ABSTRACT
In the late 1920s and early ’30s, just as cinemas around the world were transitioning to sound, many Neorealist painters adopted film aesthetics in their paintings to communicate a number of cultural crises. This chapter asserts that film served as a model for visualizing modernity in a manner similar to the camera obscura during the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The cinema provided the Neorealists with the aesthetic means to visualize their experiences of alienation wrought by the Great Depression and rapid-paced modernization. By eliciting a paragone between painting and film, these artists revealed both the strengths and limitations of their chosen medium. This chapter makes a larger claim for the unseen contributions of film as both a novel aesthetic and as a communal experience, while also considering its impact on figurative painting more broadly, and on Magic Realism in particular.
Another version of this chapter appears in article form under the title “Dutch Neorealism and Cinema Magic: The Case for a Filmic Modernism” in Modernism/modernity (volume 30, no. 2, 2023).
