A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film

Chapter One. The Chorus of Neorealism

C h a p t e r O n e The Chorus of Neorealism We ask for a choral cinema that would keep pace with the problems and aspirations of our souls. —Giuseppe De Santis “Non ho formule e preconcetti,” Roberto Rossellini claimed when asked to look back on his fabled postwar cinema; “ma se guardo a ritroso i miei film, indubbiamente vi riscontro degli elementi che sono in essi costanti, e che vi sono ripetuti non programmaticamente, ma, ripeto, naturalmente. Anzitutto la coralità. Il film realistico, in sé, è corale” (“I do not have formulas or preconceptions . If I look back, however, on my films, I undoubtedly encounter elements that are a constant in them, and that are repeated not programmatically but, I would stress, naturally. Above all, I find a chorality. The realist film per se is choral”) (Il mio metodo 88). Echoing Rossellini, commentators on the history and practice of neorealism have often invoked the word coralità as one of its defining characteristics.1 Indeed, this concept emerges as one of the most illuminating rubrics for fathoming the nexus between aesthetics and sociopolitical engagement during the neorealist period, as varying notions of the chorus rallied seemingly disjoined creative minds in a common struggle. For all the distance separating, say, Rossellini’s Christian humanism from Visconti’s operatic realism, their exploration of chorality in the late 1940s reveals a militant commitment to using art to rebuild a disgraced nation, while highlighting their respective understanding of the aims and theories of neorealism.2 Whether in the Italian coralità or its English equivalent, chorality, the word coralità draws on its link to the root chorus to denote acting in concert or speaking with one voice. The provenance of coralità invokes associations with the ancient Greek tragic chorus, whose two chief functions continue to inform the term’s afterlife: singing and witnessing. In fifth-century BCE Attic tragedy, “the chorus were ‘interested spectators,’ sympathizing with the 20 Neorealist Rhetoric and National Identity fortunes of the characters, and giving expression, between the ‘acts,’ to the moral and religious sentiments evoked by the action of the play.”3 The mandate of the chorus for sung testimony was incorporated into the architecture and landscape of the Greek theater itself, where “the constant presence of a choral group as witnesses to the action contributed to the public character of the events portrayed” (Easterling 1540). Thus ensued a contradictory role for the chorus that shaped its later manifestations in the neorealist tradition: although the Greek tragic mode “could deal with intimate subject-matter,” it also “depended on large effects of gesture and movement that could be ‘read’ by very diverse audiences” (Easterling 1540). In its capacity as the intermediary between the private lives depicted onstage and the public interests of the audience, the chorus ensured the popular and antielitist appeal of Greek tragedy by translating the themes of the drama into a lyrical shorthand accessible to all.4 The design and function of the chorus became a platform for mythmaking in the quest by later cultures for roots, actual and imagined, in the ancient world. The most influential modern treatment of the ancient chorus, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, argues against both August Wilhelm Schlegel’s view of the chorus as an abstract “idealized spectator” and Friedrich Schiller’s notion of it as “a living wall that tragedy constructs around itself in order to close itself off from the world of reality” (Tragedy 57–58). In contrast, Nietzsche proposes a radically participatory role for the chorus, which becomes the key to his binary distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of human nature. The Greek tragedy, he writes, remained true to its beginnings as a ritualistic, Dionysian musical chorus—Greek tragedy originally consisted only of the chorus—even when it later developed into its more classic, discursive theatrical forms in the Attic and Athenian drama. In high Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche, the general theme is the ultimate failure of an Apollonian hero who cannot rise above the constraints of his individuality.5 But for all the devastation these tragedies depict, the chorus in ecstatic Dionysian unity remains onstage after the hero’s destruction , a testament to the “metaphysical comfort . . . that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable” (Nietzsche, Tragedy 59).6 The depiction of suffering and woe in Nietzsche’s tragic stage raises the chorus member into a higher state of being, where the...