ABSTRACT
Italian film not only has good directors, it also has excellent cinematog raphers, among whom Aldo Tonti (a.k.a. G. R. Aldo) is probably one of the best in the world. To be sure, a cinematographer’s art may lie in the direction of self-effacement, and Tonti has given us evidence of this. But it seems that in the last few years, more and more plastic composition has become the rule. This has become a way of integrating into realism a vivid and ornate theatricality, which is no less characteristic not only of Italian film but also of Italian artistic sensibility in general. One could even argue that this synthesis is more radically new than the neorealism of Bicycle Thieves (1948), which has always been present, as we know, in Italian film, even if not to so great an extent. Opposed to it was the pub lic’s more pronounced taste for spectacles with magnificent sets and mammoth crowds. In La Terra Trema (1948), for instance, one sees very well how Luchino Visconti, whose wonderful Ossessione (1942) had initi ated the rebirth of Italian realistic cinema, strives to create a necessarily grand synthesis between the most rigorous verisimilitude, on the one hand, and the most plastic composition, on the other-a plasticity that necessarily completely transforms the verism. Whereas the taste for spec tacular grandeur expressed itself in the past through the fame of the star, the magnitude of the set, or the number of wild animals deployed, it has come today to be totally subordinate to the most modest, down-to-earth subject matter. Visconti’s fishermen are real fishermen, but they have the bearing of tragic princes or operatic leads, and the cinematography con fers on their rags the aristocratic dignity of Renaissance brocade.
