A turning point in history, captured on film: the origins and influence of Italian neorealism

The Italian neorealist film movement emerged suddenly with the initial fall of Mussolini in Italy in 1943. In every way this movement expressed the profound break with the past and the revolutionary potential of the period – not only in the style and subject matter of its films, but also in the conditions for its emergence as a movement. 

[This article was originally published as part of issue 49 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here]

It sprang up almost overnight from its opposite – the films of Mussolini’s fascist regime. These were all glossy artifice and escapism, which is what the regime required of them. 

The literal destruction of the film studios controlled by Mussolini’s regime, which were bombed in the war, meant that not only were Italian film makers suddenly freed from a totalitarian censor, the very studios bound up with it were gone too. They therefore had every reason to embrace the spirit of the ‘Italian Spring’, to unleash all the pent-up creativity suppressed by fascism with new studios, new methods and ideas.

That is why this film style not only reflects different political pressures and ideals, but is different in every way. These films were set amongst the working class, they were filmed, of necessity, on location, and used non-professional actors from the struggling communities they were about. This makes them not only great films, but almost documentaries of a unique moment in history.

Rome, Open City

In September 1945, Rome, Open City was released, just 15 months after Rome was liberated from the Nazis, and only four months after the war ended in Europe. This incredible film, set in Nazi-occupied Rome, was described by Martin Scorsese as “the most precious moment of film history”. 

It was written by the great Federico Fellini, amongst others, and directed by Roberto Rossellini as part of his famous neorealist trilogy. It depicts with remarkable realism the resistance to the Nazis by a local community of ordinary Italians. To achieve this, Rossellini largely employed real working-class Romans instead of professional actors to play the parts.

The film was shot in January 1945, as the war was still raging in Germany and northern Italy, and only seven months after the Nazis were defeated in Rome. As it was being filmed, a local man pulled his gun out, believing the events being acted out were real!

A still from Rome, Open City / Image: public domain

Rossellini himself was not politically aligned with the working class, and had in fact made films for Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. But he was dedicated to his craft of realism, which he described as “nothing other than the artistic form of truth”. For this reason, Rome, Open City captures truthfully the intensity of this community’s struggle against Nazi occupation, their solidarity, bravery and stoical cheerfulness in the face of such hardship.

As the character Francesco says: 

“[The war] will end, Pina, and spring will come again, more beautiful than ever, because we'll be free. We have to believe it and want it. We mustn't be afraid now or in the future, because we're on the just path. Understand, Pina?

[...]

“We're fighting for something that has to be, that can't help coming. The road may be long and hard, but we'll get there and we'll see a better world. And our children especially will see it.”

Rome, Open City began life as a documentary, and at times it still feels like it. Thanks to its realism and the fact it was shot on site so soon after the war ended, it stands as an invaluable historical treasure, a window into a brief moment in history in which Europe was on the cusp of revolution.

The wasted potential of this revolutionary situation is intelligently hinted at in this film, when the communist the Nazis have been searching for is finally caught. The officer, whose methods of torture have failed to break him, switches to a more psychological and political technique:

“You are a communist. Your party has formed a pact with reactionary forces. You’re all working together against us now. But tomorrow, when Rome is occupied, or ‘liberated’, as you call it, will these monarchist officers still be your allies? I offer you the solution to this problem: give me the names of Badoglio’s generals.”

The revolutionary holds firm and refuses to betray his party’s liberal and monarchist ‘allies’. He pays for it with his life. Whether Rossellini intended it or not, this brilliantly symbolises the tragedy of the sacrifice of revolution by its ‘communist’ leaders, to please Stalin’s imperialist allies. 

At one point early in the film, one of the residents asks another “Do you think these Americans really exist?” The question implies desperation for the war to end, but also a suspicion of these Americans, who will surely have their own interests. This perspective seems to be confirmed by the reply from another resident, who looks towards a bombed-out building and says: “looks that way”. 

Allied bombings on Italian cities intensified in the second part of the war, wreaking havoc on factories and infrastructure, exacting a heavy toll of civilian casualties and destroying entire working-class neighbourhoods.

This is the liberation Rome got thanks to Stalin and Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, holding back the communist partisans who could have liberated Rome by themselves. 

Struggle for survival

The intensity of the life of the community we are focused on comes across loud and clear. Watching the film, you feel almost as if you are one of the tenants living in this cramped apartment block, overhearing their conversations and joining in the community’s efforts to undermine the Nazis. You feel the organised chaos of real life, of people living on top of each other, looking out for, but also annoying, one another.

Complaining about the difficulties of wartime life and Nazi occupation, one character says with a sigh: “Flu is all there's plenty of these days”. Another says, not with pride but with shame at their desperation: “We stormed a bakery this morning, the second one this week.”

