Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema

3. Rossellini’s Exemplary Corpse and the Sovereign Bystander

In his 1999 documentary My Voyage to Italy, Martin Scorsese describes his personal devotion to Italian cinema. The film begins with the director sharing a memory from his childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when every Friday night, his extended family gathered to watch the Italian films broadcast on television. In his narration, Scorsese argues that seeing these films introduced him to cinema’s potential to engage its audiences with social experiences and political realities outside of themselves. Exactly which images allowed the act of spectatorship to attain such significance?1 Scorsese’s voice-over claims it was those uniquely “powerful” and “strong” moments of neorealist films that sparked his boyhood discovery of cinema’s social and political import. As he narrates his account of neorealism’s power, the documentary replays some of the most gruesome and disturbing scenes from Roberto Rossellini’s two canonical neorealist features, Rome Open City and Paisan. By juxtaposing Scorsese’s personal revelations with the torture sequences of the former film and the floating corpses sequence of the latter, this documentary locates the affective power of Italian cinema in neorealism’s depictions of the imperiled body. Surprisingly, however, Scorsese himself does not directly speak of neorealism ’s violence. When he later explicates how postwar Italian cinema set a new standard of realism, he cites a number of definitional features: the use of nonprofessional actors in starring roles, for example , and shooting on actual streets instead of studio sets. He never mentions that the narratives of many neorealist classics pivot on scenarios of the violenced body. In this sense, My Voyage to Italy exploits neorealism’s corporeal imagery as visual evidence to support the claim that these films had an affective impact on the lives and perspectives 109 3 ROSSELLINI’S EXEMPLARY CORPSE AND THE SOVEREIGN BYSTANDER of their international audiences. Yet Scorsese’s film remains curiously silent on the topic of violence, never naming the unprecedented corporeality of these films, let alone explicitly considering it as an essential element of the neorealist aesthetic or a key component of their global appeal.2 This silence is symptomatic of how the act of watching Italian films gets remembered in the United States and in film studies more broadly. In this chapter, I seek to break with this tradition and confront the imperiled bodies that populate Rome Open City and Paisan. I argue that these displays of the imperiled body offer a narrational opportunity for the films to reach out to a postwar international viewer. These films utilize explicit depictions of the suffering body to grant the international spectator a place of agency in otherwise foreign terrain. Their visual narration of violence underwrites, I propose, a new transcultural protocol of spectatorship: images of physical abuse, political torture , and execution supply a venue through which these films promote looking as a form of political engagement. By placing ocular witnessing at the center of their narratives, these films seek to transform seeing from a passive state of consumption into a powerful means of moral reckoning. Cinema spectatorship becomes a virtual mode of bearing witness that emerges from these films as the exemplary experience of postwar politics. Perhaps this should not surprise us. Asked whether he considered himself a neorealist, Roberto Rossellini replied, “Neo-realism, but what does that mean? . . . For me, it is above all, a moral position from which to look at the world. It then became an aesthetic position, but at the beginning it was moral.”3 According to Rossellini, the original mission of a neorealist filmmaker was to provide his audience with a unique vantage point from which to see the world in moral terms. He suggests that the appeal to this morality, which was seemingly urgent and necessary at the moment of neorealism’s conception, was best made through point of view: it was a “moral position from which to look at the world.” In Rossellini’s account, neorealism’s emergence as a coherent aesthetic tradition follows from the implementation of point of view as a means of making a moral position available to its audiences. It is a new means of being able to look at the world as the world. In the context of the mid-1940s, that word, world, resonates with both ontological realism and geopolitics. In Rossellini’s view, cinematic realism will help to effect a realignment of vision from a 110 rossellini’s exemplary corpse regional or...