PICTURING REALITY IN POSTWAR ITALY: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MARIO GIACOMELLI IN RELATIONSHIP TO ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA 1945-1970 by SARAH A. ROBISON A THESIS Presented to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2014 ii THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Sarah A. Robison Title: Picturing Reality in Postwar Italy: The Photography of Mario Giacomelli in Relationship to Italian Neorealist Cinema 1945-1970 This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture by: Kate Mondloch Chairperson Jenny Lin Member Sergio Rigoletto Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation; Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2014 iii © 2014 Sarah A. Robison iv THESIS ABSTRACT Sarah A. Robison Master of Arts Department of the History of Art and Architecture June 2014 Title: Picturing Reality in Postwar Italy: The Photography of Mario Giacomelli in Relationship to Italian Neorealist Cinema 1945-1970 Critical interpretations of the work of Mario Giacomelli often disagree as to whether he should be classified within the style of Italian neorealism. This thesis argues that  Giacomelli’s  photography  strikes  a  balance  between  realism  and  abstraction  that  is   best explained as neorealist. Neorealist films such as Rome, Open City (1945) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) sought to capture the social realities of postwar Italy. The realism in these films is complicated however, subjecting postwar social actuality to the artistic initiative of the director. I  seek  to  identify  the  filmic  qualities  in  Giacomelli’s  work  to  clarify  a  connection   to neorealism. Though Giacomelli physically manipulated his images, these manipulations  give  his  images  the  appearance  of  a  film.  To  reveal  Giacomelli’s   connection to neorealism, I will investigate the cinematic qualities of mise-en-scene, montage and narrative. This thesis will argue that Giacomelli’s  photography  stems  from  a   cinematic approach that was first developed in neorealism. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Sarah A. Robison GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Miami University, Oxford, OH DEGREES AWARDED: Master of Arts, History of Art and Architecture, 2014, University of Oregon Museum Studies Graduate Certificate, 2014, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, 2011, Miami University Bachelor of Fine Arts, 2011, Miami University Honors Degree, 2011, Miami University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Museum Studies History of Photography PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Student Curator, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 2013-2014 Curatorial Research Intern, Cincinnati Art Museum, 2012-2013 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Graduate Teaching Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2012-2013, 2013-2014 Rome Program Scholarship, University of Oregon, 2013 Ina McClung Scholarship for Travel and Research, University of Oregon, 2013 Amy and Ross Kari Scholarship for Conference Travel, University of Oregon, 2014 Miami University Honors Program Award, Miami University, 2007-2011 vi Wallace and Lynn Volwiler Scholarship, Miami University, 2007- 2011 Judith Paetow George Ferris Award, Most Outstanding Student in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Miami University, 2009-2010, 2010- 2011 PUBLICATIONS: Robison,  Sarah  A..  “Locating  a  sense  of  place  and self: Pierre Daura and St. Cirq LaPopie.”  In  Placing Pierre Daura. exh. cat., Eugene, OR: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 2014 (pg no.s) vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express sincere appreciation to Professors Kate Mondloch, Jenny Lin and Sergio Rigoletto for their assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. Special thanks are due to Professor Rigoletto, whose wonderful course on Italian Postwar Cinema was instrumental in my conception of this topic. I also wish to express my gratitude to the staff of the Museum of Modern Art, Information and Photography in Senigallia, Italy for their warm welcome and support of my research. Finally, many thanks are due to my friends and family, without whose patience and support this thesis would have been impossible. I am particularly grateful to Alexander Newman, for his assistance in editing this paper and providing honest feedback. This project was made possible by the generous support of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 II. CONSTRUCTING REALITY: NEOREALIST MISE-EN-SCENE IN GIACOMELLI’S  EARLY  PHOTOGRAPHS ............................................................. 22 Choosing the Subject ............................................................................................. 22 Depicting the Subject ............................................................................................. 30 Composing the Shot ............................................................................................... 35 Movement .............................................................................................................. 39 The Close-Up ......................................................................................................... 41 III. SEQUENCING REALITY: NEOREALIST FORMS OF MONTAGE IN GIACOMELLI’S  PHOTOGRAPHS ........................................................................... 44 The Photomontage and the Double Exposure ........................................................ 44 Unusual Forms of Montage ................................................................................... 47 IV. A NEOREALIST PERSPECTIVE ON REALITY: THE NARRATIVE ............. 57 Neorealist  Form  in  Giacomelli’s  Photographic  Series: Structure .......................... 57 Giacomelli’s  Neorealist  Message:  Content ............................................................ 60 V. CONCLUSION:  MARIO  GIACOMELLI’S  CINEMATIC  PHOTOGRAPHY   IN THE LIGHT OF NEOREALISM ........................................................................... 70 APPENDICES A. FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 73 B. SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCES ......................................................................... 100 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 103 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Mario Giacomelli. Paesaggi, 1954-2000. .............................................................. 73 2. Mario Giacomelli. Prime Photo (01), 1953-1956. ................................................ 73 3. Mario Giacomelli. Prime photo (19), 1953-1956. ................................................ 74 4. Mario Giacomelli. Prime foto (20), 1953-1956. ................................................... 74 5. Mario Giacomelli. Death will come and it will have your eyes (45), 1953-1983. 75 6. Mario Giacomelli. I have no hands to caress my face (8), 1961-1963. ................ 75 7. Mario Giacomelli. I have no hands to caress my face (16), 1961-1963. .............. 76 8. Mario Giacomelli. I have no hands to caress my face (12), 1961-1963. ............. 76 9. Mario Giacomelli. I have no hands to caress my face (6), 1961-1963. ............... 77 10.      Film  Nitrate.  “Miracle  in  Milan/  Miracolo  a  Milano  (1951)”.  Tom Everson ...... 77 11. Mario Giacomelli. I have no hands to caress my face (15), 1961-1963. ............ 78 12. Mario Giacomelli. I have no hands to caress my face (1), 1961-1963. .............. 78 13. Mario Giacomelli. Scanno (2), 1957-1959. ........................................................ 79 14. Mario Giacomelli. Scanno (4), 1957-1959. ........................................................ 79 15. Mario Giacomelli. Scanno (5), 1957-1959. ........................................................ 80 16. Mario Giacomelli. One man, one woman, one love (2), 1960-1961. .................. 80 17.      The  Criterion  Collection.  “Roberto  Rossellini,  Paisan.” .................................... 81 18. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (4), 1964-1966. .......................................... 81 19. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (25), 1964-1966. ........................................ 82 20. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (28), 1964-1966. ........................................ 82 x Figure Page 21. Mario Giacomelli. L’approdo, 1953. .................................................................. 83 22.      But  What  She  Said.  “Rossellini’s  War  Trilogy:  Saved  by  grace.” ..................... 83 23. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (20), 1964-1966. ........................................ 84 24. Mario Giacomelli. Puglia (9), 1958. ................................................................... 84 25. Mario Giacomelli. Puglia (19), 1958. ................................................................. 85 26. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (2), 1964-1966. .......................................... 85 27. Mario Giacomelli. One man, one woman, one love (17), 1960-1961. ................ 86 28. Masterworks of World Cinema- Harvard  Film  Archive.  “Paisan.” .................... 86 29.      Versus  the  Screen.  “Studying  film:  Bicycle  Thieves  (1948)  Review.”   .............. 87 30.      My  Reviewer.com.  “Review  for  Germany,  Year  Zero”.  Curtis Owen ................ 87 31. Mario Giacomelli. Scanno (21), 1957-1959. ...................................................... 88 32. Mario Giacomelli. Homage to Spoon River Anthology (20), 1971-1973. .......... 88 33. Mario Giacomelli. Scanno (11), 1957-1959. ...................................................... 89 34. Mario Giacomelli. Puglia (26), 1958. ................................................................. 89 35. Mario Giacomelli. Scanno (13), 1957-1959. ...................................................... 90 36. Mario Giacomelli. Puglia (25), 1958. ................................................................. 90 37. Mario Giacomelli. Scanno (1), 1957-1959. ........................................................ 91 38. Mario Giacomelli. Puglia (16), 1958. ................................................................. 91 39. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (5), 1964-1966. .......................................... 92 40. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (33), 1964-1966. ........................................ 92 41. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (34), 1964-1966. ........................................ 93 42. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (42), 1964-1966. ........................................ 93 xi Figure Page 43. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (43), 1964-1966. ........................................ 94 44. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (52), 1964-1966. ........................................ 94 45. Mario Giacomelli. The Good Earth (56), 1964-1966. ........................................ 95 46.      USC  School  of  Cinematic  Arts.“School  of  Cinematic  Arts  Events.” .................. 95 47. Mario Giacomelli. One man, one woman, one love (20). 1960-1961. ................ 96 48. Mario Giacomelli. One man, one woman, one love (21). 1960-1961. ................ 96 49. Mario Giacomelli. One man, one woman, one love (22). 1964-1966. ................ 97 50. Mario Giacomelli. Homage to Spoon River Anthology (10). 1971-1973. .......... 97 51. Mario Giacomelli. Homage to Spoon River Anthology (11). 1971-1973. .......... 98 52. Mario Giacomelli. Homage to Spoon River Anthology (12). 1971-1973. .......... 98 53. Mario Giacomelli. Homage to Spoon River Anthology (13). 