ABSTRACT
Focusing on Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (1949, Bitter rice), this chapter investigates Italian neorealism as an archive of mediatized musical memory with special reference to the multifaceted subject of popular music during the immediate post-war years in Italy. The musical texture of Riso amaro can thus be characterized by the neorealist duality between diegetic musical numbers and a non-diegetic film score. The diegetic music is dialectically layered by juxtaposing field-recorded folk tunes of the female paddy workers—mondine—with American-influenced boogie-woogie. From a narrative perspective, the folk chants act as a manifestation of the mondine’s collective identity while the erotically charged boogie-woogie dance scenes convey the main character’s embodied urge for self-determination and her illusive and tragic attempt to escape her socioeconomic condition. Finally, Goffredo Petrassi’s revisiting of folk and jazz tunes in his symphonic score can be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate the popular music register within a modernist framework—a response to the rhetorical overuse of folklore and to the censorship of jazz during the fascist era. This chapter examines the interactions and clashes of these musical layers by highlighting Riso amaro’s multi-authorial and even contradictory musical testimony.
