Italian neo-realist influence on the scope of film

The art of film is a universal language. Its ability to display real life, construct alternate realities and/or dictate a conscious message to the spectator is utilized in most every national context. Film has an uncanny ability to incite laughter, contrive mystery, and inflict despair on its spectators. The diversity of cinematic function has expanded by the countless instances of film production across every national border, as an endless dialogue between national cinemas has led to the creation of various film cycles. Undoubtedly one of the most integral studies of film movements is the realist cycle of films initiated by the Italian neorealist films of the late 1940s, and its reiteration under the guise of the French New Wave filmmakers over a decade later. It is through a detailed and relatable portrayal of daily life which spoke to the contemporary audience, and served to reveal the underlying “echoes and reverberations of the human condition” (Monticelli 74). Drawing on two specific films from their respective cycles, Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1947) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) will provide examples to reveal how their minimalist and intimate portrayals of post-war Europe function to provide an overarching commentary on their historical contexts and social conditions.
The roots of the realist movement in cinema can be traced back to literature, which influenced the Italian neorealist filmmakers. Novelists from both Italy and abroad inspired Rossellini, and others, to author film objectively as various European novelists from the 18th-19th century had (Cottino-Jones 42). These novels depicted the lives of peasants in a naturalistic setting, and the influence is unmistakable in the cinematic translation of the realist mode of storytelling. Twentieth century American novelists such as Steinbeck and Faulkner also captivated the literary culture in Italy with their “frank treatment of all subject matter, regardless of how common, grim, or violent’ (Cottino-Jones 44). Made within the immediate post-war years, Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1947) can be described with all three of those foreboding adjectives. The film exposes the spectator to the impoverished and desperate life of a German family. The perspective is objectively placed at a distance which requires the viewer to actively participate in relating to. In the literary sense, the film needs to be read into in order for a social and/or political message to be conveyed. The depressing and fatalistic progression is not working to entertain, rather to inflict itself onto the spectator.
Germany Year Zero focuses on Edmund, a twelve-year old German boy who is burdened with the duty of providing for his fractured family. His mother is absent; his father is bedridden with a serious illness; his brother is afraid to register to work because of his previous Nazi affiliation, which leaves Edmund as the only family member able to work and provide food for his family. Throughout the film, Edmund is torn between his childish inclinations to play games such as soccer and hopscotch, and his duty to assume the patriarchal role in order to keep his family from further disintegration. He is confined to a life following the morals imposed by his elders, and the influence from his old teacher, a homosexual Nazi, leads to his suicide. The film is mercilessly depressing and utterly hopeless, as Rossellini took the mammoth aftermath of WWII and reduced it down to Edmund’s disturbed and conflicted life. The neorealist portrayal of Edmund’s life presents the events much more horrifically than any kind of high-budget costume drama could. It is the authenticity of the setting and characters which blur the line of being a spectator consuming the spectacle, and a participant relating to and drawing an understanding from the work. In Peter Brunette’s understanding of Rossellini’s production, he states that “Rossellini is positing a symbolic reality to the humane ideas that have been raised by their absence, and have a real life of their own, beyond that of any individual like Edmund” (Brunette 86). The film lacks the personification of humanity, which is the exact intention of Rossellini’s realist portrayal of the ravaged society.
Fast-forward to 1960. Jean-Luc Godard has been a critic for the Cahiers du cinema for almost ten years. The director of Breathless devoted his years with the weekly publication to harsh and analytical criticism of film from various international contexts. The post-war flourishing of film libraries rendered the new filmmakers unable to avoid influence from other directors. Similar to Italian neorealism, which was influenced by the gritty and unrelenting portrayals of peasant life in earlier literature, the French New Wave can attribute its inspiration to the collectivity of international cinemas exposed to and analyzed by the French film critics. This film is a hybridized text, encompassing the function of dialogue between international cinemas. As Richard Roud writes in his introduction to Godard on Godard, “a certain age of innocence is over… [a director] now has got to do research” (Godard 9). This can be seen as the axiom for the French New Wave film movement; the research of film and subsequent cinematic development is directly attributed to those productions before it. There may have been no director more entrenched in his research of film than Jean-Luc Godard, which is prevalent in his first feature film Breathless. Michel is the main character, a cavalier car thief who seems to lack the conscious to keep him from petty crimes, grand theft auto, and even murder. He shuffles in and around the bustling metropolis of Paris, using alter-egos and taking advantage of various female companions while on the lam after the murder of a motorcycle cop in the beginning of the film. Eventually, Michel’s nefarious tactics aren’t enough to keep him from being gunned down in the street by the cops pursuing him throughout the film.
