Bazin’s Fables, Deleuze’s Samples

Neither Bazin nor Deleuze considered neorealism to be a monolithic phenomenon. Yet in writing about, respectively, the Italian school of the liberation and the cinema of liberated senses, Bazin and Deleuze alike contributed to cementing neorealism as the crucial turning point in the history of world cinemas—the moment where the medium’s specificity finally manifests itself at the movies.4 The subsequent global appreciation of postwar Italian auteurs, in turn, has made it basically impossible to engage with Italian cinema without taking Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) or Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) as obligatory points of reference. The problem is that when neorealism rises to the status of “via maestra of Italian film,” as happens in the book by Millicent Marcus that coalesced Italian film studies into an academic area in the United States in the 1980s, one cannot but articulate normative accounts of the country’s cinema, accounts that reduce everything to anticipations, returns, or betrayals of Rossellini’s or De Sica’s aesthetics.5

In order to overcome the situation caused by viewing Italian film history in the light of neorealism, Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe proposed shunning neorealism and auteur cinema, so to redirect critical attention to the much-overlooked and often-vilified national commercial production.6 However, while a reassessment of the politics and history of Italian genre fiction is indeed crucial, by simply ignoring neorealism one eschews the opportunity to upset the categories grounding other areas of inquiry, like the geopolitical area “Italy,” or the disciplinary area “Italian film studies,” or even, more fundamentally, the area of cinema studies itself, given the role that neorealism has played in defining what cinema is.

To effect a more radical reassessment of what Italy and cinema are, rather than forgetting neorealism, it might be therefore useful to deconstruct it—to simultaneously put pressure on this category and account for its success. Accordingly, I want to try to understand what, if anything, is this “neorealism” that Deleuze and Bazin so enthusiastically reviewed, before speculating on why we keep falling for engagements with national film that are as imprecise as they are influential. In fact, notwithstanding the radically different philosophical traditions they belong to—put simply, Christian humanism versus Nietzschean post-structuralism—Bazin and Deleuze approach their archives in a quite similar manner: it is by purging all traditional aspects from the corpus of postwar Italian cinema and telling tales about actual Italian films that they can turn Rossellini and De Sica into the heralds of a post-totalitarian redemption of cinema. As far as Bazin is concerned, the mythical foundations of his whole film theory become evident when one ponders the organic link that his 1948 essay “An Aesthetic of Reality” draws between the new Italian cinematic realism and the old realist films made under the regime.

To refute the impression that De Sica’s and Rossellini’s masterpieces miraculously emerged from the rotten corpse of Fascism, Bazin argues that the Italian school of the liberation was anticipated by preliberation realist films by Alessandro Blasetti, Rossellini, De Robertis, and Mario Camerini. Bazin assures his readers that Italian cinema in the 1930s had moved beyond the silent monumentality of Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913) and Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), films whose complicity with nationalist and imperialist agendas was apparent. He also affirms that Blasetti’s fantasy film La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), with its affected rhetoric, tasteless decor, reliance on celebrities, conventional scenario, and disregard for naturalistic acting, did not represent the true “characteristics of films made beyond the Alps.”7 To find authentic Italian cinema, a cinema that stayed true to Italy’s core character, one has to move away from studios and sets.

In Cinecittà, escapism and propaganda ruled. Outside the fascist-founded studios, however, in Bazin’s account, directors were shooting without following strict scripts and thus capturing life as it unfolded in front of the camera and not through the mediation of political preconceptions or an a priori thesis. It is on the basis of these imprecise insights that Bazin praises Camerini, De Robertis, and Blasetti’s films I have discussed in this book. Since (again according to Bazin) they were to a large extent improvised and shot on location—in the streets and on the sea—for Bazin these films freed themselves from the fascist gaze, starting to move closer to reality and truth. This characteristically Italian interest in reality that already manifested with Blasetti, Rossellini, and Camerini under Mussolini sprouted after the regime’s demise. As a matter of fact, in “An Aesthetic of Reality,” neorealism stands out as the blooming of cinematic practices already present at the margins of the fascist film industry. Until Italy’s entry into World War II, realist films were “modest violets flowering at the feet of the grand sequoias” of the cultural industry.8 Then, as the resistance to Nazi Fascism grew and the regime’s forest of lies burned down, accurate chronicles of national life started blossoming across Italy. The liberation further nourished this Italian aesthetic of reality, and finally allowed the cinematographic apparatus to fully develop its potential and specificity as a medium. At that point, De Sica’s and Rossellini’s liberated cinema flowered, changing film forever.