1971-1973. .......... 99 54.  Italy  Through  Film.  “Rome,  Open City.”   ............................................................. 99 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This thesis will investigate the work of the Italian postwar photographer Mario Giacomelli  in  relationship  to  Italian  neorealism.  Critical  interpretations  of  Giacomelli’s   work often disagree as to whether he should or should not be classified within the style of Italian neorealism. Through a historical and stylistic comparison of his work to the most prominent medium of neorealist discourse, Italian postwar cinema, this thesis argues that Giacomelli’s  photography  strikes  a  balance  between realism and abstract artistic vision that is best explained as neorealist. Giacomelli was an amateur, self-taught photographer. This lack of formal training allowed him to experiment and craft a graphic and expressive photographic style. In defiance of traditional ideas of good photographic technique, Giacomelli heavily manipulated his images both during shooting and in the darkroom. Despite his interventions  in  the  photographic  process,  Giacomelli’s  photography  has  its  roots  in   realism. Although he began his artistic career as a painter and professional typographer, Giacomelli turned to photography in the aftermath of World War II. He chose photography because of its correspondence to reality: as a more direct medium to express his experiences. Giacomelli was drawn to the indexicality of the photograph, whereby a direct imprint of an object placed in front of the lens is captured through the reflection of light. Despite the indexical relationship of the photograph to reality, the flexibility of the photographic process allows for manipulation. For Giacomelli, reality was the foundation, but strict realism was not the desired result. He has also stated that the 2 imagery of neorealist films inspired him to pick up a camera.1 Like Giacomelli, neorealist filmmakers relied on a foundation of reality, but employed various techniques to manipulate it. Rosselini, De Sica, Zavattini and Fellini. These are names that appear often in the scholarship  on  Giacomelli’s  photography.  Rarely,  however,  is  there  an  in depth analysis of why the connection between Giacomelli and the great neorealist filmmakers is so prevalent. For most scholars the visual and temporal commonalities between Giacomelli’s  photographs  and  neorealism  are  obvious  enough  to  stand  on  their  own.   Some  scholars  oppose  this  connection  on  the  basis  of  Giacomelli’s  manipulative   technique.  In  this  case,  manipulation  is  thought  to  be  in  opposition  to  the  “truth  value”   proposed by neorealism. Many  of  the  world’s  most  prominent  artists  and  filmmakers  have claimed they owe a great deal to the stylistic and thematic paradigms of neorealism, including Giacomelli.  Only  a  few  years  prior  to  the  beginning  of  Giacomelli’s  first  photographic   experimentations in late 1952, numerous films sought to capture the social realities of post World War II Italy. Critics later classified these films under the category of Italian neorealism.2 Although it is accepted that neorealism spans the years 1945-1952, the number  of  films  labeled  “neorealist”  varies.3 Most critics agree on seven key works in the 1 Mario Giacomelli, Mario Giacomelli (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1983), 9. 2 The  word  “neorealism”  was  first used in film criticism to describe French films of the 1930s, from which Italian neorealist filmmakers gained much of their inspiration and, in many cases, their early formal training. The name also references realist movements in Western literature, which illustrated the conditions of the peasant and working classes through a detached narrative style. For more information see Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007). 3 Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema 1896-1996 (London: Routledge, 1996), 93. Note: Sorlin states that there are anywhere from 20 to 50 neorealist films depending on the specificity of the critical scholar. 3 style:  the  three  films  of  Roberto  Rossellini’s  war  trilogy  Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948), director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s  Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1951) and Luchino  Visconti’s  The Earth Trembles (1948).4 These films represent neorealism proper, which with its close ties to the resistance movement of the mid 1940s quickly became outdated. By the early 1950s, the shift away from neorealism was felt by even the most committed neorealist directors. Rossellini himself sums up this tendency when he described his own change in style, [O]ne is moved to take up other themes, interest is shifted somewhere else, you have to take other paths; you cannot go on shooting in ruined cities forever. Too often we make the mistake of letting ourselves be hypnotized by a particular milieu, by the feel of a particular time. But life has changed, the war is over, the cities have been rebuilt.5 Although neorealist style continued to have an impact in Italian cinema, the social humanist themes of neorealism were left behind. There are many characteristics that comprise the style of Italian neorealist films. Their qualities include: on location shooting, lengthy takes, unobtrusive editing, natural lighting, a predominance of medium and long shots, respect for the continuity of time and space, use of contemporary subjects, an open-ended plot, working-class protagonists, a nonprofessional cast, vernacular dialogue, active viewer involvement and implied social criticism.6 Several of these characteristics refer to the aesthetic program established in the 4 Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 3. 5 Eric  Rohmer  and  Francois  Truffant,  “Interviews  with  Roberto  Rossellini,”  Cahiers du Cinéma 37, July 1954 (extract), translated by Liz Heron from Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 209. 6 Millicent Joy Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986),  22.  Note:  Marcus’s  rules  of  neorealism  provide  the  most  extensive description I have found thus far. 4 first  neorealist  film,  Rossellini’s  Rome, Open City.  Later  filmmakers  created  an  “illusion   of technical  poverty”  even  though  the  industry  had  surpassed  the  difficult  conditions  that   determined the look and feel of the earlier film.7 The aesthetic choices of neorealist directors resulted in films that resonated with contemporary audiences. More than anything, neorealist filmmakers wanted to depict the social issues of their time in a realistic way. Through realism, their goal was to inspire strong empathetic reactions in the viewer that would lead them towards a humanist response. No single film fulfills all of the characteristics of neorealism. Instead, each director developed their own neorealist style that simultaneously established the genre and pushed at its boundaries. In his celebrated 1970 analysis of neorealism, Patterns of Realism, scholar Roy Armes explains, Each great realist director evolved his own pattern of realism and used it to interpret a chosen facet of reality, and though collectively the important films of the neo-realists reflect the whole variety of Italian life, always the hand of the director is apparent, shaping the inchoate mass of material into an appropriate and satisfying form.8 For this reason, neorealist cinema is often analyzed through the style of individual directors rather than with a chronological focus. This is a method of the French film critics, the Cahiers,9 known  as  the  “auteur  theory”  (theory  of  the  director). It is this precedent that I will follow in my analysis of the movement as well. 7 Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 57. 8 Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism (South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1971), 22. 9 The name refers to the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma that was founded by a group of French critics, most predominantly André Bazin, in 1951. The magazine was highly influential for re-establishing the practice of critical film theory with a focus on fine art cinema. For more information see Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 5 The  beginning  of  Giacomelli’s  photographic  career  in  the  early 1950s coincides historically with the downfall of the purest form of Italian neorealism.10 By this time in postwar Italy, neorealist cinema was well known for propagating the desire for social and political  transformation.  Giacomelli’s  photographs  reacted  to this activist social disposition, but in a more personal way. Giacomelli was born into a poor family in the coastal town of Senigallia. He lived and worked in the Marche for his entire life and he took the majority of his photographs there.11 He was especially drawn to the vast plowed fields on the outskirts of the city and landscapes from his largest series, Paesaggi, make up much of the body of his oeuvre (fig. 1, see Appendix A for all figures). However, Giacomelli also explored an interest in human nature in many of his series. In the postwar period, the people of Senigallia, Giacomelli included, were disillusioned, restless, and hungry to move beyond wartime struggles.12 To capture this mindset, Giacomelli took many portraits of people from his community and sometimes traveled to other areas of Italy. These images explore the nuances of everyday life in postwar Italy and open up to more encompassing themes of temporality and human experience. 10 By the early 1950s, Italians desired a different depiction of their society. The country had moved past the rallying cry of social realism promoted during the mid 1940s. This was displayed in the box office failure of  De  Sica  and  Zavattini’s  Umberto  D.  of  1952.  Italy’s  minister  of  film,  Giulio  Andreotti,  publicly   criticized the negativity of the film and its hyper-realistic style. After the release of Umberto D., the Andreotti Law forced Italian films to be approved by the government for aesthetic and moral content before they could be produced. The law was the undoing of neorealism proper. Instead, most neorealist filmmakers moved away from social realism towards more personal themes and experimental styles of filmmaking. 11 The Marche region is characterized by farming communities and tourism along the coast. This is in keeping with the postwar economic profile of the north-east  and  center  of  Italy  as  “strong  agriculture  with an  industrial  base”  as  described  by  Silvana  Patriarca  in  her  essay,  “How  Many  Italies?  The  South  in   Official  Statistics”  from  Jane  Schneider,  Italy's "Southern question": Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 91. 12 Mario Giacomelli (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography,1983), 9. 6 Giacomelli’s  work  balances  between  its  ties  to  realism  and  his abstract artistic vision. The documentary subject matter of the rural people and landscape of his region is characteristic of neorealist film, yet his personal style is more poetic. He captured his subjects without interference, observing them closely just as the neorealist filmmakers did. After being inspired by his subjects, Giacomelli used exaggerated camera movements and darkroom processes to alter his images. The resulting photographs speak both to the reality that was before the lens and to his personal interpretation of it. Throughout his career, Giacomelli considered his photography to be a personal endeavor. For  him  it  was  an  emotional  outlet,  an  extension  of  himself.  