Italian theatrical poster for Rome, Open City / Image: public domain

Rossellini’s films are often described as unsentimental and cold, thanks to their realism. The gunning down of important characters is certainly shown in a matter-of-fact way: this is the reality of life. War is a bare struggle for survival; it is not warm and sentimental, and so it is right that his films are like this. That does not mean, however, that ordinary people suffering through war are themselves cold and uncaring, and this reality is also conveyed in the film. 

Rome, Open City might be shot without sentimental adornment. But it is a warm film because it is about real people and their real struggles, full of heroism, solidarity and self-sacrifice.

These Romans are not shown to be superhuman abstractions of revolutionaries, however. After two of them are caught, they await their inevitable torture with terrible fear, trying to gear each other up to stay silent, unsure that they will be able to. 

As the blowtorch is brought out, we see the short-sighted stupidity of the Nazi officer, who thinks all they need to do is to apply brutal methods to get the answers they want. But another officer manages to have a moment of foresight and casts doubt on these violent methods: 

“We’ve strewn all of Europe with corpses. From their graves rises up an unquenchable hatred. Hatred, hatred everywhere!”

Germany, Year Zero

The consequences of the Nazi occupation and plunder of Europe, this unquenchable hatred directed at the Germans, is the subject of a later neorealist masterpiece by Rossellini, Germany, Year Zero. Filmed partly on location in Berlin and partly in Rome in 1947, this film is perhaps even more remarkable as a record of the extreme deprivation and despair faced by ordinary Germans in the immediate aftermath of the war.

The policy of the victorious Allies at the end of the war was summarised as “the complete disarmament, demilitarisation and the dismemberment of Germany as they deem requisite for future peace and security.” Further, Germany was to pay for all losses incurred during the war.

In the name of ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘reparations’, German industry and infrastructure was quite literally dismantled and transferred to the victorious powers, while a heavy tribute was imposed on what remained of Germany’s national product. At the same time, millions of German workers were conscripted into forced labour by the Allies.

Over this programme of naked plunder was draped the myth of the ‘collective guilt’ of the German people for the crimes of Nazism. Allied occupation forces unleashed a massive propaganda campaign throughout Germany, which included posters featuring images of concentration camps with the slogan, “These atrocities: Your fault!”

Spontaneous initiatives of the German working class erupted as the iron heel of fascism was lifted. These were immediately suppressed by the Allied occupation forces, with the support of the Social Democratic and Stalinist leaders. 

A still from Germany, Year Zero / Image: public domain

Meanwhile in the Western-occupied zones, the big capitalists who had collaborated with the Nazi regime not only remained at liberty but even retained their property, while card-carrying Nazi officials filled what would become the West German state. By 1957, 77 percent of senior officials in the West German justice ministry were former Nazis; a higher proportion than under the Third Reich itself!

Germany’s ‘national shame’ was therefore nothing other than the transference of the guilt of the ruling class onto the shoulders of millions of working-class men, women and children, who in 1947 were gripped by hunger, homelessness and insecurity.

The suffering of a defeated and humiliated people is shown starkly in Germany, Year Zero, through the tragic story of a Berlin family’s struggle to survive amid the ruins of their city. As it was shot on site less than three years after the Red Army captured Berlin, the vision of decimation in the film is entirely real. Berlin is strewn with literal hills of rubble, and every building seems to be a wreck.

The film starts with a discussion amongst workers as to which section of the city, American, British, French or Soviet, has the most food. There are rumours there is jam in the Soviet sector. What are these workers doing as they discuss? They are digging graves; we can only assume to be filled with the mountains of corpses from the war.

The main character Edmund, a boy of around 12 years old, is thrown off this grave-digging work for being too young and weak. He was played not by a professional actor but by a Berliner Rossellini found at a circus. 

Desperate times

Edmund’s family is desperate. There is a great deal of anguished discussion amongst them as to how they can get more food. 

The eldest son is in turmoil due to his past and has not claimed his ration card for this reason, as he would have to register. His sister, who insists he do so for the sake of the family, tells him: “that was a war, you were doing your duty as a soldier”. But he fears the denazification campaign will target him, as his unit fought to the last. Consequently, he is just another mouth to feed, a burden on the family. 

This character’s predicament encapsulates the mood of this film, so different to Rome, Open City. In Italy, although the country was poor at the end of the war, people had fought a victorious struggle against fascism. But for Edmund’s brother in Germany, the end of the war is not felt as a liberation; he cannot embrace the new period of peace. He is stuck in the shadow of the war, because he was a participant in the crimes of the defeated party. This despondent atmosphere pervades the film.