Bazin’s history of Italian film might appear straightforward, but with its flurry of naturalistic metaphors it conceals important theoretical moves. Not only does Bazin craft a normative outlook on Italian film by claiming that realism is its defining trait. He also imbues what he considers proper Italian cinema with a necessary progressive dimension. In fact, Bazin insists that the choice to privilege improvisation, location shooting, nonprofessional actors, and long takes allows the camera to rid itself of the studio system’s ideological scripts and, as a result, attain a higher degree of authenticity and proximity to the real. He then posits that the realist impulse informing such a typically Italian zero-degree style is incompatible with capitalist or political idiocies (bêtises), sanctioning it as a refuge of culture and intelligence that stands strong against the compromised vision dominating commercial cinema. Such an enticing proposal regarding the revolutionary ethics of new and old Italian realisms and the essence of national cinema hinges on a very dubious claim: that when it comes to Italy, the move away from studios and toward reality, to use Bazin’s terminology, has historically favored modes of behavior and forms of identification that are incompatible with capitalist violence and political oppression. This conclusion is untenable. “An Aesthetic of Reality”—which is possibly the most consequential intervention in the history of neorealism specifically and film criticism more broadly—misses completely how Blasetti’s and Camerini’s social realism, or De Robertis’s and Rossellini’s racial melodramas, were unquestionably complicit with the regime’s biopolitical efforts and perfectly in sync with Mussolini’s projects of internal colonization and external colonialism.

Bazin’s misreading of Italian film history is so egregious that it appears more than a mere blunder. It is instead a constitutive blindness that is paramount for the system of insight Bazin sets up. It is as if Bazin cannot even contemplate the existence of a fascist realist cinema because its very existence would challenge the terms of his whole ontology of cinema. Both Bazin’s Manichean dismissal of genre fiction and his insistence on realism as an antitotalitarian cinematic mode become untenable once one acknowledges that the audiovisual forms and narrative strategies characteristic of liberated Italy had earlier contributed to the making of the Blackshirt race.9

However, it is not quite simply a matter of reckoning—speculatively and historically—with the role of old Italian realism in Mussolini’s racialized identity politics, of reconsidering the politics of genre fiction, and of correcting Bazin accordingly. As soon as elements of continuity between neorealist aesthetic and fascist cinema become apparent, additional cracks appear in Bazin’s framework. In this regard, Christopher Wagstaff and Karl Schoonover further challenge Bazin’s mythicization of neorealism by signaling that the new Italian realism itself is less progressive (Schoonover) and unscripted (Wagstaff) than Bazin posited. Although they engage with Bazin from very different angles and with very different methodologies, Schoonover and Wagstaff reach a similar conclusion: Bazin can transform postwar Italian film into a revolution of cinema; he can invent what Wagstaff dubs the “institution of neorealism” only through a very partial account of the works he analyzes.10 There is a strategic forgetting of the realities of Italian cinema at play in the foundational “An Aesthetic of Reality,” and a similar form of selective memory in Deleuze’s authoritative treatment of neorealism.

For Cesare Casarino, Deleuze convincingly identified neorealism as a cinema of absence and potentiality:

whereas the primary political import of pre-war cinema consisted in the presence of the people . . . the political import of post-war cinema lies precisely in drawing attention to the conspicuous absence of the people, in knowing how to show that the people are what is missing.11

Yet, as Jacques Rancière and Alessia Ricciardi emphasize, the films associated with neorealism carried out a more complex operation.12 Cinema, once again, highlighted the absence of a united Italian people; it insisted on differences, fractures, and friction in the nation’s body. At the same time, it also tried to affectively gather the population together by providing a lost country with a new sense of belonging and identity, of position in history and the world after the end of Nazi Fascism. Do Roma città aperta and Ladri di biciclette exhibit a historical incapacity to act, or are they instead slow explorations of how Italians should dwell in the new historical reality that the Allies were busy assembling? Do these films witness the liberation of sense organs from sensory–motor reflex arcs or do they engender appropriate ways of reacting to the new world order: the world order of American hegemony, opposing blocs, post-racial racism, neocolonialism and neocapitalism, geopolitical areas and area studies?

Rancière and Ricciardi do not contest the presence of idleness (“time-images,” in Deleuze’s terms) in Roma città aperta or in other postwar Italian films. They do insist, however, that Deleuze neglects the interplay of these speculative moments with bursts of action, resoluteness, decisiveness, and motion. On the one hand, Deleuze brilliantly illuminates certain specific sequences that, with their “hieratic slowness” and uneventful episodic meandering, prompt the pensive spectator to linger on the very act of seeing.13 On the other hand, the sequences that Deleuze discusses do not exist in isolation. One can fully appreciate what these moments accomplish, how they affect bodies and brains, only by treating them as components of the larger textual machines of which they are a part. Instead, Deleuze samples a few scenes from each film and then reedits them into his own director’s cut of world cinema history. In a sense, Deleuze’s Cinema volumes are extraordinary works of montage, where a continuous metonymic displacement presents particular objets petit a as representative of the whole.

