THEMES IN ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA: A STUDY OF THE 1940S AND 50S

The paper talks about various themes explored in Italian neorealist cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. During the 1940s and 1950s, Italian filmmakers responded to the artificiality of pre-World War II and Fascist films with a new movement called neorealism (Italian for "new reality"). The movement aimed to address the pre-war events and the social and economic issues that the war spawned realistically. The presentations of events/situations follow certain patterns like poverty, starvation, suffering and struggle for socio-economic justice. There is a clear-cut and distinct emphasis on characterization and the social milieu from which its thematic concerns grow. It aims to make films less glamorous and more helpful as a means of communication for the greater good. It could be suggested that while interacting with the socio-political realities of that period cinema was influencing and being influenced by it. The objective is to show that films do not just appear in a vacuum but are part and product of a specific political, historical, and cultural milieu. They can’t remain divorced from the socio-cultural and political relations of the period they belong to. The themes of anti-Fascism, problems of have v/s have-nots, unemployment, poverty, inequality, and their moral dimensions have been studied.  The de-dramatization of situations and the deviations in the portrayal, as evident in Miracle in Milan (1953), which has been compared with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have also been discussed.