He  said,  “I  am  satisfied  when   I  can  look  at  one  of  my  photographs  and  say:  “photography  is  my  way  of  loving.”  I  find  it   extremely beautiful to tear something away from nature, to assail it in order to capture the feelings  of  a  moment,  transformed  yet  again.”13 Giacomelli’s  formal  experiments  were   essential to the development of his ideas. He refused to let the camera do the work for him. His techniques were many: moving the camera while shooting, over and underexposing, the use of old or damaged film, hand printing on highly reactive photographic paper, scratching, collaging, cropping and double exposing. Through these manipulations, Giacomelli conceived of photography as a type of poetry that conveyed both the essence of his subjects and his own response to them. To communicate this poetic nature, Giacomelli composed his images in photographic series. He rarely titled individual photographs. Instead, he grouped the images together by subject and arranged 13 Mario Giacomelli, letter to Mr. Richard Craven, 11 May 1965, quoted in Antonella Russo, Viewpoints: Italy in Black and White, Photographs from the Prelz Oltramonti Collection (Milano, Italy: Skira, 2005), 58. 7 them in a particular order.14 This progressive organization of the photographs gives his work  a  narrative  quality.  Giacomelli’s  decision to title several of his series after famous poets or writers further enforces the poetic characterization of his narratives. As the decades progressed, Giacomelli began to recombine his earlier images: changing their order, series, or title to convey a new layer of meaning. The series of his later years reflect  his  life’s  work  but  are  increasingly  abstract.  For  this  reason,  Giacomelli’s  later   series are less subject to an analysis through the lens of neorealism. Therefore, this thesis will analyze the relationship  between  Giacomelli’s  photographic  production  between  the   1950s through the 1970s and the films produced during the height of neorealism. The source of the critical speculation linking Giacomelli and Italian neorealist cinema is the 1980 monograph on the artist written by the Italian photography scholar Arturo Carlo Quintavalle. The monograph is considered the seminal work on Giacomelli’s  photography,  and  it  provides  the  most  complete  collection  of  his   photographic series up until its publishing date. The monograph includes a brief analytical discussion of each of the photographic series. Throughout the book, Quintavalle  describes  the  “cinematic  quality”  of  Giacomelli’s  images  numerous  times   and connects them to a kind of cinematography seen in neorealism. He also mentions the names of prominent neorealist directors, but his brief comments fail to directly compare Giacomelli’s  photographs  to  the  films.  Further,  Quintavalle  diminishes  a  connection  of   Giacomelli to neorealist directors for his readers because he also connects Giacomelli to 14 Giacomelli labeled the back of each photograph with the series title and order number of the image within the sequence. 8 many other artistic movements.15 Although he situates Giacomelli in the course of the history of art, Quintavalle suggests so many artistic movements that they begin to cancel each other out. It appears that he is not trying to make a direct stylistic connection, but rather a reference point for his readers to ponder. Quintavalle’s  analysis  is  the  basis  for  the  debate  circling  Giacomelli  and   neorealism in the work of later scholars. The field is split between those who endorse Quintavalle’s  remarks  and  those  who  question  the  basis  of  his  arguments.  A  comparison   of two recent examples of scholarship highlights the range of opinions on this topic. First, in  his  essay  “Neo-realism?,”  author  Christian  Caujolle  argues  that a true neorealist photographic style in Italy does not exist. He believes this especially true in the classification  of  Giacomelli.  He  states  outright,  “Clearly  Giacomelli,  who  was  the  most   significant creator of images of his time, cannot be classified as a neo-realist.”16 He continues,  “[Giacomelli’s]  evident  preoccupation  with  reality  is  only  relevant  in  terms  of   how  he  managed  to  subliminate  it,  to  throw  it  into  crisis,  or  distance  himself  from  it.”17 Insisting that Giacomelli simply distorts reality on impulse, Caujolle claims that his images were created with a different mindset than neorealism. In support of his definition of neorealism, Caujolle employs the words of famed neorealist  critic,  André  Bazin.  Bazin  praised  neorealism  for  its  “technical crudity”  in   15 In  describing  Giacomelli’s  photographs,  Quintavalle  references  key  figures  from  the  history  of   photography including Nadar, Brassai, the American FSA photographers, Italian futurist photographers, the Surrealists, and other contemporary Italian photographers. He also discusses connections between Giacomelli’s  style  and  several  of  art  history’s  most  respected  painters,  including  the  old  masters Raphael and Rembrandt, cubists Picasso and Braque, and the French impressionists. For more information see Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Mario Giacomelli (Parma: Universitá di Parma in collaborazione con l'Assessorato alla Cultura del Comune di Parma e il patrocinio della Regione Emilia-Romagna, 1980). 16 Christian  Caujolle,  “Neo-realism?,”  from  Giovanna  Calvenzi,  Italia: Portrait of a Country Throughout 60 Years of Photography (Rome: Contrasto, 2003), 187. 17 Caujolle,  “Neo-realism?,”  188.     9 which the reality depicted correlated closely to the reality of what was before the lens. Bazin  deemed  this  approach  of  neorealist  films  as  being  against  “technical  aestheticism”   whereby the creators heavily edited the film.18 This denial of technical aesthetics in filmmaking  placed  the  films  closer  to  reality  through  what  Bazin  called  “ethical   aestheticism.”  For  this  reason,  neorealist  films  are  often  described  as  being   “documentary”  in  style.  Caujolle  echoes  this  argument  but  overlooks  its  implications. In Bazin’s  words  Caujolle  repeats,  “In  my  opinion,  Italian  cinema  should  be  applauded  for   remembering  once  again  that  there  never  was  “realism”  in  art  that  was  not  profoundly   “aesthetic”.”19 Both Caujolle and Bazin admit that neorealist films involve an aesthetic interpretation  of  reality,  yet  their  “realism”  requires  the  director  to  remain  truthful  in  the   process. Truth is subjective in this case; artistic process inherently involves manipulation. Bazin himself traced the roots of cinema to photography with this understanding. In his famous  essay,  “The  Ontology  of  the  Photographic  Image,”  Bazin  describes  the   photographic image as an imitation of reality that simultaneously creates a new reality. The new reality, as manipulated by the photographer, is a subjective one. These inherent manipulations  in  the  photographic  process  can  undoubtedly  be  deemed  “technical,”   despite the assertion that neorealist filmmakers denied a technical aesthetic. In neorealist films there are two forms of technical manipulation that combine to create the final film: mise-en-scene and montage. Both techniques involve subjective choices made by the filmmaker during the assembly of a film. The implied notion of a strict documentary style (which foregrounds objective truth in representation over personal interpretation) in 18 Ibid., 189. 19 André  Bazin,  “Bicycle  Thieves,”  from  Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 61. 10 neorealism is therefore problematic. The films are, first and foremost, fictional creations with a basis in reality. My research seeks to prove that it is in fact manipulation that solidifies  Giacomelli’s  connection to the neorealist movement. I will accomplish this by debunking  the  myth  of  the  “truthful”  neorealist  filmmaker  while  clarifying  that   Giacomelli’s  “truthfulness”  is  more  closely  tied  to  reality  than  it  initially  appears.       Caujolle does not take these  elements  into  account  when  asserting  that  Giacomelli’s   photographs are unrelated to neorealism, and this is perhaps the greatest downfall of his argument. In  striking  contrast  to  Caujolle’s  assertion  that  Giacomelli’s  style  is  opposed  to   neorealism,  scholar  Walter  Liva  has  placed  Giacomelli’s  work  as  the  culmination  of  a   neorealist photographic aesthetic in Italy. In the catalogue for the exhibition, Photography and Neorealism in Italy, 1945-1965, Liva describes the evolution of Italian photography groups in late 1940s and early 1950s in response to neorealism. Liva ascribes a neorealist aesthetic to photographs that follow the tradition of reportage and documentary  photography.  Rather  than  placing  Giacomelli’s  manipulated  photography   outside of neorealism,  Liva  places  Giacomelli  just  beyond  its  scope.  Liva’s  semi- neorealist classification of Giacomelli is questionable however. He bases his arguments solely  on  Giacomelli’s  series  of  the  early  1960s  and  ‘70s,  One man, one woman, one love (Un Umomo, una dona, un amore), and Homage to Spoon River (Omaggio A Spoon River) and ignores his earlier works. While Liva acknowledges Giacomelli as a seminal figure in the development of an Italian neorealist photographic style (he references Giacomelli throughout the text of the catalogue) he too refuses to associate Giacomelli with neorealism on the basis of his earliest images. 11 My  research  in  this  thesis  is  a  refutation  of  Caujolle’s  argument  and  an  extension   of the ideas put forth in the monograph by Quintavalle and the neorealist photography exhibition by Liva. In contrast to the work of these former scholars, my methods in this paper  are  more  concrete.  I  seek  to  identify  the  filmic  qualities  in  Giacomelli’s  work  in   order to clarify a connection to neorealism. This paper asks a simple question; where do we  see  the  evidence  of  a  connection  to  Italian  neorealist  cinema  in  Giacomelli’s   photographs? Giacomelli’s  photographs  display  a  strong  formal  connection  to  neorealist  films   through their distinctive cinematic qualities. Though he physically manipulated his images in a manner considered antithetical to the formal strategies of neorealist film directors, these manipulations give his photographic images the appearance of a film. Some of these manipulations include collage and double exposure of several images into one, an emphasis on movement, both of the camera and of the subjects, cinematic notions of framing, and the zoom from mid-length  to  closeup.  Even  the  seriality  of  Giacomelli’s   photographs adds to the cinematic nature of his work. It is as if the viewer is seeing an entire  scene  unfolding  rather  than  a  single  image.  Film  scholar  James  Monaco’s   description of the concerns of the filmmaker allows us to decode the technical processes behind  Giacomelli’s  cinematic  approach:  “Three  questions  confront  the  filmmaker:  what   to shoot, how to shoot it, how to present the shot. The province of the first two questions is  mise  en  scene,  that  of  the  last,  montage.”20 Monaco establishes the choice of subject matter and technique as mise-en-scene,  a  French  term  for  “staging,”  and  the  assembly  of   single  image  frames  or  “shots”  as  montage,  from  the  French  “monter,”  meaning  “to   20 James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981), 148. 12 assemble.”21 The formal elements of mise-en-scene and montage combine to form a greater plot or story: the narrative.22 Narrative  is  defined  in  film  studies  as  “the  distinctive   qualities  of  storytelling”  in  cinema.23 This includes both the construction of a story or “plot”  and  the  development  of  a  underlying  message  or  “theme”  that  the  plot  conveys.   