can you even say that but nonetheless i-, actually within the 
Italian context melodrama is much less of a kind of shock to the idea of 
realism than it is within an Anglo-Saxon context a final area i want to mention 
is much more the subject matter because the subject matter of neo-realism is 
also very important and in many ways i've already mentioned this everyday life 
ordinary people er and social problems often so first of all it's an idea 
simply of ordinary everyday life and er ordinary people now of course the 
interesting thing is well what is everyday life er and what actually you know 
after all a-, this is what i do every day er this b-, b-, but i wouldn't be in 
an Italian ne-, or even a British neo-realist film if 
there was such a thing now certain things are thought to be more everyday than 
other kinds of things so er ordin-, so everydayness is already often confined 
to i-, for instance domesticity therefore becomes very important because 
domesticity seems like a more common everyday experience than er more than than 
many kind of jobs and in the public world and the idea of ordinary people often 
that to be middle class is in fact perfectly ordinary but n-, er although 
statistically now it's statistically it's the most ordinary thing to be but 
certainly in er the forties it was more statistically ordinary to be working 
class or er peasant and that actually is what is really indicated by the notion 
of ordinary people [cough] or just people actually er in Italian neo-realist 
cinema it's the working class it's the peasantry [cough] now at one level it's 
just that idea well you just observe what's going on now it's true that in 
Paisan and Rome Open City what you're also seeing is 
the war and the resistance so it's rather incredible events and things that 
none of us have experienced [cough] i think er but er the er obviously there 
you have to say well they had just been fighting a war so yes it's remarkable 
but it's a remarkable it's the impact of very remarkable events upon 
nonetheless the actually rather a-, m-, mundane ordinary lives of Italian 
people but that sense that really yes it was enough just to see ordinary life 
in a way did was not maintained and er er very often it needed to come down to 
something that could be thought of as a social problem so increasingly it 
became the problem of poverty the problem of unemployment the problem of 
prostitution the problem of the black market so that although there was a 
notion that oh it's just anything that happens is just ordinary life is 
interesting when it comes down to it it often means social problems that 
because they at least they have a kind of dramatic er hold which perhaps just 
seeing someone doing the cooking and waiting for their husband to come home and 
whatever would would d-, in fact didn't really have but also very important er 
is the notion of Italian identity that a lot of these films either explicitly 
as in Paisan or implicitly in many of them are actually about what does it mean 
to be an Italian and that that was of course a question of particular 
sensitivity when these films were made because of course only un-, until er the 
end of the war it-, Italy had been a fascist country and fascism had all been 
about the greatness of Italy it had been a great appeal to Italianness the 
rhetoric of fascism is all about national identity so after the war when 
everyone had this revulsion or everyone but i mean everyone claimed to have a 
revulsion against fascism er the er the question came well but if that's not if 
if i don't remember it was thirty years we had er sorry twenty years much 
longer than in er Germany that fascism was in Italy so you 
know if that if all of that Italianness of fascism isn't us what is it to be an 
Italian and a lot of the films are actually about the problem of Italian 
identity now that problem is exacerbated by something that's always been a 
problem about Italian identity and that is that Italy is in fact a very 
regional culture so that er regionality's often much more important to people 
er people tend to say i'm a Roman i'm a Milanese i'm Sicilian or whatever much 
more than they say i'm Italian so that er er regional identity is actually a 
problem and of course Italy has only really been a nation in any modern sense 
since eighteen-sixty when the resorg-, in what's called the Resorgimento 
happened which was the unification of Italy so the sense of er having been a 
country a long time which is so pervasive in British er sensibility is actually 
not true and was even less true in the forties where it was less than a hundred 
years that Italy had been a nation 
so the question of Italian identity is partly very urgent because you want to 
have a sense of who you are in the context of not being fascist but on the 
other hand who are you as an Italian if really what you are is Sicilian or 
Neopolitan or whatever particular er regional identity is concerned and that's 
very much er the theme of a lot of the films and it's very marked in Paisan 
where you actually see which is actually a a trip through Italy okay now i just 
want to show you then very briefly the extract from er Umberto D that i 
mentioned er just to show you the example oh where's did i fail to bring the 
the videos oh well i'll show it to you next week as an example of realism sorry 
about that i i hope i haven't lost them along the way er i'll just go straight 
on to the next er next topic i can't see them nobody can see two videos one 
just in an ordinary recording cover no sorry okay [cough] so let me then turn 
to saying something about Paisan and about Rome 
saying first of all something about Paisan the film that we're just about to 
see first of all the title it's a very ambiguous title it's not a conventional 
Italian word it's a way of saying paisà or paese and er it's got a double 
meaning on the on the one hand to say paisà might well be how a peasant would 