This very technique of sampling is what allows Deleuze to limn a neorealist canon identified by five distinctive features (dispersive situation, weak narrative links, voyage form, consciousness of clichés, and condemnation of a plot).14 The very use of isolated images and moments as emblematic metonymies is also what causes Deleuze to lose sight of the films he discusses. A woman’s hand on her pregnant belly stands for De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952). A carnival party stands for Federico Fellini’s I vitelloni (The Bullocks, 1953). The arrival of Rocco’s family in Milan stands for Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). Only through a generalized forgetting of the bigger picture, so to speak, can Deleuze conclude that neorealism’s innovation consists in the transformation of film characters into wanderers and seers who are more committed to studying the world than acting in it. After all, postwar Italian films’ balades (strolls) do lead somewhere. No matter how slowly they unfold, how dispersive the reality they mirror, how trivial their scripts, or how reflexive they are, the films that Deleuze samples do not merely register unprecedented audiovisual situations. They also model specific forms of living and particular patterns of behavior within the context of a history that is still the history of racial capitalism. In the final instance, then, by rewriting Italian films, Deleuze also rewrites the basic social function of the cinematographic apparatus in the wake of World War II, remediating it from a weapon of social reproduction and geopolitical governmentality into the first new technology of a liberated form of human life.

To tell the fable of cinema’s evolution from realist aspiration to revolutionary humanism, Bazin represses the generic aspects of Rossellini’s and De Sica’s works. In order to stage neorealism as the event ripening cinema’s speculative potential, Deleuze occludes the force with which Pina (Anna Magnani) from Roma città aperta and other famous characters from post-Mussolini Italian cinema respond and react to the realities they confront. Bazin feared that traditional narrative techniques would prevent cinema from achieving the phenomenological dream of a pure rendering of all of reality’s ambiguities. To preserve the very myth of a total cinema he elsewhere mocked, he erased from the filmic corpus of De Sica and Rossellini every stain of conventionality and directorial manipulation.15 Deleuze displayed a similar mistrust of classic narrative economy—which he considered inducing naturalized behaviors—and forced Italian auteurs to stand for the possibility of a modernist cinema that evaded truisms about the world and scrutinized all commonplaces about it. There is a common anxiety about cinematographic writing, about storytelling, at the center of Bazin’s and Deleuze’s understanding of post-fascist Italian films. Surprisingly enough, Cesare Zavattini, the author of so many neorealist scenarios, expressed a similar suspicion of plot.

By 1952, critics were claiming that neorealism had exhausted its energies. When interviewed on the matter, though, Zavattini provided a different account of its life cycle: neorealism was not dead; it had never been born. Even the presumed strongholds of neorealism were in fact insufficiently neorealist because these films still relied on plots to communicate the large or small facts of everyday life.16 Neorealist directors knew all too well that life could not be captured through artifice and that cinema’s business was not to tell stories, to peddle fictions. Accordingly, they had explored strategies to allow life to expose itself, unmediated, to the camera. Alas, for Zavattini, no one had yet succeeded in such an enterprise. Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti had started the battle to capture reality, and now there was an army of directors behind them ready to go on the attack and win the neorealist war. The victory, however, would not bring about a liberation of cinema but rather a liberation from cinema. For Zavattini, the birth of neorealism proper would imply the elimination of film as we know it: directors, producers, screenwriters, actors—all these roles had to be renounced. Thus, to achieve neorealism, to translate neorealism from manifestos to reels, one would have to reject the cinematic apparatus altogether.

Even Bazin was aware that the birth of neorealism would entail the death of film. Believing he had found neorealism in Ladri di biciclette, he commented: “No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”17 But in later writing, he retraced his steps and admitted to making “some rather naïve statements in the past.”18 Bazin, in the end, cannot but concede that even in De Sica one can only find glimpses of what neorealism might be—two or three sequences that in Umberto D. bear witness to a cinema that has renounced fiction.19 Neorealism begins when plot ends: Bazin, Zavattini, and Deleuze would agree on this. Only beyond the threshold of subjective mediation do authentic cinema and realism become possible. Such a crossing—unrealistic as it is—remains a categorical imperative, the urgency that forces theories of neorealism to speak in the future tense.

