METHS300 Italian Neo Realism

This course concentrates on the key period of productivity by a body of filmmakers who became world-renowned during Italian Neorealism: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Beginning with Rossellin's Rome: Open City (1945), it traces some of the major aesthetic, political and spiritual considerations of a generation of young Italian filmmakers who sought a new culture to arise from the ashes of the defeat of Fascism as well as a new manner of exploiting cinema. The course concludes by considering the factors helping to explain the decline of Neorealism after the late 1960s as well as the later careers and intentions of its principal spokesmen both in relation to their works and to the changing conditions of the 1960s and 1970s. An important aspect of the concluding part will be to reevaluate the impact of the Neorealists' experiments on our understanding of cinema as the distinctly twentieth-century artform concerned with both the individual psyche and society at large.

Methods Seminars are in-depth, interdisciplinary investigations of a particular problem or theme. These seminars focus on ways of knowing the world characteristic of the disciplines represented in the seminar, such that the forms or methods of investigation are as important as the subject matter itself.