The film devotes itself to a most detailed portrayal of both the main character Michel, his love interest Patricia, and the city of Paris which he must move in and around to evade the police. Godard’s mash-up of Italian neorealist stylistics and storytelling with the “hardboiled film noir tradition he wanted to emulate” (Sterritt XI) creates a “jazzy, free-form, sexy homage to film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinema” (Andrew 15). As mentioned before, this film is a completely hybridized text of film influences, ranging from the literary-adapted noir murder mysteries of the American post-war moment, to the despairing realist cinematic portrayals of ravaged post-war Europe in the films of Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. The function of these influences makes Michel’s plight throughout the film a commentary on the social context of early 1960s France, making the film self-aware of international film’s saturation of French film culture, which in-turn works to establish Michel as equally influenced by them.
An important aspect of both Rossellini and Godard’s films lies in their main characters. The shared characteristics between the well-intentioned twelve-year-old boy and the twenty-something sociopath are not overtly presented at first glance. It is the manner in which the two main characters are not functioning as the protagonist, in the sense that they are not the positive actors combating the evils of the antagonist. Rather it is my assertion that Edmund and Michel are the antagonists, inflicting their malfeasance on their respective societies.
Edmund is most certainly a victim of circumstance; “in the Berlin of 1947, the familiar rites [of] passage have become speeded up and horribly distorted, and Edmund is simply too young to shoulder the adult burden” (Brunette 78). The war has left the city in a complete state of disrepair, destroyed along with the economy which has left a large portion of the citizens jobless and relying on ration cards to feed themselves. The fragmented family that fully relies on Edmund is typical of many German families after the war, with fathers and sons either killed in the war, or detained by the Allied troops for previous Nazi affiliations. The reason that the son who should assume the patriarch role, the much older Karlheinz, doesn’t is due to his fear of being detained for his role as a Nazi trooper in the war. The prominent illustration of the Nazi ideology is an essential point in considering Rossellini’s intentions in displaying the social disintegration of German at the hands of the Third Reich.
The most sinister and perverse character which the viewer encounters is Edmund’s old school teacher, Mr. Henning. He is a homosexual, and several disturbing sequences include Henning touching Edmund too intimately. Henning’s sexual advances serve to reveal “individual sexual depravity as emblematic of the wider philosophical and moral depravity known as Nazism” (Brunette 80). Rossellini embodies the delusional ideal of the Nazi within this character, and Henning is distinguished as the antithesis of humanity, with his sexual perversion and his repeated reinforcement of his ideas of “Social Darwinism” on young Edmund (Cottino-Jones 52). In response to Edmund’s fear that his father is not strong enough to survive his illness, Henning states “You’re afraid Papa’ll die? Learn from nature: the weak are always eliminated by the strong. We must have the courage to sacrifice the weak”. A complete disregard for both the institution of family and the value of loyalty is being imposed onto Edmund’s young psyche, which leads him to sacrifice his father by poisoning his milk. Rossellini has rehashed the exact type of corrupt and distorted Nazi influence which has brought the country to ruins through an allegorical teacher-student relationship. Edmund has perpetuated the horrific cycle by adopting the ideals of the Nazi, which leads to such a great amount of guilt that he jumps off a building, falling to his death. Rossellini’s political intentions are clear, placing the extremely fatalist consequence for the adherence to Nazi ideals.
Conversely, Breathless portrays the main character Michel as completely responsible for his circumstance. When he is unable to evade police after stealing a car in the opening sequence, he guns down an officer on the French countryside with a gun he finds in the glove box. He then tries to hide in Paris and find his old American girlfriend Patricia, attempting to convince her to run away to Italy. Michel is a very licentious being, unwilling to align with societies morals, represented by his acts of thievery and murder. He seems completely unremorseful for his crimes, and the viewer sees how disconnected he is from his social environment. It is apparent that Michel has rejected his environment, and has confined himself in his own self-perception, which he models after characters in film. This is the crucial point in understanding Breathless as a self-reflexive commentary on the cultural milieu of France, as the youth culture, and its subsequent consumerism (Phillips 77), has begun to undermine the older generation of morality and adherence to social confines. Michel gazes fondly at a poster of Humphrey Bogart, and the shot/reverse shot back-and-forth between Michel and Bogart emphasizes the way Michel models himself after the suave American movie star, which Michel has learned to view as the ethos of the powerful and sexually appealing dominant male.