In Bazin, such a futurity takes the geometrical shape of an asymptote, the curve that approaches another line without ever connecting with it. To achieve realism, Bazin writes in 1952, one must strive to make cinema the asymptote of reality, “in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry.”20 By acknowledging that cinema can only approach reality, without ever being able to touch it, Bazin also admits that realism is only an aspiration, cinema’s persistent dream. But if integral realism is always “to come,” then it becomes difficult to pin down precise criteria through which one could discriminate between faithful and unfaithful captures of reality onscreen, objective and partisan takes on the world, works moved by a humanist impulse, and films informed by political motivations—neorealist and non-neorealist movies.21

But “An Aesthetic of Reality” already showed signs of Bazin’s own hesitations in regard to the actual import and existence of a neorealist ethico-aesthetic revolution. Consider the fraught reading that Bazin’s 1948 essay offers of Paisà (Paisan, 1946). In the body of the text, Bazin treats Rossellini’s film as the gold standard of neorealist cinema, excavating its secrets and mining from it the norms of authentic Italian national film. At the same time, in a note, Bazin acknowledges that there are demi-mensonges (half lies) in Rossellini and that Paisà is not an unadulterated account of social reality. It would not be silly (dupe), Bazin suggests, to detect in the film a pro-American stance and an a priori take on the real.22 Yet, after this concession, after admitting there are fictions and politics in Paisà, after admitting the film is not an objective chronicle but an ideological script, Bazin somehow goes on to argue that Paisà is still more “sociological” than “political,” that is, an objective work rather than a partisan intervention, insofar as Rossellini’s film is more concerned with capturing reality as is than with imposing a particular meaning on it.

Notwithstanding this convoluted attempt to save his own take on Paisà and consequently his whole film theory, Bazin cannot hide that—as in Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore—as long as human hands control the movie camera, film will be a human, and thus imperfect, partial, political, interested, “fictional” representation of reality.23 Only a redeemed humanity that has rejected all prejudices, biases, divisions, stereotypes, and subject positions will be able to invent a cinema that is true to its originating dream and finally mirrors life as it is, without telling stories about it. Yet even Bazin knows that such a liberation of the human race will not be possible while human beings remain under the yoke of capitalist political economy. So long as we are capitalist subjects, that is, bodies subjected to racialized biopolitics and racial imaginaries, neorealism as such cannot exist; it can only remain a fiction.

In Deleuze, there are no traces of the Christian overtones informing Bazin’s longing for a pure humanity and pure images. Nevertheless, in his treatment of neorealism one can still hear the ring of futurity. It is true that Deleuze presents his take on postwar Italian cinema as a radical displacement of “An Aesthetic of Reality” four decades after its publication. Yet it is also true that Deleuze radicalizes Bazin’s film fables, emphasizing the lack of preexisting schemas through which neorealism approaches reality and evoking the specific cinematic intelligence of the people behind this new stage in the history of human imagination. As a matter of fact, Deleuze’s Cinema volumes offer not only a taxonomy of different species of images; they also propose an axiology of life marked by a specific evolutionary progression, an asynchronous and yet progressive history in which neorealism attests to the human brain’s unbound potential for speculation.

We have seen that for Deleuze certain images are closer to speculation than other film forms; they are more just, more thought-provoking, more philosophical, and have more intellectual value. Instead of making spectators jump to conclusions and leap into action, some images lead people to pause and reflect. Since these smarter images are, for Deleuze, organically connected to the geohistorical milieux from which they originate, their differential complexity and reflectivity also manifest something about the community that generated them. The modes of the imaginary, in other words, can be brought back to the plane of effective history and used to profile its protagonists. It is the thoughtfulness of different historical forms of life that Deleuze’s volumes thus end up classifying, using film forms as the markers to assess each of them.24 But if this is true, what are the features of the people responsible for neorealism’s speculative images?

Deleuze posits that the time-image emanates from bodies that ponder the world rather than automatically reacting to it on the basis of hegemonic clichés or established habits. Hence, a purely speculative film could be realized only by a life absolutely idle and autonomous, by an existence freed from the ideologies and behavioral patterns imposed by the needs of economic production and social reproduction. It is for this precise reason that Deleuze cannot help but connect neorealism with a science-fiction imaginary that takes us beyond the horizon of labor and the universe of racial capitalism. Deleuze’s discussion of the time-image begins with a pregnant Italian maid working in a Rome apartment and ends with a white American interplanetary traveler whose only occupation is watching himself eating, dying, and being reborn as a star child. This child is naked; it could not have been otherwise, since this new white life has been liberated from any habitus whatsoever. In order for neorealism to be a cinema of time-images, the white people who were responsible for it ought to be as bare and idle as the absolute life born at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In the last scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film on the origins and ends of white humanity (notably, there are no Black characters in this journey), “the sphere of the fetus and the sphere of the earth have the chance of entering into a new, incommensurable, unknown relation, which would convert death into a new life.”25 Somehow, it seems to me, Deleuze leans on neorealism to suggest that the futuristic evolution of white lives that 2001 features in the midst of the 1960s is not mere science fiction but a concrete historical possibility that first manifested itself in Italy’s past: from Blackshirt death to time-images, and beyond.

