Faithfulness to everyday life in the scenario, truth to his part in an
actor, however, are simply the basic materials of the aesthetic of the
Italian film.
One must beware of contrasting aesthetic refinement and a certain crudeness, a certain instant effectiveness of a realism which is satisfied just to present reality. In my view, one merit of the Italian film will be that it has demonstrated that every realism in art was first profoundly aesthetic. One always felt it was so, but in the reverberations of the accusations of witch
craft that some people today are making against actors suspected of a pact
with the demon of art for art's sake, one has tended to forget it. The real like the imaginary in art is the concern of the artist alone. The flesh and blood of reality are no easier to capture in the net of literature or cinema than are gratuitous flights of the imagination. Or to put it another way, even when inventions and complexity of forms are no longer being applied to the
actual content of the work, they do not cease thereby to have an influence
on the effectiveness of the means. Because the Soviet cinema was too for getful of this, it slipped in twenty years from first to last place among the great film-producing nations. Potemkin turned the cinema world upside
down not just because of its political message , not even because it replaced the studio plaster sets with real settings and the star with an anoynmous crowd, but because Eistenstein was the greatest montage theoretician of his day, because he worked with Tisse, the finest camerman of his day, and be cause Russia was the focal point of cinematographic thought-in short,
What Is Cinema?
because the "realist" films Russia turned out secreted more aesthetic know how than all the sets and performances and lighting and artistic interpreta tion of the artiest works of German expressionism.
It is the same today with the Italian cinema. There is nothing aestheti caly retrogressive about its neorealism, on the contrary, there is progress
in expression, a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an ex tension of its stylistics.
Let us first take a good look at the cinema to see where it stands today. Since the expressionist heresy came to an end, particularly after the arrival of sound, one may take it that the general trend of cinema has been to ward realism. Let us agree, by and large, that film sought to give the spec tator as perfect an ilusion of reality as possible within the limits of the
logical demands of cinematographic narrative and of the current limits of technique. Thus the cinema stands in contrast to poetry, painting, and theater, and comes ever closer to the novel. It is not my intention here to
justify this basic aesthetic trend of modem cinema, be it on technical,
psychological, or economic grounds. I simply state it for this once without thereby prejudging either the intrinsic validity of such an evolution or the extent to which it is final.
But realism in art can only be achieved in one way-through artifice.
Every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered. But when this aesthetic aims in essence at creating the illusion
of reality, as does the cinema, this choice sets up a fundamental contra diction which is at once unacceptable and necessary : necessary because
art can only exist when such a choice is made. Without it, supposing total cinema was here and now technically -possible, we would go back purely
to reality. Unacceptable because it would be done definitely at the expense of that reality which the cinema proposes to restore integrally. That is why it would be absurd to resist every new technical development aiming to add to the realism of cinema, namely sound, color, and stereoscopy. Actually the "art" of cinema lives off this contradiction. It gets the most out
of the potential for abstraction and symbolism provided by the present limits of the screen, but this utilization of the residue of conventions aban-
doned by technique can work either to the advantage or to the detriment of realism. It can magnify or neutralize the effectiveness of the elements of
reality that the camera captures. One might group, if not classify in order
of importance, the various styles of cinematography in terms of the added measure of reality. We would define as "realist," then, al narrative means
tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen. Reality is not to be taken quantitatively. The same event, the same object, can be rep resented in various ways. Each representation discards or retains various of the qualities that permit us to recognize the object on the screen. Each in
troduces, for didactic or aesthetic reasons, abstractions that operate more or less corrosively and thus do not permit the original to subsist in its en tirety. At the conclusion of this inevitable and necessary "chemical" action, for the initial reality there has been substituted an ilusion of reality com posed of a complex of abstraction (black and white, plane surface), of con ventions (the rules of montage, for example), and of authentic reality. It is a necessary illusion but it quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality
itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cine matographic representation. As for the film maker, the moment he has se cured this unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he
himself is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end. There could never be any question of calling him a liar because his art consists in lying. He is just no longer in control of his art. He is its dupe , and hence he is held
back from any further conquest of reality.