Godard departs from the neorealist objective view of the events, employing the noir-like voice-over to channel Michel’s perspective. Godard goes as far as having Michel turn and address the viewer directly, exemplary of the way Arlene Croce defines the spectatorship of the French New Wave; ‘you are no longer looking at the film- the film is looking at you” (38). With the ‘fourth-wall’ broken, the viewer is directly implicated in Michel’s plight, as “the ‘new wave’ technique makes unique demands on the spectator” (37). The active role of reading into the events on-screen, like the objective perspective in Germany Year Zero, has be superseded by a direct communication from Michel to the audience. A privileged view into Michel’s mentality is provided with these major departures from neorealist objectivity, and the film becomes a first-person chronicling of a disturbed and isolated youth.
The characters in both films are clearly vulnerable to an influence which ultimately has proven to be fatalistic. Edmund’s impressionability allowed the lingering Nazi ideologies to corrupt him to the point of murder and suicide. Michel consumes the cultural saturation of international media, and the representation of a male archetype has determined his isolated and immoral outlook on his society. There is an obvious multitude of influences which dictate the fatalistic outcomes of these films, just as the multitude of national cinemas and other media have influenced the film cycles which produced them. The most significant correlation between the Italian neorealist cycle and the French New Wave has to be the aesthetic style and realist setting which is so important to the development of the character and narrative. In the immediate post-war years, Berlin was left in such a bombed out and ruined state that most domestic film studios were destroyed. This resulted in the neorealist practice of exclusively shooting on location, providing an undeniably powerful authenticity through its imagery. Outside of his cramped and depressing apartment, Edmund wanders aimlessly throughout the ruined city. A reoccurrence of long-shots frame Edmund to seem like an insignificant blot between two half-destroyed buildings, reflecting the magnitude of consequences from years of corruption by the Nazis, which has left Edmund in an intolerable and hopeless position. The setting takes on a much larger allegorical meaning; it virtually becomes a character that embodies the ravaged historical context of 1947 Berlin, in the same way Mr. Henning encompasses the disturbed philosophies which destroyed the city.
Michel spends nearly the entirety of Breathless moving around the bustling metropolis of Paris. The viewer becomes intimately acquainted to the environment, with reoccurring driving shots passing the famous landmarks of the city. Michel is displayed with the long-shot, and we watch him run across the street traffic nearly being by the many cars packed onto the street. The reoccurring imagery and theme of the car, being the continuing object of Michel’s desire, is a reflection of what Alastair Phillips marks as the “spread of a distinctive youth culture coincided with the dissemination of other new material phenomenon such as…the development of the car as the mainstream form of private transportation” (189). This is reading deep into the film’s text, but it is an interesting counterpoint to the theme of the public tram that Rossellini uses in Germany Year Zero. Along with being the first and last images in the film, the tram car is a recurrent visual marker of Edmund’s aimless circling around the city (Cottino-Jones 41), and there is a clear contrast between this and the prevalence of cars in Godard’s film to signify the modernization since the end of the war. Once again, the realist and detailed display of the location implies the larger presence of a society within it and Michel’s rejection of it; “I’m sick of France!” he states.
The ultimately fatalistic outcome of these realist films function to provide a larger commentary on their respective social and political contexts. Edmund’s adolescence leads Nazi influence to destroy his life, as Rossellini has illustrated the kind of pre-war manipulation of philosophies in the ravaged post-war context. It is undeniable the kind of political commentary Rossellini sees prudent to illuminate by this tragic story, which is similar but not mirroring the social commentary Godard employs in Breathless. Michel’s isolation from society and its humanity leads his personality to be dictated by the various male archetypes mainstream international film has established, and his demise comes from his obsession with the consumer culture which was synonymous with the prevalence of youth culture in the years after the war. Rossellini mastered the technique and style of neorealist cinema, which Godard employed, but not cloned, in his self-reflexive mixture of various film inspirations of his first film. The realist depiction in both films establishes a greater sense of an honest and authentic portrayal, leaving the viewer unable to deny their relationship with the piece. This effect on the audience transforms the minimalist productions into greater tools in revealing a conscious and detailed dissection of society within the respective historical contexts.











Works Cited

Phillips, Alastair. Youth and Entrapment in the French New Wave. New York London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. Print.

Monticelli, Simona. "Italian post-war cinema and Neo-realism." World Cinema: Critical approaches. (2000): 71-76. Print.

Croce, Arlene. "Les Quatre Cents Coups." Film Quarterly. 13.3 (1960): 35-38. Print.

Sterritt, David. Jean-Luc Godard Interviews. Jackson, Mississippi: UM Press, 1998. xii. Print.

Godard, Jean-Luc. "Selected Articles of Popular Film." Cahiers du Cinema 1951-1959: Print.

Brunette, Peter. Roberto Rossellini. 1st. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.

Cottino-Jones, Marga. A Guide to Italian Cinema. 1st. New york: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007. Print.