Bazin held that the Italian school of the liberation was the cinema of a redeemed people. For Deleuze, it appears to be the film form appropriate for new species of living beings. In both cases, the evolution of cinema that neorealism would manifest can only occur after a radical reclamation of Italian life from its racial configuration under Fascism. Deleuze’s emphasis on neorealism as a cinema that starts from zero unmistakably resonates with Bazin’s insistence on neorealism as the cinema of a recently reborn country, of a nation that is only a few years old. Liberated Italy stands out, in Bazin and Deleuze, as a sort of miraculous void in which the essence of humanity, or the potential of a superhuman life, is set free. Their neorealism is made to attest to an epochal moment in the history of Western humanity: a metamorphosis, an evolution that is a revolution, a blank slate untouched by the evil of either capitalistic savagery or naturalized habit. It only takes a closer look at their frameworks to register that Bazin and Deleuze are writing about a zero cinema, a zero nation, and a zero people that in fact did not exist—but that we keep falling for.

Feeling for Italy

Neorealism stands strong. Despite the many voices that have problematized this category, discussions of Italy and Italian film can hardly avoid the reference to this elusive, and yet fundamental, redemption of cinema. Why is this the case? Why is it almost impossible to experience the geopolitical area known as Italy away from neorealism’s blinding light, even if it is unclear what neorealism actually is and which films, if any, comprise its canon? The attachment to a term that is manifestly fraught and aporetic goes beyond being an ingrained habit in film discourse that could simply be corrected. Hence, it seems important to complement treatments of what Charles Leavitt calls the “repeated occlusions implicit in neorealism’s accepted definitions” with an explanation of why an institution with such unsound foundations nevertheless stands so strong.26

Might it be that the weaknesses in neorealism as a concept, its historical imprecisions and theoretical indecisions, are precisely what have made it successful? In this regard, the most crucial insight into neorealism’s critical hegemony belongs to Peter Bondanella, who insisted that the intertwined misrepresentation of fascist cinema and emphasis on Rossellini’s and De Sica’s aesthetico-politico newness should be connected with the need to isolate the regime from national history and establish a clear break between totalitarianism and democracy.27 In Bazin’s “An Aesthetic of Reality,” we read that the war in Italy was the end of an era, the conclusion of an epoch. The centrality of neorealism in discussions of anything Italian would derive, then, from its power to hide continuities between the fascist and post-fascist nation—between the race that Italians were under Mussolini and the people they became after his fall; between the racial imaginaries and racist structures that characterize totalitarian biopolitics and those ruling over a neoliberal society. Christina Sharpe emphasizes the need to read the history of Western modernity in the wake of racism and colonization, that is, to read Western history in its structural complicity with racial capitalism.28 The category of neorealism, with its “year zero” mythologies, forecloses precisely the possibility of such a wake work—amplifying the convenient fantasy that the Allies’ liberation of Europe from Nazi Fascism constituted a turning point for the West and thus the start of something new and beautiful for the whole human race. But how could things radically change, how could discriminations and hierarchies among human beings be redressed if the capitalist-colonial order and white supremacy with it remained unfazed?

I am not arguing that Bazin and Deleuze consciously suppressed Fascism’s deep roots in Italian and Western history. Instead, I suggest that Bazin and Deleuze were somehow duped—to use a term dear to Bazin—by Italian cinema and ended up enabling specious tropes about Italy and Italians that are fundamental to a very specific postwar geopolitical ordering. Bazin’s and Deleuze’s explicit confrontations with Italian film are also making implicit claims on the essence of the Italian people and their standing in the world.

In the note from “An Aesthetic of Reality” discussing Paisà, Bazin remarks on the relation between the film forms characteristic of proper Italian national cinema and Italy’s national character. He claims that neorealism avoids artificiality, politics, and division in part because of Italians’ “ethnic temperament.” In a later passage from the original version of “An Aesthetic of Reality” that does not appear in the canonical English translation of the essay, Bazin reiterates that neorealism’s liberation from classic cinematographic writing is somehow connected with the “génie ethnique”—the ethnic genius, spirit—that is proper to Italy.29 So while Bazin writes about neorealism as a cinema of humanity liberated from divisions, he cannot avoid the specter of ethnic racism as he reintroduces naturalized specificities and differences between peoples and communities. In fact, Bazin’s essay obliquely implies that Italians have the natural disposition to dwell closer to reality, and that this proximity to the real entails a familiarity with each other and with the world that allows them to renounce artificial divisions and focus on what is naturally common to the whole human race. It would be this very Italian simplicity that—once past the fascist blunder—pushed national cinema to embrace a raw, universalistic aesthetics.