All of the pressure on this family falls onto young Edmund’s shoulders. The family sends him out to wander the streets hawking whatever remaining possessions they have for a few marks. He is told to get at least 300 marks for the family’s scales. But he is easily swindled by a much older man who takes advantage of this child’s ignorance and naivety, and then gets into a smart looking car. In these desperate times, the strong get stronger and the weak weaker.

Edmund then runs into a deeply creepy man, Herr Henning, who takes the exploitation of this child further. He lures Edmund in by pretending to be his friend, stroking and squeezing the poor boy as he tells him he is no longer employed as a teacher as “the authorities and I didn’t see eye to eye”. 

It turns out he was, and is, a Nazi. He chats to a man shovelling rubble, who complains that this is “slave work”, saying that “before, we were still men. National Socialists. Now we’re just Nazis”, to the agreement of Henning. 

Unlike Rome, Open City’s optimism of the collective struggle for a great cause, Germany, Year Zero is unrelentingly bleak. 

The atmosphere throughout the film is one of survival of the fittest, the devil take the hindmost. Indeed, one character says that “I don’t believe in help from strangers. Everyone has to help themselves these days”. 

Everyone is ripping everyone else off, and the language is offensive and crude: a girl is described by a boy as “a mattress that dispenses cigarettes”. This is summed up by the exploitative Herr Henning, who tells Edmund that “One must have the courage to let the weak die”, with tragic and horrifying consequences.

A still from Germany, Year Zero / Image: public domain

Such levels of desperation eventually caused concerns for the imperialists themselves. It was feared that if the situation were to continue, Western-occupied Germany would fall to the Soviet Union, followed by the rest of Europe. Therefore, in April 1948, shortly before the release of Germany, Year Zero, President Truman signed the ‘Marshall Plan’ into law, which totally reversed Allied policy in relation to occupied Germany, committing billions in aid to help rebuild its economy.

Rossellini’s film therefore captures an important turning point in history, between the end of one world order and the beginning of a new, with all the hypocrisy and brutality of imperialism on full display.

The Third Man

The Third Man, shot in 1948 and released in 1949, is often cited as the greatest British film ever made. Set in gritty postwar Vienna, it was written by the celebrated novelist Graham Greene, and directed by Carol Reed. 

Although it is not strictly considered a ‘neorealist’ film, it is safe to say that the film would not exist, at least in the form it does, if it were not for Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. The film inspired The Third Man’s producer Alexander Korda, who explained, “Location shooting, the use of non-professional actors and a harnessing of Rome’s organic rhythms had given Italian films an immediacy and honest personality.” As such, he sent Greene on a trip to Vienna and Rome for research in February 1948. 

The cynical, depressed and opportunistic mood of Germany, Year Zero is perhaps even clearer in Carol Reed’s postwar classic. Less like a documentary and more stylised, it still feels like a truthful window into a forgotten time, being filmed as it was in Vienna in 1948.

After the war, Vienna was occupied by the ‘Allies’ much like Berlin, but only up until 1955. The US did a deal with the Austrian ruling class to present the country as the first victims of the Nazis. But the atmosphere of The Third Man gives the lie to that, for the Austrians hardly seem to feel liberated and grateful, but instead seem resentful, traumatised and suspicious. 

At one point, the owner of an apartment that is being searched by British authorities shouts at them in German. When asked what she is saying, an Austrian character says: “She’s only complaining about the way they behave in her house”. 

That seems to sum up the whole story: the defeated and impoverished Austrians must endure the humiliation of rude and exploitative foreigners ‘in their house’.

The film opens with a narration by the director, who sets the story up: 

“I never knew Vienna before the war, with its easy charm and glamour. I got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We’d run anything if people wanted enough and had money to pay.” 

Like Berlin at the time, Vienna is depicted as strewn with rubble and ruined grand buildings. 

US theatrical poster for The Third Man / Image: public domain

There were acute food shortages. Potato harvests in 1947 (one year before the film was shot) were below 30% of pre-war levels, and the government was unable to distribute food rations. There were many food riots and strikes. America started supplying emergency food aid for fear the shortages could see the country fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. When these were withdrawn in 1950, a series of general strikes shook the country.

Capitalists who had collaborated with the Nazis fled, abandoning their factories. Indeed, up until about 1950, many of the factories in Austria were actually rebuilt and operated under workers’ control. 

The CIA coordinated the right wing of the Austrian trade unions, who ensured that the 1950 general strike wave went down to defeat. In the aftermath of this defeat, the CIA organised hooligans to break up the workers’ control of the factories, which were then returned to the hands of capitalists. The revolutionary potential of this postwar situation was snuffed out.

