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52 THE ROLE OF DOCUMENTARY FILM IN THE FORMATION OF THE NEOREALIST CINEMA luca caminati The importance of the debates on the nature of realism in art and mass culture and on the role of nonfiction films in the formation of the fascist culture forces scholars not only to reevaluate the role of the documentary in the Italian context but also to rewrite the narrative of the genesis of neorealism as part of the evolving discourses on Italian modernity.1 Documentary and newsreels played a key role in the process of modernization brought forward by the Italian fascist regime, both as documentations of the successes of governmental initiatives (the images of Il Duce leading the way in all fields of modernization are a staple of this period) and as integral parts of a thrust toward a more direct engagement with reality.2 On both the formal and ideological levels, the bond between neorealism and documentary form has been considered self-evident , a point of view that is reflected in the scholarship: Even a quick survey of histories of Italian cinema immediately points to the documentary quality of neorealist filmmaking, making a tie between the two on the basis of their shared “realist” ambitions.3 Bill Nichols’s account of this relationship, Mariano Mestman notes,4 sounds attractive because it is reminiscent of the historical order of things: The realism that characterizes the documentary dates back to the Lumière brothers, turning into an aesthetic and political motif in the hands of Dziga Vertov, Robert Flaherty, and John Grierson. In his discussion of the shared qualities of the two modes of filmmaking, Nichols enumerates the fictional representation of “time and space in experience as it is lived,” the combination between “the searching eye of the documentary and the intersubjective , identifying strategies of fiction, and the prioritisation of victims as subject-matter.”5 The notion of a predominant “social mission” separated the documentary from fiction and show business, “but thanks to the Neo-realist movement in postwar Italy, documentary realism found an ally to its ethic call in the field of fiction, as a form of responsible and often committed representation of history.”6 53 Documentary Film in Formation of Neorealist Cinema While it is widely acknowledged that neorealism shows strong documentary qualities, the exact nature of this relationship (in terms of the history of reception of documentary by neorealist practitioners and mutual influence between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking) has never been fully explored.7 Many reasons account for this historiographical lacuna. Many postwar film and cultural critics (those who first wrote the history of neorealism) certainly were fully committed to differentiating both the new cinema and themselves from any cultural product tainted by the ideology of the fascist era.8 Rather than looking back at fascist cinema—or more generally, films produced during the fascist period (following Steven Ricci’s distinction)—all intellectuals looked geographically outside of Italy and temporally to an antecedent period to systematize the cultural milieu of the new postwar cinema.9 Moreover, film historians have associated prewar documentary with LUCE newsreels, known for their didactic and/or propagandist overtones, without taking into consideration the rich production of other types of nonfiction films.10 On a more complex ideological/cultural level, this omission may reflect the cultural bias, established by criticism derived from Benedetto Croce’s idealist aesthetics, against documentary as “nonartistic.” And given neorealism’s status as modernist cinema par excellence, this omission may reflect a particular—liberal— reading of neorealism as above all a form of art cinema, uncontaminated by such “low” forms as documentary. The insistence of early Italian film historians (such as Umberto Barbaro and Carlo Lizzani) on literary and painterly indigenous sources reflects precisely this anxiety regarding artistic hybridity and miscegenation.11 My research shows that a lively Italian cinematic culture in the 1930s and 1940s generated an interesting though small body of documentary films and a very dynamic cultural debate on the issue of realism in the arts and in cinema in particular. This essay addresses the historical connections between the rise of the documentary in the 1920s–30s, its reception in Italy and its effects on both critical discourse and filmmaking practices, and the formation of neorealism. Thus the structure of this essay is twofold. First, it is concerned with the ideological and political implications of the post-facto narrative of the genesis of neorealism as a way of re-creating...

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