Through these cinematic qualities, mise-en-scene,  montage  and  narrative,  Giacomelli’s   neorealist approach can be analyzed. Building on these basic definitions, a more nuanced understanding of mise-en- scene, montage and narrative is necessary to apply them to neorealism, and further, to Giacomelli. The first chapter of this thesis will explore the concept of mise-en-scene. Although mise-en-scene  is  understood  as  “staging,”  it  more  broadly  describes  the  process   of transformation of a film from the words of the script to an image that is carried out by the director.24 Presupposing that the director also chose the content of the film before a script was written, mise-en-scene also includes the choice of the subject. In film studies, the term mise-en-scene can convey both the  processes  of  “putting  in  the  scene”  and  the   total  “construction  of  the  scene.”25 It is the later definition that this thesis will employ. The term was described in the French film critical magazine Cahiers du Cinéma as providing  “the  means  by  which  the auteur expressed his thought... and thus also the 21 Steven Blandford, Keith Barry Grant, and Jim Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary (London: Arnold, 2001), 149-150. 22 Ibid. 23Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell, "narrative/narration," A Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford University Press, 2012), http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199587261.001.0001/acref- 9780199587261-e-0460, accessed April 28, 2014. 24 Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave, 9-11. 25 Blanford, Grant, and Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary, 149. 13 means  by  which  the  auteur  is  critically  discovered,  analyzed.”26 Mise-en-scene can be understood  as  the  director’s  style.  This  is  expressed  through  the  choices  that  are  routinely   made by a director. These choices  include  the  “staging”  aspects  of  the  film  before  it  is   shot (set design, lighting, hair and makeup, etc.) as well as choices made by the director during the shooting process (camera distance, framing and composition, camera movement and actor direction).27 Bazin describes the most desirable use of mise-en-scene in neorealist films as follows: If the event is sufficient unto itself without the director having to shed any further light on it by means of camera angles, or purposely chosen camera positions, it is because it has reached that stage of perfect luminosity which makes it possible for an art to unmask a nature which in the end resembles it.28 For Bazin, the director should interfere with composition as little as possible during shooting and simply let the camera capture reality, rather than construct it. Though capturing reality may be the end goal in appearance, it was not the process actually used for most neorealist films. In order to recreate reality, neorealist directors chose recognizable contemporary subjects and made choices in staging (shooting on location, choosing actors for their physical appearance, use of natural light) and shooting (preference for medium and long shots, long takes and simple camera movements). The result of these choices is a film that closely resembles the experience of viewing a real event. Bazin thus praises the mise-en-scene of neorealism for resembling nature, not for capturing nature itself. With the understanding that neorealist mise-en-scene creates the experience of viewing an event through a resemblance to reality, my analysis of 26 Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave, 11. 27 Blanford, Grant, and Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary, 149-150. 28 Bazin,  “Bicycle  Thieves,”  71. 14 Giacomelli’s  mise-en-scene will explore how his choices of contemporary subject matter, staging and shooting create a similar viewing experience. Chapter Two will explore  the  use  of  montage  in  Giacomelli’s  photography  as  it   relates to neorealist cinema. After translating the script into visual images through choices in mise-en-scene, neorealist filmmakers combined their images to construct the final film through the process of montage. Montage is a heated topic in neorealist discourse, as Bazin places it squarely in opposition to the more truthful mise-en-scene. Bazin  praised  neorealist  directors  for  their  rejection  of  “manipulative”  forms  of  montage,   such as the abrupt cutting of earlier Soviet cinema.29 He calls this tendency of neorealism a  “total  absence  of  the  effects  of  montage,”  by  which  he  means  not  a  total  absence  of  the   process, but of a non-deceptive use of it.30 Bazin preferred the viewer to interpret a film based on the construction of the image itself, defined as mise-en-scene, which in neorealism creates the experience of viewing reality.31 Therefore, Bazin condemned processes of montage whereby the director provided a single interpretation of a scene through juxtaposition of specific images.32 Despite  Bazin’s  polarization  of  mise-en-scene 29 Soviet cinema is most often associated with Sergei Eisenstein, a film director of the early to mid 20th century, is famous for his theorization of montage in cinema. As early as the 1920s, he wrote several essays that  explored  the  concept  of  montage  as  based  on  “attractions,”  or  the  choice  of  highly  controlled  shots   with  particular  symbolic  relevance.  In  Eisenstein’s  conception,  these  “attractions”  are  then  juxtaposed  with   opposing images (through cutting from one image to the next) to create conflict. Conflict between images elicits specific associations in the mind of viewer and forces a strong emotional response. The process of montage  for  Eisenstein  is  one  of  complete  control  of  the  viewer’s  emotions  by  the  director,  in  contrast  to   montage that orders shots into a temporal sequence. 30 André  Bazin,  “The  Evolution  of  the  Language  of  Cinema,”  from  André  Bazin  and  Hugh  Gray,  What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 37. 31 “Introduction,”  Bert  Cardullo  ed.,  Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), xiii. 32 Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave, 11. 15 and montage, a return to their basic definitions (the construction of images and the sequencing of images) reveals that both are necessary components of the medium of film. Given  Bazin’s  interpretation  of  neorealism  as  “non-montage,”  what  does  montage   entail for neorealist filmmakers? In his explanation of neorealist montage, neorealist scholar  Christopher  Wagstaff  emphasizes  the  “meaningful”  nature  of  the  sequence.33 Montage, then, is not simply the ordering shots into a sequence; it is the act of composing instances  together  in  a  meaningful  way.  For  the  neorealists,  “meaningful”  was  most  often   the  opposite  of  “logical.”  Rather  than  relying  on  typical  montage  conventions  that  form obvious connections, neorealist directors wanted to be free to express reality as they saw fit. Freed of the restrictions of montage, they chose moments that they believed to be important rather than necessary. Therefore, montage in neorealism can best be described as  the  choice  of  “meaningful”  moments  followed  by  the  construction  of  these  moments   into  a  “meaningful”  sequence.  Through  a  similar  conception  of  montage,  this  thesis  will   argue  that  Giacomelli  also  chose  “meaningful”  moments  and  organized  them into sequences. The third chapter of this thesis will explore the concept of the narrative in Giacomelli’s  photography  and  neorealism.  Neorealist  cinema  is  known  for  characteristic   narrative  (or  “non-narrative”)  strategies  in  the  service  of  common  themes. Neorealist narratives do not rely on the traditional plot structure of beginning, middle and end, but rather take the form of individual episodes. These episodes often follow the interests of several characters (or a single character representative of a larger social category), which develops  themes  based  on  human  experience.  Through  Giacomelli’s  unique  form  of   33 Christopher Wagstaff, Italian neorealist cinema: an aesthetic approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 43. 16 visual storytelling and choice of postwar subjects, his work reflects these neorealist narrative structures and themes on several levels. Although some of these cinematic qualities have been mentioned by previous scholars, they have never been brought together in a cohesive argument. The  question  of  Giacomelli’s  connection  to  neorealism  lies  in  the  distinction  of   his abstracted photography as “realist”  and  “documentary.”  The  terms  “realism”  and   “documentary”  are  problematizing  in  any  theoretical  discussion  of  photography.  As  both   terms are a necessary component of my argument, I will qualify them here. The  term  realism  is  defined  as  “the  quality or fact of representing a person or thing  in  a  way  that  is  accurate  and  true  to  life.”34 When describing something as “realistic,”  one  is  implying  that  a  person,  place,  or  thing  has  already  or  has  the  potential   to occur in real life. The assertion that something  is  “realistic”  based  on  its  potential  to   occur  in  reality,  defined  as  “the  state  of  things  as  they  actually  exist,  as  opposed  to  an   idealistic  or  notional  idea  of  them,”  is  subjective,  as  is  the  “accurateness”  of  they  way  in   which a thing is portrayed.35 When discussing art, it is important to note that Realism is also  “an  artistic  or  literary  movement  or  style  characterized  by  the  representation  of   people  or  things  as  they  actually  are.”  Realism  as  a  movement  began  in  the  19th  century   as a sincere, unidealized portrait of contemporary life.36 Both realism and the 19th century movement of Realism are relevant to my discussion. 34 “realism,” Oxford Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2014), http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/documentary. 35 “reality,” Oxford Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2014), http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/documentary. 36 “realism,”  Oxford Dictionary Online, www.oxforddictionaries.com. 17 Documentary is a more specific term that has its roots in realism. At its simplest, documentary  can  be  defined  as  “consisting  of  or  based  on  official  documents.”37 In the introduction to Documentary from the series Documents of Contemporary Art, scholar Julian Stallabrass recognizes the complexity of the term. Its basis lies both in a relation to a real subject and to the maker’s  assertion  that  something  is  “documentary.”38 Stallabrass expands  his  definition  in  regards  to  film.  He  states,  “For  documentary  to  function   traditionally, its conventions have to remain invisible to the viewer, so that they remain in the accepted realm of framing or common sense, letting the subject seem to speak directly  to  the  viewer.”39 In  “traditional”  documentary,  the  hand  of  the  creator  appears   acceptably distanced to the viewer. With this flexibility of the term, artists have taken issue with it since its creation.40 Asserting that their work is documentary through the use of real subjects, an artist may use the term with the understanding that the degree to which  the  artist’s  hand  is  present  is  subjective.  