talk about his or her village or his or her land it er p-, paese is a very 
fascinating word 'cause it means both village and land er so it's a way it's a 
could be a very intimate and er felt and located way of talking about where you 
live where you are so on the one hand it has a very mu-, it's very much about 
being Italian and being rooted in a particular place my place my paisà on the 
other hand it's also the term that the Allies used er particularly the 
Americans used to call the Italians that they met in that context it really 
means peasant it was actually rather derogatory and say oh you're a you know 
you're sort of backward er you're a sort of s-, you know you're 
un-, uncivilized undeveloped it's actually ra-, it was rather a contemptuous 
term that was used by the Allies particularly Americans to describe the er 
people they met so it's a very very ambiguous n-, term and as you'll see the 
whole film actually is exactly plays upon that question of what it means to be 
an Italian for an Italian and how the Italians are perceived by the liberating 
forces the other thing to say by way of introduction before talking about what 
we're going to talk about tomorrow er is just to remind you you should know 
this from your reading by now er about the situation er in which this film 
would have been made Mussolini the fascist leader had been in power since the 
twenties er had er fled er er by the er nineteen-forty-four er and was 
eventually executed but Italy was then occupied by the Nazis who were of course 
the allies of the Italians during the Second World War so at the start of this 
film and also at the start of Rome Open City Italy is er 
occupied by the Nazis which of course is has a very different feeling from the 
French who were also occupied by the Nazis at the same period but there they 
were very much c-, a conquered nation whereas of course there was the ma-, that 
there had been a history of an alliance between Germans and Italians so there's 
a er er er it's quite a complicated s-, it's quite complicated to sort of work 
out the sense of what it meant to be occupied by a er er by a nation who was 
nonetheless a er had been an ally of yours in addition to that it's worth 
remembering that Italy has a huge history of being occupied and had been 
occupied by Austria for er a-, a-, about a century now er Austria is not 
Germany we all know that but probably if you hear an a German voice it doesn't 
really matter to you too much if it's Austria or Germany it's all part of a 
sort of sense of an occupying force so it's an occupying force who in a sense 
were invited in so it's a very odd er situation and then the allies 
particularly br-, the bri-, British and er Americans er liberated er i-, Italy 
starting er in Sicily and moving up the continent and er you'll see that in er 
that's what Paisan's all about now Paisan can be seen as a film that's 
essentially about the discovery of Italy after fascism well that's one of one 
of its themes and that's what i w-, particularly want us to focus on the way in 
which ideas of what it means to be an Italian are er focused on and developed 
through the structure indeed of a what is essentially a trip through six er z-, 
areas of Italy starting in Sicily and one of the ways in which this sense of 
discovering Italy after fascism er the the the wh-, what is Italy if it's not 
that Italian rhetoric that rhetoric of Italy under Mussolini one of the ways in 
which it's done is actually in the way the ha-, the narrative structure is 
handled so very often the stories that are told in each of these episodes are 
actually about the discovery of a hidden truth er so that er 
they're either about the s-, sometimes it's we that discover it sometimes the 
characters themselves discover the hidden truth er and that that that structure 
is is already very interesting as a way of realizing at the level of narrative 
form this basic concern with finding the real Italy that people felt had been 
hidden by er the er lies of fascism er the one exception to that er is the 
monastery sequence and that's very much seen as an enclave that actually almost 
er separate from er Italy generally and so that sense of a er this little 
enclave that's hidden away is although it's not in the narrative structure it's 
not about discovery nonetheless the overall er struc-, the overall sense of 
that is that it itself is a hidden part of Italy it's the most controversial 
part of the film really you either think it's nonsense or that it's really very 
moving and its ambivalence is actually because it's directed by Rossellini who 
was a Catholic and scripted by Fellini who was a 
bit more ambivalent anyway er we can talk about that er tomorrow possibly now 
so we've got this idea of the true Italy and the discovery of the true Italy 
now what i want us to talk about tomorrow and what we'll do tomorrow in the 
seminars is look at the Naples sequence in detail [cough] but er the in the 
essays i've asked you to look at other ones well it's it's a possible essay er 
what's interesting to think about is how exactly is this Italian ness 
constructed 'cause first there's the question about well who discovered Italy 
is this Italians discovering their own culture or is it er the G-Is the am-, 
the amer-, the liberating forces finding it or is it in some sense we the 
audience who have the the the the recognition of true Italianness that's 
signalled to us as something we can understand but equally important is who as 
er who as it were represents Italy and one might literally say quite literally 
who embodies Italy there's a sense in which different each episode er chooses a 
central 
character who in themselves represents something way in the and the way they 
look and everything about them suggests a particular regional identity a 
regional Italianness if you like and it's worth thinking about well why is it 