This was also before the Cold War had really begun. There was enormous uncertainty in Austria as to where society was going. Who would be the master: the workers or the capitalists? Which power would decide Austria’s fate: the USA or the USSR?

As well as this, there was a programme of denazification, although this was cut short by the establishment of the myth that Austrians were the first victims of the Nazis. A huge layer of the Austrian bourgeoisie had a past they would rather forget, and were not sure exactly how their past crimes, or association with crimes, would be treated if they were found out. Even swathes of small business owners had acquired their property through Nazi-sponsored robbery, because their businesses had been owned by Jews. Such people were unsure if they would get to keep this property that was gained in such a fashion.

For all these reasons, there was a prevailing atmosphere of cynicism, deceit and opportunism. The general tendency was to be prepared to adapt to whatever the situation turned out to be.

Shady

This is the perfect setting for a ‘noir’ mystery, which is exactly what The Third Man is. The plot is that an American man, Holly Martins, comes to Vienna after being promised work by his friend, Harry Limes, who has moved there. Upon arrival, however, he finds his friend has died in a traffic accident.

A number of details of this accident seem rather strange, and so Holly decides to stay and conduct his own investigation. It is suspicious how many people who were associates of Harry seem to have been witnesses to the accident. Two of these associates were also on hand to immediately carry Harry’s body away, which is odd. Worse still, different people give him different accounts of how he died – some say instantaneously, others say he spoke to them for a while afterwards. And some tell him that there was a mysterious ‘third man’ involved in carrying the body away.

A British police chief then shatters Holly’s perception of his friend by insisting he was a notorious racketeer. His racket was to steal penicillin, which was in desperately short supply, adulterate it with other substances, and sell it back to those in need. This led to many deaths, especially of children.

Still from The Third Man / Image: public domain

This is not just emblematic of the general poverty and acute shortages faced by Austrians after the war. More or less exactly this sort of thing happened. 

Penicillin was developed by the Americans in the war and so they did indeed have control over Austria’s supply of the drug. In 1946, America gave Austria access to it, but only enough for twenty patients! According to Susanne Krejsa MacManus, “the black market flourished. Newspapers from the years 1945 to 1949 reported thefts from American hospitals, counterfeiting, dilution with even dangerous substances and blackmail.” Single bottles of it went for $10,000.

It is very interesting that the sinister antagonist in charge of a black-market swindle is cast as an American, and not an Austrian, German or Russian. The implication is that the new occupiers and masters of Europe are not really liberators at all, but capitalist crooks playing with the fate of a Europe that was on its knees.

The mystery of Harry Limes’ death can also be seen as suggesting something not to be trusted about the apparent annihilation of Nazism at the hands of the US. Their denazification programme did indeed turn out to be very limited, as the US decided it needed to incorporate Nazi bureaucrats and generals into the state as a bulwark against communism. 

The film asks: what really happened to the sinister Harry Limes and his pernicious racket, just as we might ask: where did these former Nazis and their ill-gotten gains really go?

The cinematographer, Robert Krasker, masterfully uses the dramatic shadows cast by night-time street lamps to emphasise this sense of shadiness, of things hidden, and perhaps to imply the uncertainty and cynical amorality of key characters. This is especially striking during a couple of chase sequences, in which the antagonists cannot be seen save for their enormous, looming shadows cast onto walls in the style of Murnau’s famous vampire-horror Nosferatu (1922).

The chase sequence ends up in Vienna’s cavernous sewers, or ‘cholera canals’, built in the 1830s. Here, no one can be sure where they are going, whether or not they are still on the chase, or have lost their man to one of the sewers’ many, many alcoves. 

A glimpse of real history

These wonderful films capture the contradictory sides of a decisive but largely forgotten moment in European history. 

What these films show a glimpse of is that (in the case of Rome, Open City) the Nazis were successfully fought by partisans and ordinary people, many of whom were communists, and who had the potential to turn the defeat of the Nazis into an almighty revolution that abolished capitalism across Europe. 

They also show us the near total destruction that Hitler and the German ruling class had brought Germany and Austria to, and suggest that American imperialism’s newfound domination of Western Europe had nothing to do with freedom, but was instead a means to the US domination of the world market.

Films with this degree of realism and connection to titanic historic events are simply not made these days. Very few, if any, films today depict the struggles and organisation of ordinary working-class people like Rossellini’s neorealist masterpieces do. 

Europe, however, stands on the edge of a new revolutionary crisis. Its governments and parties are despised, and yet more austerity is called for. A new generation is without a voice. It will find one in the course of the revolutionary events that impend, and with that, a new generation of bold filmmakers will emerge.