Italian Neorealism

In 1945 the Cinecittà studios housed refugees, film stock was short, and Rossellini shot in a barely liberated Rome with whatever he could find. From that poverty came a method: the street instead of the set, non-professional actors, tiny stories that tell a whole country. A workman spends an entire film looking for the bicycle without which he will lose his job, Sicilian fishermen go into debt to buy their own boat, rice weeders exhaust themselves in the paddies. World cinema kept the lesson.

works 6

• CinemaRome, Open CityRoma città apertaRoberto Rossellini · 1945In occupied Rome, a hunted resistance fighter, a parish priest and a neighbour shelter one another.Cinema
• CinemaBicycle ThievesLadri di bicicletteVittorio De Sica · 1948In postwar Rome, a father loses the bicycle on which his new job depends.Cinema
• CinemaLa terra tremaLuchino Visconti · 1948A family of Sicilian fishermen tries to escape the wholesalers who take their catch from them.Cinema
• CinemaBitter RiceRiso amaroGiuseppe de Santis · 1949Seasonal workers transplant rice in the Po plain, and two thieves on the run mingle with them.Cinema
• CinemaThe Path of HopeIl cammino della speranzaPietro Germi · 1950After the mine closes, a village in Sicily takes the road north without papers.Cinema
• CinemaLa StradaFederico Fellini · 1954A poor young girl takes to the road with the man to whom her mother has given her up.Cinema