The Fictional Worlds of Neorealism

NON-ACTORS, REAL LOCATIONS, unpolished cinematography, episodic narration—these are some of the most commonly cited traits of the loosely collected group of films known as Italian Neorealism. The list serves to foreground the documentary influence on the tradition. This is no surprise, given the documentary's close connection to questions of realism. The list is usually qualified by another list, emphasizing items such as continuity editing, sentimental story lines, and conventionally scored music tracks. These other techniques are cited to prove the point that Neorealism does not (and perhaps cannot) achieve its goal of capturing reality. The world of Neorealism is not captured, but constructed.

In this essay, it is not my intention to dispute the claim that the world of the Neorealist film is constructed; quite the contrary, I will affirm this claim repeatedly. I will, however, question the assumption that this concession compromises the realist agenda. Is it possible that Neorealism works by acknowledging fictionality, rather than trying to efface it?

Consider La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948), surely one of the most rigorous of all Neorealist films. Visconti could have made a documentary about Sicilian fishermen if he had wished to do so; instead, he made a fiction film, based on a literary classic. ¹ In spite of the use of non-actors and real locations, no one would mistake the film for a documentary. The staging is too careful, the photography too beautiful, the narrative too deftly constructed. Rather than see these marks of fictionality as mistakes, as fatal blows to the realist project, I suggust we see them as essential components of its realist agenda. La Terra Trema quite openly constructs a fictional world. To understand its realist agenda, we cannot simply bracket off the text's fictionality and argue that the film aims to represent the real world directly, in spite of that fictionality. Rather, we must develop a more complicated model, in which realist functions are openly mediated by the film's fictional world. ²

To accomplish this goal, I will turn to an often-overlooked model from literary theory: Benjamin Harshav's theory of Internal and External Fields of Reference. Harshav explained his theory in a series of important essays in the '70s and '80s, and he applied it to a range of literary examples, from modernist poetry to War and Peace. ³ Although film studies has a long tradition of taking inspiration from literary theory, Harshav's theory has not, to my knowledge, been applied to the study of film. Yet Harshav's complicated model is, I will argue, ideally suited to tackling the complex issues concerning Neorealism, because of his multifaceted approach to a range of questions concerning a text's interaction with the reader's beliefs about the world.

Harshav's theory starts with the assertion that works of fiction can and do refer to what does not exist in the "real" world. Although Harshav occasionally uses the term "fictional world," he prefers to speak of Internal frames and Fields of Reference. Harshav defines the frame of reference, or fr, as "any semantic continuum of two or more referents that we may speak about." ⁴ He explains:

We may distinguish frs of various kinds. An fr may be present to the interlocutors or absent; if absent, it may be known or unknown to the hearer. It can be "real," a concrete scene in time and space, or "ideal," a theory or an abstract concept (e.g. "existence" or "triangle"). An fr can have a unique description in time or be iterative ("they used to play"), or have any other undefined or unusual reality-relations; it may be a typical situation ("autumn") or highly individualized ("the crazy party in my garden on the 6th of October last year"). It may be real, hypothetical or fictional; its ontological status is unimportant for semantics—it is anything that we can speak about. ⁵

The Field of Reference is a broader concept, a "large universe containing a multitude of crisscrossing...