Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s

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Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress
Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s
Citation
DiSalvo, Mary Lorraine. 2014. Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of
the 1950s and 1960s. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.
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http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274334
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Redirecting Neorealism:
Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s

A dissertation presented
by
Mary Lorraine DiSalvo
to
The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
Italian Literature

Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

May 2014
© 2014 Mary Lorraine DiSalvo
All rights reserved.
Dissertation Advisor: Giuliana Minghelli Author: Mary Lorraine DiSalvo

Redirecting Neorealism: Italian Auteur-Actress Collaborations of the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The aftermath of Italy’s cinematic movement neorealism left several directors searching
for a new cinematic practice and a new directorial identity. Many of the most artistically intrepid
directors of the era turned to women as a means of professional and personal reinvention. This
study analyzes the collaborations of Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and
Michelangelo Antonioni with the actresses Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Giulietta Masina, and
Monica Vitti, respectively.
The political disillusionment with post-war reconstruction and the desire to transcend the
strictures of neorealist practice manifested as an impulse to turn towards more personal and
lyrical cinematic narratives. By placing women at center stage, these directors found a conduit
through which to explore the vision of the other. The post-neorealist films of these artists reveal
the extent to which they abandoned neorealism’s chorality, its focus on the collective and the
common man, in favor of the single, marginalized, uncommon woman.
Using Deleuze’s concept of deterritorialization, this dissertation addresses the way in
which the collaborations of these couples, often defined by the directors’ attempts to harness the
woman’s perspective, resulted in the creation of a third space, an open space of interpretation.
The woman’s vision presents a fruitful indeterminacy. An analysis of the films reveals how these
women irreversibly changed the face of the directors’ cinema. The study concludes with an
iii
examination of Lina Wertmüller and Giancarlo Giannini’s collaboration as an example of a
“reverse” case that took place in the following decade (the 1970s).

iv
Table of Contents
I. Introduction 1
II. De Sica, Loren, and the (A)historical Female Body 18
III. Encountering the Other: Rossellini, Bergman and the Creation
of a New Cinematic Language 61
IV. Masina’s Performance of Spectatorship in Fellini’s Films 117
V. Resistant Subjectivity: Antonioni’s Appropriation
of Vitti’s “Modernity” 163
VI. [Epilogue] Grotesque Vision, Visions of the Grotesque:
Wertmüller and Giannini 211
VII. Bibliography 236

v
I. Introduction

Every critic focusing on a specific period in cinematic history is faced with the tricky
proposition of historical and aesthetic demarcation. In Italian film, the monolithic term
“neorealism,” often used as an ambiguous catch-all, complicates this attempt at periodization.
The 1950s and s’60s saw dramatic shifts in Italian cinema, a movement away from the
categorical strictures of neorealism established by critics in the post-war era. And yet, in art, a
turning is often a returning. While the auteurs of this era expanded the definition of their
“neorealisms,” venturing into new aesthetic realms, they also drew upon bygone eras. One such
return, the focus of my study, is the reemergence of the female figure at the center of the frame.
The four directors on whom I will focus—Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini,
and Michelangelo Antonioni—all reinvented their cinema around women in the post-neorealist
period. Their actresses—Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Giulietta Masina, and Monica Vitti,
respectively—allowed a renegotiation with the directors’ engagement with neorealism and all
that it had come to contain.
The formation of these four directors can be traced, to varying degrees, to the crucible of
neorealist practice.1 The films I will examine demonstrate a reaction against or manipulation of
this aesthetic and ideological base. Much of this reaction coincided with a general feeling of
disillusion in the post-war reconstruction. The build-up to the miracolo economico redirected the
collective desire for political and cultural reforms toward more purely economic concerns. The

1 Here, as throughout this introduction, it is difficult to generalize about the trajectory of these directors. De Sica, for
example, started his acting career in the late twenties and filmed the neorealist classic Ladri di biciclette in 1948,
two years before Fellini or Antonioni made their first feature films (Luci del varietà and Cronaca di un amore,
respectively). Yet even Deleuze insists that, along with Visconti, “Antonioni and Fellini are definitely part of neo-
realism, despite all their differences.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Robert Galeta and Hugh
Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2005) 4.
1
result, on the part of intellectuals, was “a bitter feeling of helplessness and disenchantment, even
of shame and remorse for a missed opportunity, with parties competing at polished forms of
fraudulent patronage instead of busying themselves with negotiations framed by an idea of
curbed inequalities and public good.”2 Naturally this failure debased the tenets by which
neorealism was originally defined, that is, “as a social realist expression of populist politics,” as
Giuliana Minghelli reminds us—a definition that preceded a “formal appreciation of its
innovation as an art cinema.”3 The political character of neorealism called for reconstruction, for
the redemption of the ruins left by fascism: according to Noa Steimatsky, “In a landscape of
ruins, neorealism was reconstruction.”4
The clearest voices of post-neorealist reconstruction (“re”-reconstruction?) did not
hesitate to offer a cultural critique of Italy’s miracolo economico as well as an aesthetic critique
of neorealism itself. The most resounding of these voices can be found in Rossellini, Fellini and
Antonioni. Peter Bondanella affirms that “All three played an important role in scripting or
directing neorealist works, but all felt continued critical association with the implicit goals or
techniques of neorealism to be increasingly confining.”5 In their artistic transition from
neorealism, however, they did not make a clean break, but rather raised “the specter of
neorealism in an effort to lend aesthetic force” to questions about the economic miracle and its
extension of postwar politics, as Karl Schoonover explains.6 Though many film critics recognize