Bazin’s outlook on Italians’ ethnic character, with its obvious resonances with the “Italian good people” discourse, might appear flattering at first sight. Yet one should be wary of Bazin’s association of Italians with nature as well as his emphasis on their spontaneous simplicity and natural community bonds. These discourses rehash stereotypes about southern people’s “rawness” and “unscriptedness” that, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak elucidates, give rise to precise hierarchies between world locations and cultures.30 Italian neorealism, for Bazin, is only a starting point, the beginning of a new life for cinema that other peoples and other national cinemas must sustain: given that Italian neorealism remained only an aspiration—often giving in to the temptations of genre fiction, melodrama, and sentimentalism—more sophisticated ethnicities, peoples with a more refined ethnic temperament, that is, the Americans and French, are by “An Aesthetic of Reality” implicitly assigned the task of bringing to maturity the immediate, unmediated cinematic intuitions that emerged naturally and organically, almost out of a biological or geological necessity, in Italy. The essay’s effort to position Italy in a geopolitical area under U.S. sway becomes apparent in its conclusion, another section that is trimmed in the English translation by Hugh Gray for the University of California Press. Here, Bazin argues that what a film like Paisà showcases is the symbiotic relation between American and Italian civilizations: the cinema made in Italy in the postwar period, he writes, is simultaneously the most typically Italian filmic expression and American cinema.31 So, in a certain sense, being an ethnically authentic Italian means, for Bazin, becoming Americanized.

In Deleuze, one can find similar regressive tropes about Italian identity and character as well as a similar need to embed Italy in the Western spiritual community. Ricciardi writes:

Under Deleuze’s gaze, the entire tradition of European modern cinema comes to seem a coherent and, to an extent, even a progressively evolved whole. The French philosopher attributes to the Italian neorealist directors an intuitive grasp of the new time-image that eventually advances to a reflective, intellectual awareness in the work of the auteurs of the French Nouvelle Vague at the end of the 1950s.32

Ricciardi righteously criticizes the indisputable biases that Bazin’s and Deleuze’s tales of world cinema manifest. Yet by arguing that the French critics were duped by Italian cinema, I want to suggest that their infantilizing gaze on Italy is itself, at least in part, the result of the Orientalizing tales about the Italian liberation and liberated Italians that national cinema itself circulated. As Schoonover holds, the films that we traditionally associate with the neorealist revolution precisely essentialized Italy as a childlike country that was not autonomous but in need of external support to mature and realize its full potential. Paradoxically, Italians emerged better from the war than how they had entered it, Noa Steimatsky comments—they were not thugs anymore but a people to be pitied.33 Thanks largely to Italian film, Italians were remediated as a poor, simple, good-hearted, “worthy” ethnicity who temporarily fell for mad leaders and a monstrous ideology but then endured terrible sacrifices to make amends.

Steimatsky has noted how harsh neorealist films used the ruined landscape left behind by Fascism’s downfall to project a brutal but redeeming experience of Italian history and identity.34 What went unnoticed until Schoonover’s Brutal Vision is that this way of feeling for Italy contributed to Italy’s postwar normalization and provided a visual authorization of the Marshall plan and of U.S. meddling in national affairs, playing a crucial role in the consolidation of a North Atlantic political space in the aftermath of World War II.

The dead bodies of Benito Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, Nicola Bombacci, Achille Starace, and Alessandro Pavolini were hung upside-down and exhibited in Piazzale Loreto in Milan on July 29, 1945. On that same day, the German occupation forces and the Salò puppet state surrendered unconditionally to the Allies in Caserta. The war and the occupation were finally over. But summer 1945 also ended the resistance, and with it the fight for a radically new Italian futurity. As Francesco Filippi explains, given the country’s position as a border zone between East and West, Global North and Global South, but also the presence on national soil of the strongest Communist Party in Western Europe, the forces in charge of the pacification of the country deemed it essential for both the new world order and the reproduction of capitalist supremacy—that is, of white supremacy—to avoid probing too deeply into twenty years of Blackshirt command.35 After the Allies took control of Italy, the pressure to return to normal life mounted; it was no longer time for the revolutionary passions that had animated the years of the resistance and the civil war. It was time to go back to normalcy, to go back to being hard workers and one big happy family. It was time to go back to the status quo.

Released a few months after Mussolini’s execution, less subtle and accomplished than other interventions dealing with the transition from totalitarianism to democracy, Mattòli’s La vita ricomincia is a more transparent manifestation of the ways “neorealism” enables a strategic forgetting of history that streamlines the image of a benevolent United States and leads Italians straight back to work, straight back to heteronormativity. Written by Aldo De Benedetti, La vita ricomincia insists on the dialectical relation between truth and justice, articulating in the most explicit way the advantages of extracting from a devastated history a story of ruins that would allow the nation to move on and rebuild, under the watchful and benevolent eyes of the United States.

