Chasing the Real: Italian Neorealism
The film movement that changed cinema forever, and which today still hails the thrill of freedom.
One of the most significant post-war developments in cinema, Italian neorealism rejected traditional cinematic canons. It came to exist out of a moral necessity, following the urgency, as Cesare Zavattini, one of the movement’s architects, put it, to ‘find the hidden drama in everyday life’. When the subject of art becomes ordinary life, reality becomes spectacle. Our BFI Player collection, accompanying a two-month BFI Southbank season, features the different formal approaches taken by major directors who made reality such a spectacle. This decisive decade is ripe for rediscovery; it’s been 80 years since Rossellini started work on Rome, Open City and 70 years since the ‘official’ end of the movement, yet it remains relevant to our current times in its ability to teach us the importance of freedom and to reinforce our capacity for compassion.Giulia Saccogna, season curator
