Italian Neorealism

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The neorealist movement began in Italy at the end of World War II as an urgent response to the political turmoil and desperate economic conditions afflicting the country. Directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti took up cameras to focus on lower-class characters and their concerns, using nonprofessional actors, outdoor shooting, (necessarily) very small budgets, and a realist aesthetic. The best-known examples remain De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a critical and popular phenomenon that opened the world’s eyes to this movement, and such key earlier works as Rossellini’s Open City, the first major neorealist production. Other classics of neorealism include De Sica’s Umberto D. and Visconti’s La terra trema, but the tendrils of the movement reach back to De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us and forward to Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis, as well as to some filmmakers who did their apprenticeships in this  

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Umberto D.

Vittorio De Sica

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Rome Open City

Roberto Rossellini

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Paisan

Roberto Rossellini

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The Children Are Watching Us

Vittorio De Sica

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New German Cinema

Written and signed by two dozen German filmmakers pledging themselves to “the new German feature film,” the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto boldly announced the arrival of New German Cinema, with young, innovative, and politically radical directors taking up arms against the propriety of West German society and its failing film industry.

 

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Jean Renoir

The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was also a master of his medium: cinema. After making his mark with two very different films, Boudu Saved from Drowning and The Lower Depths, Renoir closed out the thirties with two humanistic studies of French society that routinely turn up on lists of the greatest films ever made.

 

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Christa Lang-Fuller’s Top 10

Author and actor Christa Lang-Fuller married director Samuel Fuller in 1967. In 1981, they founded Chrisam Films, which Lang-Fuller has continued to run since her husband’s death, in 1997. She coedited Fuller’s autobiography, A Third Face, for Random House and is currently writing a new book and working on two screenplays.