This  subjectivity  is  inherent  in  the   mediums of photography and film; both depict real subjects and involve manipulation by the artist. With the subjectivity of documentary photography and cinema in mind, my research relies on the implication that either medium can be deemed documentary if the artist chooses to remain faithful to the reality that they depict. To  prove  my  argument  in  Giacomelli’s  case,  I  will  rely  on  the  work  of  previous   scholars who assert that the neorealist depiction of reality is one such case of an artistic interpretation of the term documentary. Neorealist films are considered documentary 37 “documentary,”  Oxford Dictionary Online, www.oxforddictionaries.com. 38 Whitechapel Gallery, London, Julian Stallabrass ed., Documents of Contemporary Art: Documentary, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 14. 39 Whitechapel Gallery and Stallabrass ed., Documentary, 14. 40 Ibid., 15. 18 because they are a personal interpretation of real subjects where the implied truth value is high. This does not mean, however, that the hand of the artist is absent in neorealism. Wagstaff asserts a similar re-definition of the documentary quality of neorealism. He states  that  “realism”  for  the  neorealists  meant  that  their  films  should  “function  to   penetrate  through  the  ‘external  elements’  to  the  ‘spirit’  of  the  people,  seen  in  terms  of   psychology  and  morality.”41 He  states  further,  “Whether  it  is  to  be  a  documentary  or  a   fiction  film  is  almost  a  secondary  matter.”42 Wagstaff’s  analysis  confirms  that  a  moral   imperative  is  first  and  foremost  what  defines  “realism”  for  neorealism.  Whether  the  hand   of  the  director  is  apparent  was  less  of  a  concern,  as  long  as  the  “spirit”  of  the  people  was   conveyed.  It  is  from  this  redefinition  of  neorealist  “realism”  as  facts  mixed  with  personal   interpretation driven by a moral imperative that we can characterize both neorealist films and  Giacomelli’s  photography  as  “documentary.”  The  degree  of  “truthfulness”  creates  a   sliding documentary scale. Through their use of similar processes, I believe that Giacomelli and the neorealists fall in the same area of this scale. Both Giacomelli and the neorealist filmmakers studied their protagonists closely in order to remain faithful to real life; they had the intention to portray the sprit of reality as they experienced it. In both cases this realist intention was driven by a moral imperative to represent what had been hidden during Fascism: the humble, struggling working class.43 However, both the 41 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 74. 42 Ibid. 43The Fascist regime revived the Italian film industry during the 1930s, but Fascist films refused to show contemporary subjects. The films produced during this period were generally considered escapist, taking the  form  of  historical  melodramas,  elaborate  operas  or  highly  staged  “white  telephone”  comedies.  When   the Fascist regime fell, leftist filmmakers from the Cinema journal (many of whom would later be classified as neorealists) began to publish articles calling for the depiction of social realities in Italian film. For more on Fascist cinema see Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism (South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1971). For more on the Cinema journal and the development of neorealism see Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones, A New 19 neorealists and Giacomelli employed various techniques that undermine the faithfulness of their depictions. Rossellini strategically varied the visual quality of his later films to create the appearance of technical poverty (seen through uneven lighting and grainy film quality) as it was conveyed in his first postwar film Rome, Open City.44 De Sica was more interested in emotion, and coached or tricked his actors into giving an authentic performance.45 In order to remain truthful to their subjects, neorealist filmmakers had to overcome the fact that their films were recreations of reality. In comparison, Giacomelli could capture real subjects in action, but he had to overcome the static nature of the photographic  image  in  order  to  activate  them.  Giacomelli’s  process  can  be  best  be   described as a combination of neorealist techniques, which heighten a sense of reality (as determined by the artist) to create the illusion of truthfulness. Therefore, both Giacomelli and neorealism are almost documentary but refuse to fit all of its requirements in favor of their personal interpretation. My research will prove that the connection between Giacomelli’s  photographs   and neorealism runs deeper than temporal or thematic similarities with the films. Through a comparison to neorealist cinema, this thesis will qualify the concept of realism in Giacomelli’s  work.  My  approach  is  a  reversal  of  Bazin’s  theories of the evolution of cinema  from  photography  in  “The  Ontology  of  the  Photographic  Image.”  I  will   Guide to Italian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007). 44 Due to the decimation of the film industry in Rome, the studios of Cinecittà were no longer functional. This  forced  Rossellini’s  production  into  the  streets  with little technical equipment. Power outages in the city jeopardized the lighting of the film, casting dark shadows over many scenes. Even film stock was difficult to come by. Rossellini procured whatever scraps he could find off of the black market. This gave the film its unpolished quality. 45 A famous example of this is De Sica getting the young actor Enzo Staiola (Bruno) to cry for the final scene of Bicycle Thieves by falsely accusing him of stealing cigarette butts. See Stephen Snyder and Howard Curle, Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 7. 20 emphasize  the  ways  in  which  Giacomelli’s  photography  evolved  from  the  visual  and   thematic precedents set forth in neorealist cinema. I see a strong connection between the conception  of  reality  in  neorealist  cinema  and  Giacomelli’s  photographs  through  a  kind   of poetic realism. Although it is often overlooked, there is a precedent for such poetry in neorealist  discourse.  In  his  essay,  “Umberto  D.:  A  Great  Work,”  Bazin conceived of the neorealist  filmmaker  as  a  poet,  allowing  the  “true  language  of  reality”  to  come  through.   In  this  case,  Bazin  believed  that  “the  series  of  independent  moments”  that  comprise  the   famous long take of the maid in Umberto D. allowed the viewer to appreciate minute aspects  of  reality.  He  states,  “De  Sica  and  Zavattini  are  concerned  to  make  cinema  the   asymptote of reality- but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which  film  finally  changes  it.”46 For Bazin, film becomes visible poetry when it mimics the  duration  of  reality  and  highlights  its  nuances.  Giacomelli’s  photography  also  stems   from this notion of poetry. His extension of photographic time through manipulation and multiple images allows the viewer to experience the minutia of everyday experience. In addition  to  Bazin’s  characterization  of  De  Sica  as  “poetic,”  Wagstaff  broadens  the   description  of  the  “poetic”  neorealist director. He emphasizes the importance that neorealist filmmakers placed on the freedom of individual expression, which created a style unique to each director.47 Through the development of a distinct personal style that responds to reality, I believe that Giacomelli functions in the same way as a photographer that Bazin and Wagstaff conceive of the poetic neorealist director. In no way do I suggest 46 André  Bazin,  “Umberto  D.:  A  Great  Work,”  from  André  Bazin  and  Hugh  Gray,  What is Cinema? Vol. 2 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 82. 47 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 87. 21 a direct link between the processes of Giacomelli and the neorealist directors. My intent is to delve deeper into the relationship between the photographs of Giacomelli and Italian neorealist cinema. This research underscores what I believe to be the fundamental reason why Italian neorealism, and the figure of the revolutionary neorealist director, have become a common presence in the scholarship on Giacomelli. In my opinion, Giacomelli’s  unique  photographic  point  of  view  stems  from  a  cinematic  approach  to   photography that was developed by neorealist filmmakers. 22 CHAPTER II CONSTRUCTING REALITY: NEOREALIST MISE-EN-SCENE IN GIACOMELLI’S  EARLY  PHOTOGRAPHS “So  I  see  mise  en  scene  as  a  means  of  making  the  spectacle  one’s  own- but then what artist doesn’t  know  that  what  is  seen  matters  less,  not  than  the  way  of  seeing,  but  than  a  particular  way   of needing to  see  and  to  show.”48 -Alexandre Astruc, Cahiers du Cinéma An analysis of the neorealist elements of mise-en-scene reveals their processes in the creation of a fictional film that appears real. The elements of mise-en-scene that will be discussed in this chapter are the choice of the subject, the depiction of the subject, the composition of the shot, movement and shot distance, with a particular emphasis on the use of the close-up. An analysis of these processes can subsequently be applied to Giacomelli’s  work  in  his  creation  of  photographic  images  that  are  based  in  reality,  but   move beyond it. Choosing the subject The first element of mise-en-scene  is  the  choice  of  the  subject.  Giacomelli’s   earliest photographs took the form of single portraits of friends and family. These images, such as this image of a woman holding flowers (fig. 2) and this one of an intense young man (fig. 3) are dramatically staged with the subject staring firmly into the camera. The most striking image from this period is  a  portrait  of  Giacomelli’s  mother  (fig.  4).  The   portrait, titled both La Moglie del Giardiniere, The  Gardener’s  Wife, and Mia Madre, My 48 Alexandre  Astruc:  “What  is  mise  en  scene?,”  ‘Qu’est-ce  que  la  mise  en  scene?,’  Cahiers du Cinéma 100, October 1959, translated by Liz Heron, from Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 268. 23 Mother, carries the same emotional intensity as the other portraits, yet she appears physically and emotionally drained. She is weathered through physical exertion just like the shovel clasped in her hand. The dominance of the shovel in The  Gardener’s  Wife further highlights the modest clothing of the subjects. They all appear to have just completed a hard day of work. The  artist’s  son,  Simone  Giacomelli  states,  “Most  of  these   early images are carefully art directed, and shot in a contemporary style which reflects a nation still recovering from the false rhetoric and violence of the Fascist regime, and from  a  poor  people’s war.”49 Like  many  others,  Giacomelli’s  young  adult  life  was   directly impacted by the war.50 After  the  war,  the  Marche  region  continued  to  have  “poor   cultural  opportunities”  during  the  early  1950s.51 Rather than suppressing postwar struggles, Giacomelli chose to emphasize the physical and mental strength gained from dedication  and  effort.  Given  Giacomelli’s  involvement  with  the  war,  it  is  not  surprising   that  nationalist  concerns  filtered  down  to  a  local  level,  hence  the  “contemporary  style”  of   these images. This style is undoubtedly based in neorealism, which began as a reaction against the Fascist regime and wartime struggles as well. Given  their  “contemporary  style,”  many  scholars  have  identified  these  early   images of rural peasants as neorealist in subject matter. Neorealist directors were notable for their interest in depicting the working classes. The subject of the working class is 49 Simone  Giacomelli,  “Mario  Giacomelli;;  Or  Memories  of  a  Boy  Born  in  1925  and  his  Son  Born  in  1968,”   from Mario Giacomelli and Alessandra Mauro, Mario Giacomelli: The Black is Waiting for the White (Rome, Italy: Contrasto, 2009), 11. 