Mattòli’s film takes place in postwar Rome and features two of the Ventennio’s most celebrated film stars: Fosco Giachetti and Alida Valli. Paolo Martini (Giachetti) makes it back home after six years spent in a British detention camp in India, witnessing in his homecoming the devastation the regime had left behind (Figure 40). Fortunately, under the control of the U.S. military police, normality seems to have been restored. Yet the specters of the past come back to haunt the present. The police arrest Paolo’s wife, Patrizia (Valli), on a charge of murder. While her husband was away, a wicked noblewoman of German descent convinced Patrizia to turn to sex work to earn the money she lacked to buy medicine for her son, who was suffering from a strange and incomprehensible illness. However, one of Patrizia’s clients wanted to keep seeing her even after the return of her husband. During a heated exchange, Patrizia confronts the man and kills him.

Patrizia is eventually found innocent, the trial by jury establishing that she acted in self-defense. And after some thinking, Paolo forgives Patrizia insofar as whatever she did was in a state of emergency. As their Neapolitan philosophy professor friend (Eduardo De Filippo) explains, the past is the past, and it is now time to focus on rebuilding a normal future out of a devastated present. This absolution does not apply only to Patrizia. It is Italy’s entire population that La vita ricomincia prompts the public (national and global) to understand, forgive, and forget at the behest of a philosopher from Naples. In the film, De Filippo plays the part of a Benedetto Croce in disguise, and Mattòli popularizes the liberal philosopher’s views on Fascism as a passing phenomenon in Italian history, contributing to a process of social normalization and geopolitical realignment based on a colossal denial of what Fascism actually was.

In the fall 1943 New York Times think piece I mentioned at the beginning of this book, Croce admitted that the vast majority of the Italian people had collaborated with Fascism. Such an admission of the nation’s involvement with Mussolini was far from an assumption of responsibility. Croce in fact specified that Fascism was a foreign virus that had taken over a people, implying that they could not be held responsible for what they had done while sick. Foucault also resorted to a medical imaginary to define Fascism’s relation with democracy. But while Foucault presents Fascism as a “disease of power,” something connected with how political economy works—that is, with the racism structurally embedded in Western biopolitical modernity—for Croce it is a fluke that occasionally happens to liberal democracies and does not require any radical questioning of the people and communities falling for it. What Fascism requires is, for Croce, actually an uncompromising anticommunism because the fascist sickness can catch on only when consciousness has already been compromised by the germs of Karl Marx’s materialism. In a 1944 follow-up intervention, Croce explicated the consequences of this transformation of Fascism from counterrevolution seeking to secure the capitalist order into a sort of seasonal illness taking root where Marxism has weakened the liberal ethos.36 Since Fascism comes from the outside and does not normally belong in the Italian body politic, since appropriate remedies have been put in place to eradicate this malaise but also communism, there is no point is setting up tribunals to try fascists or Fascism.

La vita ricomincia repeats the structure of admission of guilt followed by denial of responsibility that informs Croce’s interventions. Patrizia acted under German influence and out of necessity: she was misguided by the foreign noblewoman, but at the same time she could not allow her son to die, nor could she agree to sell her body again after the emergency had been resolved. Nor could Paolo be held responsible for what happened to his family and to his country: he had been detained in a British camp since 1939, the very year the Pact of Steel was signed. Because he was captured before Italy’s entry in World War II, he presumably has no blood on his hands (but here the fundamental avoidance is, again, that of colonialism). Lastly and most importantly, the absolution affects all Italians. Whatever they did, the philosopher lectures, they did it to survive. In La vita ricomincia—which placed second at the box office in 1945–46, after Roma città aperta—spectatorial pleasure comes through a pseudo-confession that leads to acquittal.

The idea that Italians were not responsible for the ruination brought upon them is obviously a self-exonerating account of the nation’s history, a historical fiction that is common in the neorealist canon.37 Yet, while Roma città aperta and Paisà cloak their ideological maneuvering to the point that their absolutions of Italians dupe even Bazin and Deleuze, La vita ricomincia does nothing to hide its address to the nation. Through De Filippo, Mattòli’s film literally tells Italians what they should be doing: letting bygones be bygones. There is no hesitation or qualm or doubt or remorse here; the only valid feeling is the desire to return to normal life, to the productive existences we had and the reproductive families we were before all this. “Chi ha avuto ha avuto ha avuto, chi ha dato ha dato ha dato, scordiamoci il passato, siamo di Napoli paisà” (Who has had has had has had, who has given has given has given, let’s forget about the past—we are from Naples paisan), states a famous Neapolitan song from 1944—lyrics that the Neapolitan philosophy professor in Mattòli’s film repeats almost verbatim. We should keep in mind that this film was written by De Benedetti, a Jewish man who faced discrimination under the regime, and thus in this call to forget and return to a prelapsarian “before,” we could also pick up on the traumatized experience of someone for whom the times before Fascism were indeed safer. However, in forgetting and moving on, one is also leaving the regime unaddressed, and thus allowing the entanglement between fascist racism and larger, ongoing dynamics of Western history to remain unnoticed.

