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19 BEFORE THE (NEOREALIST) REVOLUTION vito zagarrio Continuity or Rupture? Continuity or discontinuity? This is the central dilemma of much of twentieth -century Italian history. Is there continuity or discontinuity between fascism and the Christian Democratic regime that followed it? Was fascism a real revolution, just as the quadrunviri claimed, or a “revelation,” as Giustino Fortunato has argued,1 that revealed conflicts already present in prefascist Italy? The question of continuity/discontinuity also arises in the political and cultural fields, especially on a terrain as delicate as the analysis of film. Thus, the “Italian” 1930s unfold horizontally onto a cultural geography that is more complex than we initially assumed. The decade also extends vertically, however , into a chronology that projects the cultural presence of the 1930s onto the following decades, belying comfortable definitions and orderly delimitations of history and culture.2 The elements of discontinuity between neorealism and fascist cinema are obvious and have been amply emphasized: neorealism’s emphasis on the poorer strata of Italian society, its focus on social discomfort, its “direct” take on reality , its move out of the soundstages and into real locations, its use of nonprofessional actors, its “stalking” of ordinary characters, its antifascist glue, and its extolling of the Resistance. But what are the continuities between the two cinemas? And what remains of one period in the next? How much did fascism ’s “cultural interventionism” in matters of cinema influence the education of the future protagonists of neorealism? If history does not proceed through jumps, we must acknowledge that the state and industrial policies of fascism contributed—albeit in fairly contradictory and unreflexive ways—to produce skills, technological and linguistic tools, motivations, and theoretical frameworks that became indispensable for the neorealist generation. Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and 20 vito zagarrio Alberto Lattuada, among others, found a fertile terrain for their ideological and stylistic innovations in the idea of cinema as “the most powerful weapon” (according to Lenin’s slogan rephrased by Mussolini); in the state’s investments ; in the attention paid to pivotal film industries (American, Soviet, German); in the creation of institutions and apparatuses such as Cinecittà, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and the Venice Film Festival; and finally in the development of the idea of skilled technicians (not just directors, but cinematographers, editors, stage designers, and so forth). Neorealist directors learned their craft and formed their authorial identities either under, during, or in opposition to the fascist regime. Hundreds of electricians, cameramen, stagehands, and other film workers also refined their skills in the Italian cinecittà of this very period. The Generation of the “Redeemed” At times, continuity may seem opportunism, as it does in Mirella Serri’s I redenti (The Redeemed), a book whose thesis has become somewhat popular in Italy and with which I disagree.3 The “redeemed” are those intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s who lived two lives, the first under and with fascism and the second in the aftermath of the regime’s fall and during the cultural hegemony of the Left. Serri places Roberto Rossellini in this group of intellectuals who lived “twice,” between continuity with and redemption from fascism. Rossellini’s birth as a director certainly does not date to the neorealist “war trilogy” (Roma, città aperta, Paisà, Germania anno zero) but predates to the fascist “war trilogy” (La nave bianca, Un pilota ritorna, L’uomo della croce). Serri seems taken aback by this ambiguity of Rossellini’s: the three fascist films deal strategically with the three branches of the fascist war machine—the navy, the air force, the army; Il Duce’s son, Vittorio Mussolini, collaborated on Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942); L’uomo della croce (Man with a Cross, 1943) was remarkable for its anticommunism. How can Rossellini, in just about two years, tell first the story of an anticommunist priest (the protagonist of L’uomo della croce) and then the story of an antifascist and procommunist priest (Don Pietro/Aldo Fabrizi in Roma, città aperta [Rome, Open City, 1945])? Serri’s chapter on Rossellini ends with a line that also serves as the chapter’s title: “Dall’Odeon all’Odeon [From Odeon to Odeon].” The Odeon Theater exhibited L’uomo della croce just a few months before it showed Roma, città aperta. “The great artist,” Serri writes, “was able to grasp the political reality, as his friend, screenwriter Sergio Amidei remarked, somewhat tongue-in-cheek...

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