ABSTRACT
The two prevailing explanations for Italian Neorealism’s success in the United States imagine seemingly incommensurate American spectators. Traditional histories suggest that the acutely realist images of postwar Italian fi lms appealed to the average American’s budding humanism. Here, Neorealist fi lms tap into the American spectator’s newfound concern for protecting the humane in world politics and respond to his growing interest in the ethical imperative to establish a global community. By contrast, revisionist histories, which locate the origins of art cinema in low-genre fi lms, argue that audiences fl ocked to Neorealism for its uncensored revelation of the corporeal. An attraction to the rawness of the realist image, not noble concern, defi nes this second spectator. Hollywood’s restricted manner of representing the body left the American moviegoer hungry for graphic encounters with the sordid and indiscreet. Neorealism fed that appetite. I propose that these two accounts actually describe two moments in a single spectatorial protocol. In what follows, I reconsider America’s embrace of the Neorealist image, and in doing so, I discover an emerging complementary relationship between the postwar subject’s aspiration to
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join an ethical world citizenry and that same subject’s desire for explicit images and cheap thrills. I also suggest the Neorealist image actually lies precisely at the intersection of sensational rawness and world understanding, and that the spectatorial mode it encourages tracks between the two supposedly antithetical poles of affective engagement and reasoned humanism.