Yet it is not merely sociopolitical history that La vita ricomincia encourages its viewers to forgive and forget. The memory of past Italian cinema undergoes a similar suppression: Valli and Giachetti—among the most popular stars of fascist cinema—were hailed as stars of the new democratic Italy. “Nothing, it’s life that starts again as before. Nothing happened, nothing took place,” suggests the philosophy professor at the end of the film. The past has indeed disappeared into irrelevance, and the political responsibility of the Italian cinematographic apparatus in this past has likewise been eluded rather than confronted.

Notwithstanding the initial call for change, the film industry was left unbothered by the processes of “de-fascistizzazione,” and the purge commission chaired by Umberto Barbaro, Mario Chiari, Mario Camerini, Mario Soldati, and Luchino Visconti granted substantial amnesties. Although Pavolini, the fascist Minister of Popular Culture, had been hanged at Piazzale Loreto, directors who had made films to suit the exigencies of the regime were steadily reintegrated into the nation’s cultural industry. Simultaneously, the most radical voices of anti-Fascism at the movies, those authors and intellectuals who denounced the persistence of more subtle and discreet forms of social control and violence within the country, were being isolated and marginalized. In 1947, Ruth Ben-Ghiat reconstructs, a young and eager Giulio Andreotti launched a mini-purge of communist intellectuals within the film industry. For the postwar governance of Italians, the perspectives of people like Barbaro, Visconti, or De Santis were deemed more troubling than the presence of high-ranking fascist officials in key positions within the film establishment—or the Italian state, for that matter. Normal life had indeed begun again. The process of normalization was fast. While no one spoke openly in favor of conservation and restoration, while culture and the arts—Leavitt shows—sustained illusions of radical renewal, a radicalization of Italian life and Italian cinema was actively prevented from taking place.38

But if liberated Italian film favored a conservative agenda and foreclosed the horizon of radical hope and radical change that the resistance conjured, how does one explain the fact that the Communist Party was the greatest proponent of the neorealist myth? The answer to this question was provided by Mario Cannella in the early 1970s, in an important essay where he investigates the fetishistic attachment to neorealism displayed by communist critics in democratic Italy. According to Cannella, the identification of “a series of organic links” between neorealism and the antifascist resistance allowed the Communist Party to claim a moral authority over national life after the Christian Democratic Party had achieved political hegemony in the country.39 By indulging in the ideological fantasy of neorealism as a cultural revolution, leftist criticism found a way to repress the role that culture and intellectuals (many of whom were now enlisted in the Communist Party) played during the fascist regime. Here we come to the heart of the matter, says Cannella: the myth that throughout the fascist era, Italian culture had remained neutral and that it rose up again thanks to the communist resistance.

Within the context of this bipartisan agreement to avoid the nation’s recent past, neorealism was, and still is, authorized as representative of a new Italy that had finally broken with the papier-mâché regime of misrepresentation perpetuated by fascist cinema. In the final instance, Italy cannot but be associated with neorealism because neorealism is used as a token of the people’s redemption, a redemption upon which Italy’s geopolitical realignment and its repositioning under U.S. tutelage was predicated. The legend of neorealism as zero-degree cinema legitimizes the idea of 1945 as Italy’s year zero, and vice versa. These two “zero” mythologies are grounded in a similar twofold avoidance: the relegation of Fascism and its film culture to the realm of inauthenticity (authoritarianism, falsehood, superficial consensus); and the pretense that the sociopolitical dynamics and racialized structures of feeling that brought Fascism to power had vanished with Mussolini’s execution. But if they didn’t, how different could the color of liberated Italy be from the Blackshirt whiteness of the ethno-nation that waged war against Ethiopia and then the world?

Given the reticence in interrogating the relation between Italy’s racist past and present, it is not surprising that less apologetic takes on the “good people” into which the Blackshirt racial assemblage suddenly metamorphosed—like the compilation documentaries Giorni di gloria (Days of Glory, Mario Serandrei, 1945) and All’armi siam fascisti (To Arms, We’re Fascists!, Lino Del Fra, Cecilia Mangini, and Lino Miccichè, 1962)—are still virtually invisible and consistently excluded from the canon of Italian cinema.

While these projects manifest Fascism’s connection to the capitalist–colonial order, the commemorative reference to neorealism is a way to whitewash Italian history in order to turn it into an edifying tale, a sort of coming-of-age story for a whole nation but also the entirety of white humanity. We keep hearing that neorealism is an antinarrative cinema, a cinema of seers rather than actors, a cinema that confronts the facts of reality without any a priori preconceptions. It may be that we should pay more attention to Zavattini confessing the imbrication of neorealist films with fictionality and focus on the fictions that neorealism enables. In this way, by switching off the blinding light of neorealism, we might catch some glimpse of what Fascism was, who we were, who we became after Mussolini’s fall, but also what anti-Fascism—and “we”—could be.