people of this class er this age er this gender what you know what does it tell 
us that these are the people who are selected to represent the real Italianness 
but also think about what they actually look like er you know in other words in 
the Naples episode which we'll talk about tomorrow you know why choose a little 
boy why choose a why choose a young why choose a boy why choose a boy that's 
all like this and moving all over the place like that you know what's that 
about as a percept-, as an embodiment of the Neopolitan er but also it's 
important to think about how they're introduced into the narrative t-, are they 
very clearly seen as this is the star this is the person this is about or are 
they seen as emerging from the crowd er who they're 
just one of many we could have looked at this one this one th-, what we're 
actually going to look at this one but it could have been any or are they very 
much a kind of object of enquiry are they actually although they're the main 
character are they really the object of a an enquiry of some other character 
and finally what does Italy look like the actual Italy the actual land and here 
there's the notion of paesaggio which means the idea as it was spirit of place 
the idea that a particular landscape or cityscape itself embodies certain 
qualities er which are moral aesthetic almost er psychological or felt 
qualities er which er are make it distinctive to a particular area and again 
it's worth just thinking about well what does each location look like what w-, 
er what what are the actual characteristics of the various locations er that 
that we see and are characters actually integrated into their location are they 
seen as very much emerging into their location or are they 
are they seen as part of it or are they seen as set set against it in some way 
and it's important to think of ideas of the natural the eternal the uncivilized 
that after when you start looking for the real something that of-, that often 
draws you into thinking in terms of the natural the er the the eternal the 
uncivilized and it's important to think about how those are suggested finally i 
just want to say something very briefly about Rome because er it's m-, i'll 
repeat this next week but i want you to i want to say it before you see Rome 
Open City er there's an episode in Rome in Paisan Bicycle Thieves is also set 
in Rome and the whole question about what Rome means er is another possible 
short essay topic er Rome is of course the capital of Italy and was then on the 
other hand it's also seen as a r-, as regional it's not actually seen er 
culturally as necessarily the centre of things even if it's got most money and 
the most monuments and so on nonetheless 
er it's still seen as a region and people say oh right that he's that's very 
Roman that accent that mat-, that attitude is very Roman so there's a very 
strong sense of it as a as a regional identity even though it's the capital er 
and it's worth thinking about what Rome means on the one hand of course you've 
got the Rome the famous Rome the Rome of the monuments the Rome that everybody 
probably has some sense of even if they've never been there and there are 
probably two important aspects of that one is ancient Rome or classical Rome 
the Rome of the ancient Roman Empire er and you in Paisan for instance you see 
the G-Is outside the Colosseum at one point it's a such a famous monument i 
imagine a lot of people recognize it so there's that there's those monuments of 
of Roman antiquity but of course Rome is also er the seat of the Catholic 
Church so it's also very important as a Christian city and the last shot of 
Rome Open City is in fact a shot of St Peter's 
the er you know which is like the most important Catholic church in the world 
er so er the s-, that's an equally important aspect of Rome so it's a Rome 
that's of of monuments both to ancient antiquity and to christi-, Christianity 
there are other things like er i-, within the his-, like Renaissance and so on 
which are important but i think much more difficult for us to pick up i think 
those two are not too difficult for us now the interesting thing to think about 
in terms of neo-realism is do we get a kind of tourist view of that do we get a 
a celebration of that do we get the kind of perhaps the official heritage 
industry to use a anachronistic term view of that or on the contrary is the 
Rome of the monuments nonetheless very much part of the texture of ordinary 
life what has the Rome of the monuments got to do with this function of showing 
ordinary people in everyday lives er do is it a tourist view that's irrelevant 
is it a pa-, part of an official view or is it s-, is it indeed 
integrated into the lives but equally important of course Rome is a working 
city and Rome is also a living city there's both the question of people 
actually working for a living and to what extent that is emphasized and the 
fact that people actually live there and what do we see of their lives d-, is 
what we see of their lives essentially domesticity is it more a sense of 
neighbourhood how important is leisure activity for instance as part of the 
sense of what Rome is and the last thing to mention is that this of course is 
Rome after a terrible defeat in the Second World War a Rome of ruins not of the 
sort of grandiose Colosseum type of ruins but of modern buildings in ruins to 
what extent does one see the the the the impact of fascism and particularly of 
the Second World War within the Rome that we see in these two and two-and-a- 
fifth films okay so i just wanted to mention those things as things to kind of 
have in your mind when watching the the films and they're all they are in fact 
of course relevant to the short essays er we'll watch Paisà now and tomorrow 
as i say what we'll do is look at the er Naples sequence er in detail in the 
seminars okay let's we'll take a five minute break before the film thank you