ABSTRACT
In 1952, Life magazine predicted that Italian cinema would pose an increasing commercial threat to Hollywood’s domination of the US market if Italy continued to produce both “provocative films” and “provocative beauties” (“Italian Film Invasion” 1952). Indeed, Life traces the recent American success of these European imports to the seemingly contradictory lures of the realist image: the “raw honesty” of films like Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1946) derives, Life argues, from both their “moral conscience” and their “frank treatment of sex and violence.”1 Here, Neorealism provokes American spectators in two ways: it forces them to confront the urgent relevancy of foreign matters, while at the same time overwhelming them with prurient views of imperiled bodies. Above the headline “Italian Film Invasion,” for example, the magazine supplies a promotional still from a recent import to illustrate the characteristic allure of this new and raw aesthetic. The caption reads: “Heroine of new Italian film Voice of Silence, a decent girl led into delinquency, sells off her clothes to get money to buy a car” (107).2 For Life, the still “sums up the mixture of sex and naturalism which is the trademark of the postwar Italian film.” The right-hand side of the image shows the back of a young woman’s bare legs and arms. The body of this “half naked girl” looks awkwardly exposed and vulnerable-her flesh indecently white against the gloss of her high heels and the sheen of her black satin undergarments. Her legs hang as limp as her arms and are suspended in front of a crowd of smartly dressed young men and boys. This image raises the question: how was the American spectator for Neorealism envisioned during this period? Any attempt to theorize the arrival of Italian post-World War II cinema on movie screens across the USA must contend with two divergent accounts of the mid-century American filmgoer that emerge during this period. On the one hand, critics suggested that the unprecedented success of Neorealist films such as Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette, 1949, Vittorio De Sica), Shoeshine (Sciuscià, 1947, De Sica), Paisian (Paisà,1948, Rossellini), Germany Year Zero (Germania anno zero, 1949, Rossellini), and Open City indicated the new commercial
viability of “human interest” stories (Verdone). For perhaps the first time, moreover, distributors and theater owners believed that by appealing to humanitarian concerns and global communalism a film could increase its boxoffice receipts (Thompson and Bordwell 2003). Here, Neorealism’s success would echo André Bazin’s original aspirations for these films, which he thought would “open the hearts of everyone” and, at the same time, confirm the existence of “a wide moral audience among the Western nations” (1971, 71, 20). On the other hand, Neorealism’s US promotion often emphasized the salacious character of these imported films, suggesting that their commercial viability depended upon the films’ unique exposure of a sexualized and/or violated body. These contrasting accounts of humanitarianism and prurience combine in Life magazine’s imagining of Neorealism’s audience. At first glance, we see the magazine aligning us-and, implicitly, the US audience for Neo-
realism-with the young male viewers in the photograph. As readers and as members of a potential audience for foreign films, we are asked to join the voyeuristic crowd. We provide another set of leering wide eyes-our mouths agape-focused on a body. Our spectatorship is correlated to the boys’ reactions: their eager eyes stand in for the American audience for imported films. However, the boys themselves are not only a corollary of our gaze. They are also its object. The limpness, nakedness, and blankness of the woman’s body forces us to ask serious questions about why and how these boys ended up partaking in this scenario in the first place. In this context, the woman’s body starts to look both sexualized and imperiled. In fact, upon closer inspection, some of the boys appear more troubled and disoriented than stimulated. This image ultimately illustrates how the realist film’s “raw honesty” invites two gazes at once: one of titillation, but also one of concern. If Neorealism invites both the socially concerned contemplative gaze of art cinema and the sensationalized voyeuristic gaze of exploitation cinema, then should we simply describe its audience as an incoherent bundle of contradictions? The simple answer is no. It is widely accepted that film audiences are internally diverse composite entities that often fail to confirm the coherence of industrial reception categories. Nor do they line up neatly with any particular social grouping that exists outside of the movie theater. Yet this fact should not dissuade us from analyzing how a period’s dominant discourses imagine reception, anticipate engagement, and in so doing condition the sociopolitical remunerations of filmgoing. Over the course of this chapter, I plan to do just that by returning to the archive of Neorealism’s US promotion and criticism to see how it articulates a vision of a mid-twentieth-century American spectator who is both less contradictory and more politically coherent than recent historicism would suggest. The orthodoxy of current film reception history understands the audience as a multifarious shape-shifter who makes a mockery of spectatorship theory. When applied to mid-century America, I argue, this intense focus on the pluralism of the spectator obscures an