Italian Neorealism

When the war ended, Italian filmmakers walked out of the ruined studios and found their sets already standing: the bombed streets.

Rossellini shot Rome, Open City in the just-liberated city with whatever film stock could be found, and the grain of it reads as fact. The rules were plain: real places, real faces, the poor as the subject, and De Sica cast a factory worker as the father in Bicycle Thieves. For seven years the movement made poverty visible to the world, which gave it prizes while Italy’s own government complained the laundry should have stayed inside. Umberto D., the last of the line, follows an old man and a dog nobody wants; De Sica dedicated it to his father.