From Citizen Kane to Farre bique
Recent years have brought a noticeable evolution of the aesthetic of cinema in the direction of realism. The two most significant events in this
evolution in the history of the cinema since 1940 are Citizen Kane and
Paisa. Both mark a decisive step forward in the direction of realism but by
diferent paths. If I bring up the film of Orson Welles before I analyze the
stylistics of the Italian film: it is because it wil allow us to place the latter in its true perspective. Orson Welles restored to cinematographic illusion a fundamental quality of reality-its continuity. Oassical editing, deriv ing from Grifth, separated reality into successive shots which were just
a series of either logical or subjective points of view of an event. A man locked in a cell is waiting for the arrival of his executioner. His anguished eyes are on the door. At the moment the executioner is about to enter we can be quite sure that the director wil cut to a close shot of the door handle as it slowly turns. This close-up is justified psychologicaly by the victim's concentration on the symbol of his extreme distress. It is this or dering of the shots, this conventional analysis of the reality continuum, that truly goes to make up the cinematographic language of the period.
The construction thus introduces an obviously abstract element into reality. Because we are so used to such abstractions, we no longer sense them. Orson WeUes started a revolution by systematicaly employing a depth of focus that had so far not been used. Whereas the camera lens, classically, had focused successively on different parts of the scene, the camera of Orson Welles takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field. It is no longer the editing that selects what we se, thus giving it an a priori significance, it is the mind of the spectator which is forced to discern, as in a sort of parallelepiped of reality with the screen as its cross-section, the dramatic spectrum proper to the scene. It is therefore to an intelligent use of a
specific step forward that Citizen Kane owes its realism. Thanks to the depth of focus of the lens, Orson Welles restored to reality its visible con tinuity.
We clearly see with what elements of reality the cinema has enriched
itself. But from other points of view, it is also evident that it has moved away from reality or at least that it gets no nearer to it than does the classical aesthetic. In ruling out, because of the complexity of his tech niques, all recourse to nature in the raw, natural settings, * exteriors, sun-
light, and nonprofessional actors, Orson Welles rejects those qualities of the authentic document for which there is no substitute and which, being likewise a part of reality, can themselves establish a form of realism. Let us contrast Citizen Kane and Farrebique-in the latter, a systematic de termination to exclude everything that was not primarily natural material is precisely the reason why Rouquier failed in the area of technical per fection.
Thus, the most realistic of the arts shares the common lot. It can not make reality entirely its own because reality must inevitably elude it at some point. Undoubtedly an improved technique, skilully applied, may narrow the holes of the net, but one is compelled to choose between one kind of reality and another. The sensitiveness resembles the sensitive ness of the retina. The nerve endings that register color and intensity of light are not at all the same, the density of one being ordinarily in inverse ratio to that of the other. Animals that have no difficulty in making out the shape of their quarry in the dark are almost color blind.
Between the contrasting but equally pure kinds of realism represented by Farrebique on the one hand and Citizen Kane on the other, there is a wide variety of possible combinations. For the rest, the margin of loss of the real , implicit in any realist choice, frequently alows the artist, by the use of any aesthetic convention he may introduce into the area thus left vacant, to increase the effectiveness of his chosen form of reality. In deed we have a remarkable example of this in the recent Italian cinema. In the absence of technical equipment, the Italian directors have been obliged to record the sound and dialogue after the actual filming . The net
result is a loss of realism. However, left free to use the camera unfettered by the microphone, such directors have thereby profited by the occasion to enlarge the camera's field of action and its mobility with, consequently, an immediate raising of the reality coefficient.
Future technical improvments which wil permit the conquest of the properties of the real (color and stereoscopy for example) can only in crease the distance between the two realist poles which today are situated in the area surrounding Farrebique and Citizen Kane. The quality of the interior shots wil in fact increasingly depend on a complex, delicate and cumbersome apparatus. Some measure of reality must always be sacrificed in the effort of achieving it.
Paisa
How do you fit the Italian film into the realist spectrum? After trying to trace the geographical boundaries of this cinema, so penetrating in its portrayal of the social setting, so meticulous and perceptive in its choice of authentic and significant detail, it now remains for us to fathom its
aesthetic geology.
We would clearly be deluding ourselves if we pretended to reduce recent Italian production to certain common, easily definable characteris tics applicable to all directors. We will simply try to single out those characteristics with the widest application, reserving the right when the OC".casion arises to limit our concern to the most significant films. Since we must also make a choice, we will arrange, by implication, the major
Italian films in concentric circles of decreasing interest around Paisa, since
it is this film of Rossellini's that yields the most aesthetic secrets.