emergent ideal spectator envisaged by these films and their US advocates. What this imaginary viewer tells us about actual audiences is empirically inconclusive. However, I believe that apprehending this spectator-whom elsewhere I dub “the bystander”—is crucial for understanding the political aspirations of these films and for reassessing their supposed progressive impact (Schoonover). Many histories of mid-century filmgoing anecdotally mention that Neorealism was often marketed as a quasi-pornographic spectacle, but rarely does the nature of this promotion significantly color historical accounts of the transitioning postwar film industry and its consumers. In his meta-critical essay, “Art, Exploitation, Underground” (2003), however, Mark Betz usefully identifies a “yes, but” gesture in the conventional historiography on this period: yes
Neorealism drew audiences by promising lurid content, but the popularity of these imports also points to the moral and cultural ascendancy of US audiences. This rhetorical evasion attempts to protect the idea of the newly reformed American viewer. In other words, this strategy sidelines any details that do not confirm conventional narratives of the American viewer’s moral and cultural improvement after World War II. The “yes, but” gesture is only one way that historians retrofitted the duality of the realist image. A second strategy, also noted by Betz, revels in Neorealism’s bi-vocal hailing of audiences, recognizing its heretical contradiction as historically significant. This inconsistent address is seen as either a harbinger of the fluid spectatorial affinities of the mid-century filmgoer or a symptom of a quasi-poststructuralist implosion of high and low genres. Coded taste distinctions that were once assumed to segregate social groups are, upon closer inspection, turned topsyturvy by this period’s texts, resulting in a leveling of cultural hierarchies. More recent studies approach the duality of Neorealism’s address to US audiences by adopting a third strategy: a partial embrace of contradiction. Barbara Wilinsky, for example, draws on discourse theory to argue that Neorealism’s promotion marks an “inconsistent public rhetoric” (2001, 67). For this historian, contradictions in this promotion’s doublespeak symptomatically expose the nature of an emerging arthouse ideology, where commercial interests commingle with a sociocultural mission of goodwill and art snobbery. In their efforts to ignore, account for, or repurpose the duality of the realist image, each of these critical strategies clings to certain ethical ambitions for the midcentury audience. Since this duality of the realist image troubles recent scholars more than it did criticism from the period, however, these more recent approaches seem committed to distinguishing ethos from pathos in a way that this period’s film culture did not. In the third strategy, for example, lurks an implicit moralism. Does the fact that viewers came to these films for cheap thrills necessarily contaminate the idea that Neorealism helped establish an audience aware of their global citizenry? Must ethical humanism begin with a bracketing of affect? Positing hybridity, inconsistency, or multiplicity as an endpoint of our analysis of these audiences evades the possibility that this apparently contradictory address actually cues a single spectatorial protocol. Furthermore, the critical strategies described above distract us from how adroitly the period navigates the realist image and its draw on the viewer. Refusing to preserve a traditional division between pathos and ethos, the realist image that emerges from the US promotion of Neorealism is, I want to argue, principled and illicit at once. It is simultaneously artful and trashy, sensitively observant and brazenly beguiling, morally attuned and salaciously corporeal, intellectually rigorous and dissolutely excessive. Even if we account for the various industrial shifts in censor-
ship, theater ownership, and product shortages, it remains clear that many Americans came to Neorealism for precisely this duality. I also want to emphasize that early advocates of these films did not see the duality of the realist image as a contradiction. Critics, distributors, promoters, and exhibitors depended upon the term “realism,” I claim, not only as a code word for carnally explicit content (as Thomas Guback and others suggest), but also to reference a new practice that allows otherwise incommensurate extant modes of filmgoing to merge into a single viewing practice. As Betz states, art and exploitation cinemas “proceeded not simply as parallel alternate modes of film practice, but as shared discourses and means of address” (2003, 204). The postwar realist image made previously distinct, inflexible, and opposing categories of spectatorship suddenly appear analogous, coterminous, or commingled. In other words, the promotional materials and criticism from this period are uniquely sensitive to the competing lures of the realist film image and uncommonly aware of postwar filmgoing as an experience that invokes, enlists, and manages the viewer’s multiple and conflicted identifications with the world onscreen. What we might today mistake for contradiction or inconsistency was in fact the invention of a new politics of engagement. Take, for example, Harold Barnes’s review of Germany Year Zero, which proclaims that the film is “relentless,” “savage and shattering” (1949, 18). In spite of this “inexorable impact” on the viewer (or perhaps because of it), the