50 Giacomelli was forced to enlist in the military in 1942, and was present when the port of Ancona, the regional center of the Marche not far from Senigallia, was bombed. In addition, the print house where he had begun his career as a typographer was badly damaged during the war and Giacomelli helped to rebuild it.  For  more  information  on  Giacomelli’s  biography  see  Mario  Giacomelli  and  Alessandra  Mauro,  Mario Giacomelli: The Black is Waiting for the White(Rome, Italy: Contrasto, 2009). 51 Mario Giacomelli and Enzo Carli, Giacomelli: La forma dentro, fotografie, 1952-1995 (Milano: Charta, 1995), 16. 24 prevalent  in  the  majority  of  neorealist  films.  It  is  most  apparent  in  Visconti’s  depiction  of   the rural fishing village of Aci Trezza in The Earth Trembles and in the collective films of De Sica and Zavattini. Vittorio De Sica is often praised for his choice of banal everyday  subjects  and  true  to  life  characters.  He  remarked,  “Any  hour  of  the  day,  any   place, any person, is a subject for narrative if the narrator is capable of observing and illuminating  all  these  collective  elements  by  exploring  their  interior  value.”52 This exploration  of  the  “interior  value”  of  the  working  class  subject  is  evident  in  Giacomelli’s   early photographs. Paolo Morello describes these images as elevating the status of the “humble”  peasant  worker.  This  humble  characterization  is  evident  in  the  emphasis  on  the   hands of the woman. Morello further argues that Giacomelli elevates this humble subject through the format of the formal portrait.53 Interestingly, it is the style of the formal portrait that undoes the classification of these photographs as neorealist. Morello identifies this highly composed portraiture as a form of realism, asserting that through the formality of the image Giacomelli represents a “low  subject  in  a  monumental  way.”54 The formality of such a monumental representation can be said to be anti-neorealist  if  compared  to  De  Sica’s  rejection  of   traditional  cinematic  composition  or  Rossellini’s detached style.55 If anything, these 52 Vittorio  De  Sica,  “Some  Ideas  on  the  Cinema,”  from  Stephen  Snyder  and  Howard  Curle,  Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 52. 53 Paolo  Morello,  “Realism  in  Giacomelli,”  from  Mario  Giacomelli  and  Alessandra  Mauro,  Mario Giacomelli: The Black is Waiting for the White (Rome, Italy: Contrasto, 2009), 77. 54 Paolo  Morello,  “Realism  in  Giacomelli,”  80. 55 Gian Pietro Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 125. 25 staged  early  portraits  are  most  reminiscent  of  Visconti’s  meticulous  aestheticism.56 Unlike Rossellini and De Sica, Visconti left nothing to chance during the creation of his films and meticulously crafted each shot.57 He allowed for no naturalness in his films. This is evident to the viewer through the unbalanced interaction of the awkward actors against the composed visual space in The Earth Trembles.  Although  Giacomelli’s  careful   compositions  are  similar  to  Visconti’s  approach, they lack the integration of the subject into a landscape that is essential in the depiction of the people of Aci Trezza. Although these  early  “art  directed”  portraits  cannot  be  considered  neorealist  in  style,  the  decision  to   photograph the working  class  as  a  postwar  social  commentary  establishes  Giacomelli’s   early connection to the movement. After experimenting with single shots and portraiture of friends and family, Giacomelli began to capture other subjects in multiple images. He later organized them into photographic series. The subjects for these series also have a strong affinity with those  depicted  by  neorealist  directors.  Giacomelli’s  first  series  was  shot  in  an  old   person’s  home  in  Senigallia.  The  depiction  of  the  elderly  is  a  common  subject in neorealist  films.  It  is  most  prominently  seen  in  the  feeble  aging  father  of  Rosselini’s   Germany Year Zero and  De  Sica’s pensioner in Umberto D. The subject of aging is often used by neorealist directors to emphasize the struggles of the postwar social climate. Both Germany Year Zero and Umberto D. depict the struggle of caring for the elderly in difficult times. Further, both films symbolically associate the inevitable affects of the aging process to the harshness of postwar circumstance. Giacomelli’s  photographs  carry  a   similar double meaning. This double meaning can be discerned from his titling of the 56 Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema, 126. 57 Ibid. 26 series. The original title, Hospice, provides a simple description of the place and its functions. Several years later Giacomelli changed the title to Death will come and it will have your eyes. His new title is poetic, yet sinister; this description enforces the reality of the situation and the imminent end of our own humanity. This humanity is further emphasized in the forceful content of the photographs. Many viewers were shocked at the exhibition of these photos. The tactile wrinkles, empty expressions and bodily distortions emphasized the unrelenting pace of life for the elderly. One image in particular, the torso of an excessively wrinkled woman bearing her bare breast, was called out for indecency and crudeness (fig. 5). Although the public protested the invasion of privacy to some degree, the more pressing concerns were aimed towards Giacomelli’s  emphasis  on  the  harsh  effects  of  aging.  The  woman’s  naked  body  dominates   the frame while the high contrast emphasizes the texture of her wrinkled skin. The resulting outrage caused by these formal choices was intentional. For Giacomelli, they served as a means to evoke empathy. Giacomelli’s  unflinching depiction of reality is very close to what scholar Karl Schoonover  defines  as  “brutal  humanism”  in  neorealist  cinema.  He  states,   I use the term brutal humanism to name the strange symbiosis of violence and humanitarianism, spectacular suffering and benefaction. Brutal humanism describes an inversion of commonsense understandings of the causal relation between the philosophies of liberal humanism and practices of humanitarianism... It suggests that the exceptional corporeality of the imperiled body triggers charitable dispositions. This means that we only have access to our common humanity in moments of seeing the suffering of others.58 Schoonover’s  book,  Brutal Vision, explains the many ways that neorealist films employ brutal humanism. Although  Schoonover’s  neorealist  call  for  an  eyewitness  through  brutal 58 Schoonover, Brutal Vision, xix-xx. 27 humanism applies  to  several  of  Giacomelli’s  photographic  series,  it  is  most  apparent  in   Death will come and it will have your eyes.59 In keeping with his early portraits and the hospice  images,  Giacomelli’s  other   photographic series depict various types of people from the lower and middle classes going about their daily lives. Often (though not always) Giacomelli titled his series after well known poems by Leopardi, Permuian, Montale, Pavese and others. These works have  in  common  a  “measured  lyricism  that  tends  toward  the  essential.”60 The titles provide  a  glimpse  into  Giacomelli’s  thought  process  and  reveal  many  levels  of  meaning   in the images. Most of the series prior to 1970 were shot in Senigallia. These series depict quotidian experiences of life in the region. They emphasize the practices of rural farming, La Buona Terra (The Good Earth), the energy of youth, Studenti (Students), priests in their monastery I Pretini (The Little priests or I have no hands to caress my face) and the wanderings of a couple in love Un Uomo, una dona, un amore (One man, one woman, one love), and Omaggio a Spoon River (Homage to Spoon River). Giacomelli depicted subjects that he would have experienced everyday: work, family, friendship, aging and love. As  they  are  everyday  experiences  in  the  postwar  period,  many  of  Giacomelli’s   series can easily be paired with neorealist films on similar subjects. The agricultural work of The Good Earth is in dialogue with  De  Santis’s  neorealist/hollywood  hybrid  Bitter Rice (1949).  Giacomelli  scholar  Ricardo  Lisi  described  Senigallia  as  being  located  “in  the   59 Ibid., xiv. 60 Goffredo  Fofi,  “Photography  as  Poetry  and  Philosophy,”  from  Mario  Giacomelli  and  Alessandra  Mauro,   Mario Giacomelli: The Black is Waiting for the White (Rome, Italy: Contrasto, 2009), 179. 28 most provincial of provinces in Italy, not very well linked with a strong identity of its own, apparently an average heterogeneity of the Italian reality and in some ways mediocre,  dully  industrious  without  flights  of  imagination.”61 This characterization of Senigallia  as  an  “average  heterogeneity  of  Italian  reality”  and  “dully  industrious”  is   similar to the experiences  of  De  Santis’s  female  rice  pickers,  who  travel  from  all  across   Italy to perform grueling, mundane work to support themselves. However, the family depicted  in  Giacomelli’s  The Good Earth was clearly more satisfied with their work than De  Santis’s  characters, who do not work for themselves. Despite this discrepancy, the emphasis on communal agricultural labor (a common practice throughout rural Italy at this time) creates a connection between The Good Earth and Bitter Rice. Other series by Giacomelli, Scanno and Puglia, depict the people of rural southern Italy. These series can be read in dialogue with the Sicily episode of Paisan and Visconti’s  The Earth Trembles. In Scanno and Puglia, Giacomelli intersperses shots of villagers going about their daily activities and shots of the village landscape. The villages themselves are located on mountainous, rocky terrain, which also characterizes the southern  landscapes  of  Rossellini’s  Sicily  episode  and  Visconti’s  village  of  Aci  Trezza.   The people of the region are depicted as modest and humble peasants, as is evidence by the traditional black dresses of the women of Scanno and the basic, rugged clothing of the villagers of Puglia. The villagers of Sicily in Paisan and the coastal fishermen of Aci Trezza share this same humble, peasant designation. In all of these instances, Giacomelli and the neorealist directors were faithful to the depiction of the Italian south in the 61Mario Giacomelli, Enzo Cucchi, Antonio Ria, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, and Riccardo Lisi, Mario Giacomelli, Enzo Cucchi: Nati in un fosso: dialogo tra due artisti di provincia (Lugano, Italy: ELR Edizioni Le Ricerche, 2003), 7. 