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This chapter revisits Italy and turns to Dante on screen. It considers the role of early Italian cinema, giving particular attention to the cultural and political contexts of the 1911 Milano-Films Inferno — a project that took shape during a decade which also saw significant developments in Italian nationalism before the country's entry into the First World War.

This chapter examines the historical connections between the rise of the documentary in the 1920s–30s; its reception in Italy, and its effects on both critical discourse and filmmaking practices; and the formation of neorealism. It first looks at the ideological and political implications of the post-facto narrative of the genesis of neorealism as a way of re-creating a nationalist historiography of cinema. The chapter then determines the alternative genealogies of neorealism by reconstructing the historical connections between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking in Italy in the 1930s; the emergence of Italian documentary filmmaking and the Istituto LUCE; and the larger international history of prewar documentary cinema and its impact on the stylistic changes in fiction films of that period.

This chapter examines the ways in which Italian cinema was promoted to American audiences. The advertising rhetoric of postwar Italian cinema was anchored by two seemingly contradictory poles: One emphasized critical merit and aesthetic qualities, the other relied on verbal suggestions and visual intimations of more sordid cinematic content. Each ad depended on the newspaper or magazine in which it was published as much as on the specific character of the theater at which the films were screened.

This chapter explores how neorealism viewed race in Italy’s past and present. The rise of Italian neorealism is linked to the self-serving mythology of the Italian as victim rather than perpetrator of World War II. Italian neorealism mostly forgot more than just Italian anti-Semitism: the neorealist mythopoesis also erases the Italian colonialist past, which a new generation of historians are currently unearthing in all its bloody details.

This chapter explores the relationship between the conceptual framework of the early Soviet avant-garde (of which cinema formed a vital part) and that of neorealism, bringing out the moments of concrete mediation in the dialectical relationship between avant-garde and realism in cinematic history. It presents a broad outline of the dissemination of early Soviet film theory in 1930s–40s Italy (a period encompassing the rise and fall of fascism) and shows how this dissemination helped initiate the formulation of the neorealist discourse. The chapter points to the presence of Italian neorealism in the Soviet cinema of the postwar and post-Stalin period, suggesting aesthetic interdependence between the Cinema of the Thaw in the Soviet Union and Italian neorealism.

For a long time, television was blamed for weakening the Italian cinema and reducing it to a very limited part in public entertainment. According to an Order in Council of 1947, radio, and later television, broadcasting was a State service entrusted to a public company submitted to parliamentary control. When Radiotelevisione Italiana began its television broadcasting, on 3 January 1954, Italian cinema was in its heyday. Many assumed, at the time, that once they would be offered pictures at home, people would have no reason to go out, so that cinema attendance would soon decline. However, with the passing of time, the evolution of both media was not so straightforward; they were in competition but, at the same time, complemented and influenced each other. Opinions about the impact of television on cinema changed during the second half of the twentieth century. Today, when new means of communication, more flexible and interactive, are appealing to a wide public, they can and must be defended from the point of view that a close collaboration is their only chance to survive.

This chapter identifies the elements of formal, filmic, representational, or linguistic continuity between fascism and the post-World War II period in Italy. It discusses the new interpretation of fascist cinema that began in the middle of the 1970s; the beginnings of De Sica’s neorealism; and the broader cultural climate of the 1930s that reflected the poetics of neorealism.

This chapter examines Dunham’s work on Botta e risposta (1950) and Mambo (1954) to highlight the substantial creative freedom that midcentury European cinema granted to a Black woman choreographer. The Dunham company’s portrayal in these films suggests that her troupe’s fame in postwar Europe was filtered through the same crude ideas about Black cultures that informed Baker’s career. And yet within such a framework, Dunham was afforded authorial control over her dance scenes to an extent not possible in Hollywood and, like Baker, used these scenes to present a culturally complex vision of Black womanhood that countered racist misconceptions. The chapter establishes Dunham as a coauthor of Mambo by showing that her choreography is central to its artistic vision.

