silver nitrate notes

Umberto D and the Last Days of Neorealism

28 aug 2016

Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D (1952) is, by most accounts, the last proper Italian neorealist film. The movement had been losing momentum since around 1949. The Italian government, no longer interested in films that showed Italy as a poor country, had begun subsidising only more commercial productions. De Sica, working with Cesare Zavattini on the screenplay for the last time, made Umberto D as an act of commitment to the method. The film was a commercial disaster on release. De Sica never returned to the style afterwards.

The cinematographer was Aldo Graziati (1905-1953), credited as G.R. Aldo, a Venetian working for the first time with De Sica. Graziati had trained as a stills photographer and had photographed four features before Umberto D. His method on this film was close to what Montuori had done on Bicycle Thieves: wider framings than composition required, available light, faces held at conversational distance.

The protagonist is Umberto (Carlo Battisti), a retired civil servant on a pension too small to pay his rent. The film follows him over several days in Rome as he tries to find a way to keep his apartment and, failing that, to find a home for his dog Flike. Battisti was not an actor. He was a retired philologist from the University of Florence whom De Sica had found on the street. The performance is exactly calibrated because Battisti is not acting. He is being an old man who has a problem.

The sequence that survives in every discussion of the film is the one where the young maid Maria (Maria-Pia Casilio) wakes early and prepares coffee in the kitchen. The sequence lasts several minutes. Maria grinds beans, puts water on, lights the stove, watches the coffee brew, fills a cup, looks out the window at a cat on the roof, sits at the table. Nothing happens. The sequence is still. This is what Zavattini had been calling for in his theoretical writings: a cinema of empty time, of the details of ordinary life photographed in their actual duration. Other directors had talked about this. De Sica and Graziati filmed it.

Umberto D is the film in which neorealism finishes its argument and stops. What Italian cinema did next was colour and spectacle. This was the coda.

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sources
[1] Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Continuum, 3rd ed. 2001.
[2] Cardullo, Bert. Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter. McFarland, 2002.
[3] Zavattini, Cesare. "Some Ideas on the Cinema," Sight and Sound, October 1953.
[4] Bazin, André. What Is Cinema?, vol. 2. University of California Press, 1971.