29 postwar period, which maintained a tradition of rural farming and agriculture while the northern half of the country began to modernize.62 Finally, the sentimental love stories of One man, one woman, one love and Homage to Spoon River have  much  in  common  with  episodes  from  Rossellini’s  Rome   episode of Pasian and  Michelangelo  Antonioni’s  post-neorealist Blow Up (1966).63 One man, one woman, one love in particular resonates with the subject of Paisan’s Rome episode, as both love stories portray a girl and her brief romantic interludes with a young solider. Because of this, their relationships are precious, transitory and bittersweet. If analyzed in more general terms, the romances of One man, one woman, one love and Spoon River both involve the observation of a couple over an extended period of time. This concept is also taken up by Antonioni in Blow Up, as a young photographer photographs a couple when they steal away for a romantic moment in a public park.64 In 62 The modernization of postwar Italy happened at a faster pace in the north and center of the country than it did in the south. Given that the majority of Italian urban centers were located in the north, industrialization was focused there as well. To alleviate this discrepancy and further unify Italy, the Italian government created a special program, the Casa per il Mezzogiorno, to provide funds for southern industrialization. The construction of factories and the slow filtration of modern popular culture eventually took hold in the south. Although the social and economic gap between the regions in Italy was diminished, the distinction of the urbanized north and the rural south still exists today. For more information on southern Italy see Jane Schneider, Italy's "Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 63 Antonioni flew under the radar during the early years of neorealism but was associated with the movement from its beginning. His realist documentary People of the Po Valley (1947) was not widely distributed but is now considered to be a precursor to the neorealist style. Antonioni later became famous for his depictions of bourgeois society during 1960s. Like many neorealist directors, his style is detached and observational. This can be seen in the long, unobstructed shots in Blow Up. These shots emphasize alienation, yet they owe much to the neorealist technique of the long take. For more information on Antonioni’s  connection  to  neorealism  see  Peter  E.  Bondanella,  Italian Cinema: from Neorealism to the Present (New York, NY: F. Ungar Pub. Co, 1983). 64 Liva, Photography and Neorealism in Italy, 27-29. Note: Although Liva juxtaposes images from One man, one woman, one love next to screen shots from Blow Up in the catalogue, he does not make a connection between them his written text. It is possible that a comparison between them was made on didactic panels in the physical exhibition, or that viewers are expected to see the resemblance between the photographs and the film stills on their  own.  In  any  case,  I  do  not  believe  that  Liva’s  juxtaposition  of  One man and Blow Up was coincidental. 30 this case, Giacomelli himself can be understood in a similar characterization to Antonioni’s  photographer:  both  photograph  intimate  moments  that are unscripted. Although  these  are  the  most  striking  similarities  between  Giacomelli’s  subjects   and the subjects of neorealist films, the list could go on. A few scholars have described other  pairings,  as  is  the  case  with  Giacomelli’s  Students, which has already been linked to Fellini’s  rambunctious  gang  of  young  men  in I Vitelloni (1953).65 Overall, by choosing to depict real subjects in real locations in a realistic style,  Giacomelli’s  photographs  align   themselves quite well for comparison with contemporary neorealist films. Depicting the subject Looking beyond similarities in subject, the second element of mise-en-scene involves  the  depiction  of  the  subject.  The  director’s  choices  in  depicting  the  subject  form   the core of the mise-en-scene. It is in the depiction of the subject that similarities between Giacomelli’s  photographs  and  neorealist  films  are  most  decidedly  established.  Although   neorealist films are notable for their realism, it is imperative to remember that numerous scholars, in particular Bondanella, have emphasized the layers of artifice employed by neorealist directors to create the illusion of reality.66 For  this  reason,  Giacomelli’s   manipulated photographs appear to have little in common with the un-manipulated aesthetics of neorealism on the surface, when in fact their motivations and processes are quite comparable. 65 Quintavalle, Mario Giacomelli, 117. 66 See Peter E. Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, (New York, NY: F. Ungar Pub. Co, 1983) for more on the neorealist construction of reality. 31 In order to depict their subjects in a realistic manner, Giacomelli and the neorealist directors used a similar photographic process. Both processes involve a documentary style approach without being completely documentary. This distinction was made  by  the  Italian  photographer  M.  Pellicani  when  distinguishing  the  “photographic   narrative”  from  documentary  “reportage.”67 He stated, [I]n the reportage the photographer reporter is ‘sent’  to  capture  a‘moment’  of   news  and  he  remains  ‘external’  to  the  events and the environment that constitute the object of his reportage. In the photographic narrative the narrator- photographer, instead, recreates and re-elaborates reality inventing characters, stories and places: he is not bound to the objective time of the chronicle but creates  his  own  ideal  and  poetic  ‘time.’68 Both  Giacomelli  and  the  neorealist  directors  fit  Pellicani’s  categorization  of  the  narrator- photographer. They both recreate  a  personal  “poetic”  reality  without  being  external  to  it.   The amount of time that Giacomelli and the neorealists spent located firmly in the situations that they depicted speaks to this fact. Giacomelli spent many months or years on location getting to know his subjects before ever photographing. For the Hospice series, Giacomelli spent three years making regular visits and interacting with patients. They thought of him as one of their own.69 He  stated,  “I  tried  to  make  myself  one  of   them, to be like  them.  They  didn’t  notice  I  had  my  camera  with  me.”70 Giacomelli spent an average of three years on each of his other series. For example, he spent three years getting to know the family depicted in The Good Earth,71 and repeated weekends with the 67 Pellicani was a contemporary of Giacomelli who worked with several of his mentors in Italian photography circles circa 1960. 68 Liva, Photography and Neorealism in Italy, 26. 69 Allistair Crawford and Mario Giacomelli, Mario Giacomelli (London: Phaidon, 2001), 7. 70 Crawford and Giacomelli, Mario Giacomelli, 380. 71 Giacomelli and Carli, Giacomelli:La Forma dentro, 34. 32 couple from One man, one woman, one love.72 Giacomelli was extremely concerned with creating a realistic, empathetic portrayal of his subjects. He did not want to interfere with their choices or influence their actions, which required a certain level of personal comfort. If they were unnerved by the idea that they were being photographed, their actions would have been self conscious, affected and ultimately unrealistic. Therefore, it was necessary for his presence as a photographer to fade into the background of everyday life. This non-invasive technique is most closely associated with documentary photography. Interestingly, scholar Christian Cajoulle, who fervently denies the existence of  Italian  neorealist  photography,  finds  no  issue  in  labeling  Giacomelli’s  approach to photography as documentary. He states, ...[H]is approach is direct, immediate, and unaffected, like a recording which states only and exactly what is seen and provides an account of it. He focuses on the people themselves, and does not attempt to interpret; in fact, he records more than he shows or interprets. He does not mean to prove anything, but simply to keep a trace, a souvenir, of what he saw: people.73 Neorealist directors desired a similar appearance of documentary technique. Scholar  Millicent  Marcus  made  the  profound  statement  that  the  neorealist  “considers   himself part of the world he records- he  is  in  it  and  a  determinant  of  it.”74 In contrast to Giacomelli, the neorealists did not photograph real life directly; they gathered together elements from real life to create fictional narratives. Despite the fictional outcome of the process, they firmly believed that their films depicted an accurate interpretation of postwar reality. De Sica was notorious for spending huge amounts of time scouting his 72 Crawford and Giacomelli, Mario Giacomelli, 246. 73 Christian  Caujoulle,  “Close  to  Mankind,  or  the  World  at  Departure  Point,”  from  Mario  Giacomelli  and   Alessandra Mauro, Mario Giacomelli: The Black is Waiting for the White (Rome, Italy: Contrasto, 2009), 107. 74 Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 25. 33 locations  and  getting  to  know  the  places  and  situations  for  his  films.  De  Sica’s   biographers  Snyder  and  Curle  state  “As  a  director  De  Sica  was  as  much  a  reconstructor  of   reality  as  a  discoverer  of  it.”75 A famous account describes his revisiting of a fortune teller day after day, taking notes on the experience for scenes of Bicycle Thieves. Nicola Chiaromonte,  who  worked  on  the  film  with  De  Sica,  said,  “De  Sica  is  ready  to  wait  as   long  as  necessary  to  get  the  right  touch.”76 From this statement, we can determine the “right  touch”  to  be  an  interpretation  of  reality  that  De  Sica  believed  to  be  truthful. Rossellini’s  process  was  opposed  to  De  Sica’s  attentiveness,  but  the  quotidian   effect of the films is similar. Rossellini was known to shoot quickly and with few takes, creating the illusion of a fleeting moment captured by the camera. This observational quality  enforces  the  reality  of  Rossellini’s  fictional  characters  in  Rome, Open City, and Paisan. They  display  a  “sense  of  the  quotidian”  by  seeming to go on with their lives after the camera crew has left.77 In both films the viewer is dropped into the lives of the protagonists without introduction. There is only an implied beginning to the struggles of Pina, Don Pietro and the others in Rome, Open City while the brevity of the episodes in Paisan locks each character in their time and place.78 Even Germany Year Zero begins by observing the family in the middle of the story. The circumstances that determine the fate of Edmund have already begun before the film has even started. The tragic deaths in 75 Snyder and Curle, Vittorio De Sica, 19. 76 Ibid., 18. 77 Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 44. 78 The structure of Paisan is unusual; it is broken into six short stories that are tied together under the theme of Italy during the resistance. The episodes (Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence, a monastery in the central Italian countryside and the Po Valley) are arranged geographically and follow the progress of the allied  invasion  from  southern  to  northern  Italy.  They  are  unified  by  connective  “documentary”  footage that narrates the progression of the allies through the country. 34 these  films  seem  to  confirm  Rossellini’s  sense  of  the  quotidian.  The  viewer  laments  the   future life of the characters because they can imagine them continuing beyond the film. Bazin confirms the ability of the neorealist director to capture reality through fiction as he “continually  encourages  his  reader  to  think  of  the  onscreen  actor  less  as  a  performer  and   more  as  a  filmed  body.”79 For Bazin, as it was for De Sica and Rossellini, the neorealist character/actor is a medium to capture reality. In neorealist films, the actor is not the real person. Even though in many cases non-professionals were used in an attempt to be more authentic, the actors did not play themselves in the film. They played a character type that was like themselves and based on reality, yet constructed by the director. As real people, they are an index of reality, taken directly from it.80 In this way, the actor of a neorealist film is an indexical real person playing a general description  under  the  director’s  control.   