Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach( Series - Toronto Italian Studies )

'Italian Neorealist Cinema is a terrific book, well researched, intelligent, open-minded, witty, and, more importantly, very original. Specialists have written thousands of pages on the topic but none of them has produced such a clever volume as this. In particular, Christopher Wagstaff's close readings of films by Rossellini and De Sica are masterful, and his examination of lighting in Roma cittA aperta is destined to become a classic in film studies.'-Pierre Sorlin, Professor of Sociology of Audiovisual Media, UniversitA(c) de la Sorbonne Nouvelle

The end of the Second World War saw the emergence in Italy of the neorealism movement, which produced a number of films characterized by stories set among the poor and working class, often shot on location using non-professional actors. In this study Christopher Wagstaff provides an in-depth analysis of neorealist film, focusing on three films that have had a major impact on filmmakers and audiences around the world: Roberto Rossellini's Roma cittA aperta and PaisA and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette. Indeed, these films are still, more than half a century after they were made, among the most highly regarded works in the history of cinema. In this insightful and carefully researched work, Wagstaff suggests that the importance of these films is largely due to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of their assembled sounds and images rather than, as commonly thought, their particular representations of historical reality.

The author begins by situating neorealist cinema in its historical, industrial, commercial, and cultural context. He goes on to provide a theoretical discussion of realism and the merits of neorealist films, individually and collectively, as aesthetic artefacts. He follows with a detailed analysis of the three films, focusing on technical and production aspects as well as on the significance of the films as cinematic works of art.

While providing a wealth of information and analysis previously unavailable to an English-speaking audience, Italian Neorealist Cinema offers a radically new perspective on neorealist cinema and the Italian art cinema that followed it.