Narrat ive Techniq ue
As in the novel, the aesthetic implicit in the cinema reveals itself in its
narrative technique. A film is always presented as a succession of fragments of imaged reality on a rectangular surface of given proportions, the ordering of the images and their duration on the screen determining its import.
The objective nature of the modem novel, by reducing the strictly grammatical aspect of its stylistics to a minimum, has laid bare the secret essence of style. * Certain qualities of the language of Faulkner, Heming way, or Malraux would certainly not come through in translation, but the
essential quality of their styles would not suffer because their style is almost completely identical with their narrative technique-the ordering in time of fragments of reality. The style becomes the iner dynamic principle of the narrative, somewhat like the relation of energy to matter or the specific
physics of the work, as it were. This it is which distributes the fragmented realities across the aesthetic spectrum of the narrative, which polarizes the filings of the facts without changing their chemical composition. A Faulk
ner, a Malraux, a Dos Passos, each has his personal universe which is
defined by the nature of the facts reported , but also by the law of gravity which holds them suspended above chaos. It will be useful, therefore, to arrive at a definition of the Italian style on the basis of the scenario, of its genesis, and of the forms of exposition that it follows. Unfortunately the demon of melodrama that Italian film makers seem incapable of ex orcising takes over every so often, thus imposing a dramatic necessity on strictly
foreseeable events. But that is another story. What matters is the creative surge, the special way in which the situations are brought to life. The
necessity inherent in the narrative is biological rather than dramatic. It
burgeons and grows with all the verisimilitude of life. t One must not conclude that this method, on the face of it, is less aesthetic than a slow and meticulous preplang. But the old prejudice that time, money, and re sources have a value of their own is so rooted that people forget to relate them to the work and to the artist. Van Gogh repainted the same picture ten times, very quickly, while Cezane would return to a painting time and again over the years. Certain genres call for speed, for work done in the heat of the moment, but surgery could not call for a greater sureness of touch, for greater precision. It is only at this price that the Italian film has that air of documentary, a naturalness nearer to the spoken than to the written account, to the sketch rather than to the painting. It cals for the ease and sure eye of Rossellini, Lattuada, Vergano, and de Santis. In their hands the camera is endowed with well-defined cinematographic tact, won derfully sentitive antennae which allow them with one stroke to get pre cisely what they are after. In 11 Bandito, the prisoner, returning from Ger many, finds his house in ruins. Where a solid building once stood there is now just a pile of stones surrounded by broken-down wals. The camera shows us the man's face. Then, following the movement of his eyes, it travels through a 360-degree tum which gives us the whole spectacle. This
pang shot is doubly original. First, because at the outset, we stand off
from the actor since we are looking at him by way of a camera trick, but during the traveling shot we become identified with him to the point of feeling surprised when, the 360-degree pan having been completed, we return to his face with its expression of utter horror. Second, because the speed of this subjective pang shot varies. It starts with a long slide, then it comes almost to a halt, slowly studies the burned and shattered walls with the same rhythm of the man's watching eye, as if directly impelled by
? concentration.
I have had to dwell at some length on this minor example to avoid making a purely abstract affirmation concerning what I regard, in an al most psychological sense of the word, as cinematic "tact." A shot of this
kind by virtue of its dynamism belongs with the movement of a hand drawing a sketch, leaving a space here, filg in there, here sketching round the subject, and there bringing it into relief. I am thinking of the slow motion in the documentary on Matisse which allows us to observe, beneath the continuous and uniform arabesques of the stroke, the varying hesitations of the artist's hand. In such a case the camera movement is important. The camera must be equally as ready to move as to remain still. Traveling and panning shots do not have the same god-like character that the Hollwood camera crane has bestowed on them. Everything is
shot from eye-level or from a concrete point of view, such as a roof top or
window. Technically speaking, all the memorable poetry of the children's ride on the white horse in Sciuscia can be attributed to a low-level camera angle which gives the riders or: . their mounts the appearance of an eques trian statue. In Sortilege, Christian Jacques went to a great deal more trouble over his phantom horse. But all that cinematic virtuosity did not prevent his animal from having the prosaic look of a broken-down cab
horse. The Italian camera retains something of the human quality of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera, a projection of hand and eye, almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness.
As for the photography, the lighting plays only a minor expressive role. First, because lighting calls for a studio, and the greater part of the filming is done on exteriors or in real-life settings. Second, because docu mentary camera work is identified in our minds with the grey tones of newsreels. It would be a contradiction to take any great pains with or to touch up excessively the plastic quality of the style.