2 Luca Barattoni, Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) 12.
3 Giuliana Minghelli, Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema, Year Zero (New York:
Routledge, 2013) 2.
4 Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008) 45.
5 Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1990) 103.
6 Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012) 187.
2
the complexity of this transitional period, few identify the crucial role that women played in it.
My goal in this study is to elucidate the use of female focalizers as a passage from neorealist
practice to a new directorial stylistics.
First, a note about periodization—upon which I’ve briefly touched—and the films that
I’ve chosen to analyze. Each director finds a unique journey with his leading lady, and the forms
they take are various indeed. Yet trends and reactionary movements emerge. The Italy of the
fifties, as noted by Paul Ginsborg, saw the political and cultural entrenchment of the Christian
Democrats through a base of Catholicism, Americanism, and anti-Communism.7 Though Italy
was not yet in a period of “unchecked industrial boom,”8 the early efforts of economic
reorganization were gathering force. In film, as Angelo Restivo notes, “the decades of the fifties
can be seen as a period of aesthetic retrenchment—with neorealism either diminished to a kind
of populist celebration of local color, or adopted as a method for cinematic experimentation.”9
Indeed, the early fifties saw the first use of neorealist stylistics as a jumping-board for more
lyrical projects. Already, in 1950, Rossellini had struck out on his metaphysical journey with
Bergman in Stromboli,10 while two years later, De Sica was still adhering to the neorealist spirit
with Umberto D (the same year as Rossellini’s second Bergman collaboration, Europa 51). 1954
found Rossellini, Fellini, and De Sica all contributing to the post-neorealist corpus; but while

7 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988 (London: Penguin Books, 1990)
182.
8 Ginsborg 186.
9 Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian
Art Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) 36.
10 1950 was also the year of Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore, wherein, according to Minghelli, “[N]eorealism
folds on to itself and explicitly inhabits those historical shadows from which it emerged and that still darken Italy’s
artistic and political consciousness.” Minghelli 130.
3
Viaggio in Italia and La strada11 continued to travel the road toward innovative individual
stylistics, De Sica, on the path of “populist celebration of local color,” was wandering
dangerously close to neorealismo rosa with L’oro di Napoli. Nine years later, at the height of the
miracolo economico, De Sica would (re)commit fully to the commedia all’italiana in Ieri, oggi,
domani (1963). The films on the tail end of my study, the mid-sixties, are primarily those of
Antonioni—whose projects with Vitti started rather late in his career, considering that, at his age
at the completion of L’avventura (he was 48 years-old when the film was released), Rossellini
made Viaggio in Italia (and was therefore approaching the end of his collaboration with
Bergman).12 The mid-sixties saw new experiments in cinematography and color, most
dramatically in Deserto rosso (1964) and Giulietta degli spiriti (1965). Antonioni and Fellini,
then, more than their elders, were immersed in the decadent culture of the economic miracle and,
along with Pasolini, became the representative auteurs of the sixties. Gian Piero Brunetta
observes that “Fellini and Antonioni unhinged the coordinates and conditions that delimited
creative space and the construction of the signified and the signifiers of the postwar period. They
sought to construct works that were no longer measurable by the meter of the theory and poetics
of neorealism and realism.”13 One could also argue that their break with neorealist practice was
ultimately more permissible to Italian critics than that of Rossellini or De Sica, given the degree
of separation between the younger artists and the so-called neorealist classics.14

11 Not incidentally, both films about Italian voyages.
12 Alain Bergala points out that, though Antonioni was only six years younger than Rossellini and had even
collaborated on the screenplay of Un pilota ritorna (1942) he seems to have “waited for his moment” to make truly
modern film, after the first wave of neorealism, and therefore he was more in sync with the French nouvelle vague.
Alain Bergala, “In ordine di apparizione sullo schermo: Rossellini, Antonioni, Godard,” Lo sguardo di
Michelangelo Antonioni e le arti, ed. Dominique Païni (Ferrara: Ferrara arte, 2013) 229.
13 Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 4 (Roma: Editori riuniti, 1993) 153.
14 One mustn’t forget, however, the grief Fellini caught in the fifties with the new poetics of La strada, primarily
from Marxist critics like Guido Aristarco.
4