Brutal vision : the neorealist body in postwar Italian cinema / Karl Schoonover.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schoonover, Karl.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Realism in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Italy.

Motion pictures.

Italy.

Physical Description:

xxxiii, 283 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2012]

Summary:

Schoonover (film studies, Michigan State U.) argues that the Italian neorealist school of cinema was interested in detailing the brutalized human body, and this interest underwrites the emergence of a new visual politics of liberal compassion the he calls "brutal humanism." He shows how Rossellini's 1945 Rome Open City, De Sica's 1946 Shoeshine and 1948 Bicycle Thieves, and other postwar Italian films used scenarios of physical suffering to dramatize the political stakes of vision and the need for an outside, extra-national eyewitness. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Contents:

Introduction

An inevitably obscene cinema: Bazin and neorealism

The North Atlantic ballyhoo of liberal humanism

Rossellini's exemplary corpse and the sovereign bystander

Spectacular suffering: De Sica's bodies and charity's gaze

Neorealism undone: the resistant physicalities of the second generation

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780816675548

0816675546

9780816675555

0816675554

OCLC:

759909854