film is able to make a “coldly dispassionate appraisal” of the situation it depicts. As does Barnes, Neorealism’s early advocates repeatedly posit sensate spectating as an experience integral to the new American postwar humanism. In their view, the experiential structure of the realist image works by assaulting the viewer with both an ethical plea and affective onslaught. In this account of realism’s impact, an acutely postwar version of humanism appears in which somatic arousal grounds geopolitical sympathy and spectatorial sensation underwrites political judgment. In its concomitant address to both charitable humanism and puerile curiosity, I want to suggest, the realist image thus mirrored the structures of sympathy and disengagement underwriting large-scale international aid. Returning to Life’s use of the still from Voice in this context, the unusual point of view that the realist image grants us comes into focus. In that image, our gaze originates from an extremely low and slightly canted angle that lends our perspective an exteriority. Alongside the image’s contextualization by the article, this exteriority suggests that our relationship to corporeal spectacle does not exactly overlap with that of the audience of boys pictured. We are detached onlookers who both take in the spectacle of the female body and watch that body’s viewing audience.3 If Life’s text uses the photograph to allegorize the US spectator’s encounter with recent Italian cinema, then we
discover that realism not only expands the parameters of what the movie screen contains but also revises the terms of our engagement with that screen. The realist image provokes curiosity, generates enthrallment, and offers a venue for increased awareness through its lurid and unseemly implications. However, according to Life magazine’s visualization of Neorealist spectatorship, the viewer often encounters the most startling of Neorealism’s spectacles through an exterior viewpoint. In this sense, if the realist image supplies the immediacy of affect, it also offers the viewer the comforts of subjective alterity. The writings of Manny Farber channel this movement between affect and alterity. In his review of Open City, Farber never quite resolves how depictions of war-torn Italy impact him (1946). He begins his assessment as if beleaguered by the film, suggesting that the onscreen world of worrisome destitution imposes wears and tears on the spectator. “There is a spirit of such depression, leadenness, consuming exhaustion and poverty in every note of . . . Open City that you wonder whether its extreme morbidity was intended” (1946, 46). Then suddenly Farber switches tone, delightedly spying on Italy’s sordid physical and moral disrepair: “a dope addict, a 15-year-old prostitute, plus a lot of people on the fringes of scenes who look wonderfully shady and as if they would murder you for car fare” (46). For this critic, realism allows the viewer to confront and dismiss his/her reactions to the wretchedness of war. For example, Farber is conscious of how the film depends upon displays of corporeality to secure the realism of the image and to build audiences: the actors’ bodies are all too convincingly worn-down and shrunken as a “wet string,” as if from “years-long strain, bread-crumb existence, tension, and rebellion.” “Open City shocks you because of its excessively realistic look,” but this realism is not without its pleasures-pleasures that Farber both critiques and indulges. He admonishes the film for attempting to exploit moments of “unseemliness” and sex to generate box-office revenue, only to then change his moral course mid-sentence by adding snidely that Open City’s treatment of sex should teach Hollywood how better to depict women undressing. We can trace a patterned repetition of alternating responses to the realist image in Farber’s essay. Despite the “burdensome, graveyard quality” of watching this “grayest of all war movies,” there are “flashes” when the film seems particularly fresh, and “these moments have the effect of a draft in the theatre.” These graphic sequences not only distinguish the film aesthetically but also provide the viewer with intermittent flares of voyeuristic glee that pop out of an otherwise worrisome mix of poverty and oppression. Each seems to offer Farber a kind of consumptive pleasure akin to rubber-necking or common somatic responses to fireworks: “[T]he most graphic scenes [of violence and suffering] develop with the burst and intensity of an oil-dump
fire.” For Farber, cinema itself may supply an effective device for juggling contradictory political affects: Neorealism invites viewers to experience the realist image as both overwhelming engagement and a means of divesture. Farber’s account demonstrates the contiguity of two otherwise opposite ethics of viewing. His constant alternation between immediate empathic response and distanced mediated viewing reflects neither the incidental doublespeak of crass commercialism nor any simple reshuffling of taste, class, and political allegiance. Rather, it evinces a historically productive rearranging of the political work of spectatorship. The new spectator that emerges in the imagination of this period is, like Farber, a moviegoer comfortable with his/ her schizophrenic oscillation between overwhelmed engagement and conscious detachment and ultimately reconciled to his/her paradoxically intimate distancing from the onscreen world. The Christian Science Monitor outlines a similar journeying for Germany Year Zero’s spectators.
