Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema

2. The North Atlantic Ballyhoo of Liberal Humanism

LIFE magazine predicted in 1952 that Italian cinema would pose an increasing commercial threat to Hollywood’s domination of the U.S. market if Italy continued to produce both “provocative films” and “provocative beauties.”1 Life even went so far as to trace the recent American success of these European imports to the apparently contradictory lures of the realist image: the “raw honesty” of films like Rossellini’s Rome Open City derives, Life argues, from both their “moral conscience” and their “frank treatment of sex and violence.” Here neorealism provokes American spectators in two ways: it forces them to confront the urgent relevancy of foreign matters, while at the same time overwhelming them with prurient views of imperiled bodies . Above the headline “Italian Film Invasion,” the magazine accordingly supplies a promotional still from a recent import, Voice of Silence (La voce del silenzio, 1953), to illustrate the characteristic allure of this new and raw aesthetic. The caption reads: “Heroine of new Italian film ‘Voice of Silence,’ a decent girl led into delinquency, auctions off her clothes to get money to buy a car.” If for Life the still “sums up the mixture of sex and naturalism which is the trademark of postwar Italian film,” then what does this image tell us about the period’s understanding of the realist image? The right-hand side of the image shows the back of a young woman’s bare legs and arms. The body of this “half-naked girl” looks awkwardly exposed and vulnerable, her flesh indecently white against the gloss of her high heels and the sheen of her black satin undergarments. Her legs, which like her arms hang limp, are suspended in front of a crowd of smartly dressed young men and boys. This image is as curious in what it displays as how it displays it, and for whom. It raises the question: How was the American 69 2 THE NORTH ATLANTIC BALLYHOO OF LIBERAL HUMANISM spectator for neorealism envisioned during this period? How would we characterize that spectator’s perspective? Any attempt to theorize the arrival of Italian post–World War II cinema on movie screens across the United States must contend with two divergent accounts of the midcentury American filmgoer that emerge during this period and anticipate these questions. On the one hand, this period’s critics suggested that the unprecedented success of neorealist films such as Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, and Rome Open City indicated the new commercial viability of “human interest” stories.2 For perhaps the first time, distributors and theater owners believed that by appealing to humanitarian 70 the north atlantic ballyhoo A Life magazine article from October 20, 1952, on the success of Italian films in the United States illustrates its text with an image that suggests as much about the international spectator as it does about the content of imported movies. concerns and global communalism, a film could increase its box office receipts.3 On the other hand, neorealism’s U.S. promotional discourse often emphasized the salacious character of these imported films, suggesting that their commercial viability depended on the films’ unique exposure of a sexualized and/or violated body. These contrasting accounts of humanitarianism and prurience combine in Life magazine’s imagining of neorealism’s audience. At first glance, we see the magazine aligning us—and, implicitly, the U.S. audience for neorealism—with the young male viewers in the photograph . As readers and as members of a potential audience for foreign films, we are asked to join the voyeuristic crowd. We provide another set of leering eyes focused on a body. Our spectatorship is keyed to the boys’ reactions: their eager eyes stand in for the American audience for imported films. However, these boys not only correlate to our gaze. They are also its object: the limp, naked blankness of the woman’s body forces us to ask serious questions about why and how these boys ended up partaking in this scenario in the first place. From this perspective , the female figure starts to look both sexualized and imperiled. On closer inspection, in fact, some of the boys appear more troubled and disoriented than stimulated. This image illustrates how the realist film’s “raw honesty” invites two gazes at once: one defined by titillation , and the other characterized by concern. If neorealism invites both the socially concerned contemplative gaze of art cinema and the sensationalized...