This chapter set the stage for an exploration of contemporary French-language European road movies by tracing the interwoven lines of the tradition in its American and European iterations back to the 1960s, the period during which the template for contemporary road cinema crystalized. It argues that the contours of the road movie tradition are not strictly the product of a direct lineage from seminal American films from the late 1960s, such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969, USA), but the result of complex transnational interactions within European cinemas and between European and American cultures. The films covered are Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962, Italy), Le corniaud/The Sucker (Gérard Oury, 1965, France/Italy) Les petits matins/Hitch-Hike (Jacqueline Audry, 1962, France), Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1977, West Germany), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (Aki Kaurismäki,1989, Finland/Sweden) and Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994, Germany/Portugal).

This chapter explores the similarities and differences between Iranian neorealism and its Italian progenitor. It shows that Iranian-style neorealism has not been homogenous, exhibiting itself in two different styles under two different political systems, and that it has been neither a fully formed film school nor a movement, but a moment of convergence in the social history of cinema.

This chapter examines Western tropes in Italian cinema's ‘neorealist’ phase. Taking as key case studies In the Name of the Law (In nome della legge, Pietro Germi, 1949) and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo (Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, Pietro Germi, 1952), it explores the complex ways in which Germi worked references to American genres into his work, thereby debunking approaches presupposing an Italian neorealism separated from ‘popular’ cinema, and demonstrating an oft-overlooked precursor to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying in Germi's two films a representational equivalence between the Italian South and the American West, the chapter charts a lineage of tales of banditry that blended the international and the local.

This chapter explores the conversion of Rome’s Cinecittà film studios into a refugee camp in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It argues that as one recognizes its material and historical vicissitudes, its true magnitude, the duration of its existence, and the broader social and political forces that governed its development, the camp emerges as a hidden, obverse figure of neorealism. Archival documents and images, and the gaps that still plague the history of the camp, join in a description of the overlapping uses and meanings, the physical and figurative implications, of a uniquely warped space, at once actual and phantasmatic, allegorical and cinematic.

This chapter explores the postwar film work of James Agee, Helen Levitt, and Sidney Meyers, which can be seen as a possible response to Italian neorealism outside of mainstream American cinema. Agee, who wrote the first prominent critiques of neorealist films in the United States, was involved in two independent nonfiction film projects, The Quiet One and In the Street, both of which were released in 1948. His participation in these two productions came about through his friendship with the photographer Helen Levitt, and Janice Loeb, a painter of private means who, according to some accounts, financed the making of both works. Loeb produced The Quiet One and brought on Meyers as director.

This chapter traces the cinematic fortunes of the Esposizione Universale Romana (EUR) suburb of Rome, a neighborhood originally designed by the fascist regime to host the World’s Fair of 1942 that never took place. It examines the responses to EUR registered in the cinematic and architectural cultures of postwar Italy of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In a historical era characterized by the pressing concerns of massive migration to cities, debates around urban planning, housing shortages, and the accelerated production of housing, this newly and extravagantly urbanized area of Rome became a visual trope in postwar Italian culture and cinema. Functioning as more than mere location (or setting), EUR served as a historical marker for a shift, or series of shifts, in Italian culture. More precisely, it acted as the medium through which Italian cinema historicized itself in relation to the past. EUR acted as both material embodiment and symbol, something compulsively deployed or assimilated in the variety of responses to the vertiginous acceleration of Italian postwar modernity.

This chapter centers on Glauber Rocha’s Claro (1975). Shot in Rome during the director’s exile from Brazil, Claro aspires, like Salò, to the condition of “ritual fact.” Like Pasolini, Rocha asks viewers to repeat the past in the interest of working through it. In order to displace “democratic imperialism,” Claro teaches, we must first return to the dead center of empire and instruction. That is, we must return to—in order to reckon with—Rome. In this way, Rocha revises his own early liberationist position and offers a corrective or key supplement to the more familiar understandings of education and emancipation found in the progressive educational writings of Paulo Freire. In Claro, Rocha makes the surprising case for an anticolonial old school. With onscreen history lessons, voiceover lectures, actors’ rote movements, and the camera’s pans, which compel returns, Claro turns its own opacity to pedagogical profit. The film complicates, rather than clarifies, easier narratives that treat emancipation as a matter of linear progress. But at the same time Rocha insists that a return to the past can enable, rather than thwart, radical change, even revolution.