As we have thus far attempted to describe it, the style of Italian films
would appear to belong with a greater or less degree of skill and mastery of technique or feeling to the same family as quasi-literary journalism, to an ingenious art, pleasing, lively, and even moving, but basically a minor art. This is sometimes true even though one may actually rank the genre fairly high in the aesthetic hierarchy. It would be unjust and untrue to se such an assessment as the final measure of this particular technique. Just as, in literature, rep011age with its ethic of objectivity (perhaps it would be more correct to say with its ethic of seeming objectivity) has simply
provided a basis for a new aesthetic of the novel, so the technique of the Italian film makers results in the best films especialy in Paisa, with its aesthetic of narrative that is both complex and original . *
Paisa is unquestionably the first film to resemble closely a collection of short stories. Up to now we had only known the film composed of sketches
-a bastard and phony type of film if ever there was one. Rossellini tells us,
in succession, six stories of the Italian Liberation. This historical element is the only thing they have in common. Three of them, the first, the fourth, and the last, are taken from the Resistance. The others are droll
or pathetic or tragic episodes occurring on the fringes of the Allied ad vance. Prostitution, the black market, and a Franciscan convent alike provide the story material. There is no progression other than a chrono
logical ordering of the story beginning with the landing of an Allied forcl! in Sicily. But their social, historical, and human foundation gives them a unity enough to constitute a collection perfectly homogeneous in its diver sity. Above all, the length of each story, its form, contents, and aesthetic
duration gives us for the first time precisely the impression of a short story. The Naples episode of the urchin-a black-market expert, selling the
clothes of a drunk Negro soldier-is an excellent Saroyan story. Another makes us think of Hemingway, yet another (the first) of Faulkner. I am not merely referring to the tone or the subject, but in a profound way to the style. Unfortunately one cannot put a film sequence in quotation
marks like a paragraph, and hence any literary description of one must of necessity be incomplete. However, here is an episode from the final story which reminds me now of Hemingway, now of Faulkner :
1. A small group of Italian partisans and Allied soldiers have been given a supply of food by a family of fisher folk living in an isolated farm house in the heart of the marshlands of the Po delta. Having been handed
a basket of eels, they take off. Some while later, a German patrol discovers this, and executes the inhabitants of the farm. 2. An American officer and a partisan are wandering at twilight in the marshes. There is a burst of
gunfire in the distance. From a highly elliptical conversation we gather
that the Germans have shot the fishermen. 3. The dead bodies of the men and women lie stretched out in front of the little farmhouse. In the twi light, a half-naked baby cries endlessly.
Even with such a succinct description, this fragment of the story re veals enormous ellipses--or rather, great holes. A complex train of action is reduced to three or four brief fragments, in themselves already elliptical enough in comparison with the reality they are unfolding. Let us pass over the first purely descriptive fragment. The second event is conveyed to us by something only the partisans can know--distant gunfire. The third is presented to us independently of the presence of the partisans. It is not even certain that there were any witnesses to the scene. A baby
cries besides its dead parents. There is a fact. How did the Germans dis cover that the parents were guilty? How is it that the child is still alive? That is not the film's concern, and yet a whole train of connected events led to this particular outcome. In any case, the film maker does not ordi narily show us everything. That is impossible-but the things he selects and the things he leaves out tend to form a logical pattern by way of which the mind passes easily from cause to effect. The techniq?e of Rossellini undoubtedly maintains an intelligible succession of events, but these do not mesh like a chain with the sprockets of a wheel. The mind has to leap
from one event to the other as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river. It may happen that one's foot hesitates between two rocks, or that one misses one's footing and slips. The mind does likewise. Actually it is
not of the essence of a stone to alow people to cross rivers without wetting
their feet any more than the divisions of a melon exist to allow the head of the family to divide it equally. Facts are facts, our imagination makes
use of them, but they do not exist inherently for this purpose. In the usual
shooting script ( according to a process resembling the classical novel form ) the fact comes under the scrutiny of the camera, is divided up, analyzed, and put together again, undoubtedly without entirely losing its
factual nature; but the latter, presumably, is enveloped in abstraction, as the clay of a brick is enveloped by the wall which is not as yet present but which wil multiply its paralelipeds . For Rossellini, facts take on a meaning, but not like a tool whose function has predetermined its form. The
facts follow one another, and the mind is forced to observe their resem blance ; and thus , by recalling one another, they end by meaning some thing which was inherent in each and which is, so to speak, the moral of
the story-a moral the mind cannot fail to grasp since it was drawn from reality itself. In the Florentine episode, a woman crosses the city while it is still occupied by a number of Germans and groups of Italian Fas
cists ; she is on her way to meet her fiance, a leader of the Italian under
ground, accompanied by a man who likewise is looking for his wife and child. The attention of the camera following them, step by step, though it will share all the difficulties they encounter, all their dangers, wil how ever be impartially divided between the heroes of the adventure and the
conditions they must encounter. Actualy, everything that is happening in a Florence in the throes of the Liberation is of a like importance. The personal adventures of the two individuals blend into the mass of other ad
ventures, just as one attempts to elbow one's way into a crowd to recover something one has lost. In the course of making one's way one sees in the eyes of those who stand aside the reflections of other concerns, other
passions, other dangers alongside which one's own may well be merely
laughable. Ultimately and by chance, the woman learns, from a wounded partisan, that the man she is looking for is dead. But the statement from which she learned the news was not aimed straight at her-but hit her like a stray bullet. The impeccable line followed by this recital owes nothing
to classical forms that are standard for a story of this kind Attention is never artificially focused on the heroine. The camera makes no pretense at being psychologically subjective. We share al the more fully in the feelings of the protagonists because it is easy for us to sense what they are feeling; and also because the pathetic aspect of the episode does not derive from the fact that a woman has lost the man she loves but from the special place
this drama holds among a thousand others, apart from and yet also part of
the complete drama of the Liberation of Florence. The camera, as if
An Aesthetic of Reality
making an impartial report, confines itself to following a woman searching for a man, leaving to u s the task of being alone with her, of understanding her, and of sharing her suffering.
In the admirable final episode of the partisans surrounded in the marshlands, the muddy waters of the Po Delta, the reeds stretching away to the horizon, just sufficiently tal to hide the man crouching down in the little flat-bottomed boat, the lapping of the waves against the wood, all
occupy a place of equal importance with the men. This dramatic role played by the marsh is due in great measure to deliberately intended quali ties in the photography. This is why the horizon is always at the same height. Maintaining the same proportions between water and sky in every
shot brings out one of the basic characteristics of this landscape . It is the exact equivalent, under conditions imposed by the screen, of the inner feeling men experience who are living between the sky. and the water and whose lives are at the mercy of an infinitesimal shift of angle in relation to the horizon. This shows how much subtlety of expression can be got on ex teriors from a camera in the hands of the man who photographed Paisa. The unit of cinematic narrative in Paisa is not the "shot, " an abstract view of a reality which is being analyzed, but the "fact." A fragment of concrete reality in itself multiple and . full of ambiguity, whose meaning emerges only after the fact, thanks to other imposed facts between which the mind establishes certain relationships. Unquestionably, the director
chose these "facts" carefully while at the same time respecting their factual integrity. The closeup of the door knob referred to earlier was less a fact than a sign brought into arbitrary relief by the camera, and no more in dependent semantically than a preposition in a sentence. The opposite is true of the marsh or the death of the peasants.
But the nature of the "image facts" is not only to maintain with the other image facts the relationships invented by the mind. These are in a sense the centrifugal properties of the images-those which make the narrative possible. Each image being on its own just a fragment of reality existing before any meanings, the entire surface of the scene should mani fest an equally concrete density. Once again we have here the opposite of the "door-knob" type of scene, in which the color of the enamel, the
dirt marks at the level of the hand, the shine of the metal, the worn- away
look are just so many useless facts, concrete parasites of an abstraction
fittingly dispensed with.
In Paisa ( and I repeat that I imply by this, in varying degrees, all Italian films ) the closeup of the door knob would be replaced , without any loss of that peculiar quality of which it is part, by the " image fact" of a door whose concrete characteristics would be equally visible. For the same
reason the actors will take care never to dissociate their performance from
the decor or from the performance of their fellow actors. Man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride of place should be given a priori. That is why the Italian film makers alone know how to shoot suc
cessful scenes in buses, trucks, or trains, namely because these scenes com
bine to create a special density within the framework of which they know how to portray an action without separating it from its material context and without loss of that uniquely human quality of which it is an integral part. The subtlety and suppleness of movement within these cluttered spaces, the naturalness of the behavior of everyone in the shooting area, make of these scenes supreme bravura moments of the Italian cinema.