In  contrast,  the  subjects  of  Giacomelli’s  photographs  do  not  play  a  role;;  they  play   themselves. They are inherently indexical to reality. Therefore, rather than using an actor as a medium to capture a realistic portrayal, Giacomelli used the medium of photography itself to capture his own interpretation (manifested through choices made during shooting and post-processing) of real subjects. Through his thematic series, Giacomelli also transforms the real person into a general description. Therefore, the use of actor as medium  in  neorealism  is  comparable  to  the  Giacomelli’s  use  of  the  photographic   medium. They both capture the images of real people as interpreted by the artist. The techniques of De Sica and Rossellini allow their films to function as a trace of reality on multiple levels. They document the lives of people in the same manner that Giacomelli  documents  them,  but  differ  in  their  fictionality.  The  “people”  of  neorealist   79 Schoonover, Brutal Vision, 40. 80 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 32. 35 films are in reality, fictional. In contrast, Giacomelli’s  protagonists  are  real  people  who   lose  their  individuality  to  Giacomelli’s  interpretation.  Just  as  the  neorealist  directors   pulled from everyday experience, Giacomelli reframed the experiences of others to get “the  right  touch.”  Therefore,  both  Giacomelli and the neorealists depicted their subjects through personal interpretation. They both had the intention of remaining faithful to reality, but only as they perceived it after-the-fact and not as it occurred in real time. Composing the shot The final element of mise-en-scene controlled by the director is the composition and aesthetic treatment of the shot. Composing a cinematic shot is in itself a very complicated endeavor. For the purposes of my discussion, I have broken down composition into three key elements: visual quality, movement and framing. In order to refute  the  most  commonly  asserted  claims  that  Giacomelli’s  photographs  are  opposed  to   neorealism, it is to visual quality that I will turn first. One series in particular, The Little priests (title later changed to I have no hands to caress my face)  is  at  the  center  of  many  neorealist  debates  in  Giacomelli’s  scholarship.   The series was taken at a monastery near Senigallia. It depicts young priests doing seemingly unpriestly things such as running, dancing, throwing snowballs and playing games (fig. 6-9). The subject of priests has many precedents in neorealist films, from the central character of Don Pietro in Rome, Open City, to the monastery episode in Paisan. This is no coincidence, as Catholicism is an extremely important aspect of Italian culture. For this reason, it is important to note that it is not simply the choice of priests as subjects, but the way that the directors and Giacomelli chose to portray them (as 36 humorous figures) that is significant. Untraditional depictions of priests are especially prevalent in the post-neorealist films of Federico Fellini, and it is in fact Fellini that wrote the monastery scene of Paisan. Both Fellini and Giacomelli were Catholic; they regularly explored religious themes in their work. Fellini is also remembered for his surreal, dreamlike  imagery.  For  these  reasons,  Giacomelli’s  combination  of  religious  themes  and   manipulated imagery has made I have no hands to caress my face readily comparable to Fellini’s  films.  It  is  often  through  this  comparison  that  Giacomelli’s  work  is  considered  to   be beyond the scope of neorealism. It is argued that both artists were informed by the subjects and style of neorealism, but took a more inward looking, psychological approach. I  would  argue  that  Giacomelli’s  Little priests are  too  hastily  equated  with  Fellini’s   films,  and  thus,  give  a  false  impression  of  Giacomelli’s  comparison  with  neorealism.  The   lively swirling priests, who seem to float over the empty white space of the page, have just as much in common with the unpriestly slapstick humor of Don Pietro in Open City or the humorous scandal of the monastic community in Paisan.81 Perhaps the most overlooked  equivalent  to  Giacomelli’s  priests  can  be  found  in De  Sica  and  Zavattini’s   neorealist fairytale, Miracle in Milan (1951). In the film, a series of surreal miracles assists the poor in keeping their land on the outskirts of the city. In the beginning of the film, the poor run back and forth across a field searching for the sun. In this scene, their dark clothing stands against the lighter grass in a very Giacomellian way (fig. 10). Later in  the  film,  one  of  the  “miracles”  turns  the  road  to  ice,  causing  a  group  of  black  cloaked   soldiers to flail their arms and spin in circles. This scene mimics the black cloaks of 81 The monks are scandalized when they discover that they are housing a Jew and a Protestant. They spend the next several minutes of the brief episode running around the monastery gossiping to one another. 37 Giacomelli’s  priests  swirling  in  the  snow.  Although  Miracle in Milan is considered a departure  from  De  Sica  and  Zavattini’s  neorealist  style,  its  technical  manipulations  do  not   hinder it from exploring neorealist themes or ending with a neorealist message. In  overturning  the  assumption  that  Giacomelli’s  manipulations  and  similarities  to   Fellini  place  him  as  firmly  “post  neorealist,”  it  is  important  to  note  that  the  most  regularly   reproduced images of The Little priests are  also  Giacomelli’s  most  highly  manipulated   photographs. The grey in these images has completely disappeared. Only the flat black and stark white remain, as in this image, the most famous of the series (fig. 11). If one were to look at  Giacomelli’s  other  images  (even  within  I  don’t  have  hands  series) they would discover that not all of the images received such a distorting treatment (fig 12). The  vast  majority  of  Giacomelli’s  photographs  involve  less  hand  manipulation  and   display a greater tonal range. Further, I  don’t  have  hands  is the only series that depicts its subjects  acting  in  a  way  that  is  opposed  to  their  quotidian  nature.  All  of  Giacomelli’s   other series prior to the 1970s show his subjects doing banal, everyday activities. To take Giacomelli’s  manipulations  as  anti-neorealist is to overlook their nuances, and the possible implications of them, especially when comparing Giacomelli to neorealist films. Giacomelli’s  early  series  include  exceptions  to  his  style,  just  as  neorealism encompasses its own outliers, but it is not on the basis of these works that Giacomelli or neorealism should be defined. In contrast to the surreal manipulations of Miracle in Milan or  Fellini’s  films,  the   majority  of  Giacomelli’s  photographs  display formal choices similar to the type of mise- en-scene employed by Rossellini in Rome, Open City. These formal choices would become the visual standard for neorealist films. Similar to the uneven quality of Open 38 City, Giacomelli intentionally shot with a slower film to be high contrast and extremely grainy. This emphasized the harsh character of life in rural Italy during the postwar period, as in these images from the series Scanno (fig. 13-15). Although the visual quality of Open City was less of a choice and  more  of  a  limitation,  Rossellini’s  application  of   different visual effects in the episodes of Paisan help to illuminate the artifice of neorealist visual realism. In creating Paisan, Rossellini desired the six episodes, (Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence, the monastery in the countryside, and the Po Valley), to contrast formally with each other. Each episode was written by a different person and shot in a different style. The Rome episode is poignant and nostalgic. There are numerous close- ups of the faces of Fred and Francesca. The following episode, Florence, is shaky and fast paced. Here, Rossellini mobilizes the camera in panoramic long takes to follow the protagonists through the city.82 He even chose a grainier film for the dramatic war zone of the Florence episode, while the disheartened romance of the Rome episode uses crisper film and smoother fades between scenes. One man, one woman, one love (fig. 16), functions  more  like  Rossellini’s  Rome  episode  (fig.  17).  These  images  are  clearer  and   less distorted. The effect is a more serene, peaceful atmosphere than the tenser Death will come and Scanno. A mixture of these two formulations of mise-en-scene, the graphic and the representational, occurs in the series The Good Earth. Distorted images of the hard working daily life in the Marche region (fig. 18, fig. 19) compliment images with more clarity that display the contemplative reverence that Giacomelli felt for the region (fig. 20). Giacomelli varied the formal characteristics of his photographs for the same reason 82 Millicent  Joy  Marcus,  “National  Identity  by  Means  of  Montage  in  Roberto  Rossellini’s  Paisan,”  from   Millicent Joy Marcus, After Fellini (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 29. 39 that Rossellini varied the mise-en-scene in the episodes of Pasian. Both artists aligned the formal qualities of the image with the narrative intention of the episode. Movement In addition to the use of neorealist visual qualities, a closer analysis of Giacomelli’s  photographic  manipulations  reveals  a  strong  connection  to  the  medium  of   film  itself.  The  primary  element  of  Giacomelli’s  mise-en-scene that references cinematic manipulation is the blurriness caused by his movement of the camera. Movement is also the formal element that many Giacomelli scholars employ to refute his neorealist connection. The distinction between a moving image and a static one is the defining difference between photography and cinema for many scholars, including Bazin.83 For Bazin,  movement  was  the  “catalyst”  that  activated  the  cinematic  image  over  the   photographic one.84 In  “The  Ontology  of  the  Photographic  Image” Bazin  states:  “…the   cinema  is  objectivity  in  time…  now,  for  the  first  time,  the  image  of  things  is  likewise  the image  of  their  duration.”85 Bazin praised neorealist films for their ability to capture this duration to its fullest potential, in the form of the long take. A long take follows the action without cutting. This allows the viewer to experience time realistically. The long take is opposed to jump cutting, whereby the director cuts from one angle to another. The jump cut collapses time into a shorter duration for the purposes of moving the narrative 83 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 43. Note: Wagstaff provides a discussion of the development of photography into cinema to qualify the aesthetics of cinema as having a firm basis in photography,  just  as  Bazin  does  in  his  essay  “The  Ontology  of  the  photographic  image.”   84 Schoonover, Brutal Vision, 37. 85 André  Bazin.,  “The  Ontology  of  the  Photographic  Image,”  from  André  Bazin  and  Hugh  Gray, What is cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14-15. 40 forward.86 The most renowned long take in neorealist cinema, and also the one praised by Bazin,  is  a  scene  from  De  Sica  and  Zavattini’s  Umberto D.. In this lengthy scene, the maid, Maria, gets up in the morning and goes about her daily routine. Zavattini believed scenes such as this one in Umberto D. to be the highlight of his career. Through the long take, he believed that could reveal the expressive potential of everyday life more clearly. In the preface to the Umberto D. screenplay he stated: [W]hile in the past the cinema made one fact grow out of another, the another, then yet another, and every scene was created and conceived to be immediately abandoned...nowadays, once a scene has been conceived, we feel  the  need  to  ‘stay’  with  the  scene  because  we  know  that  it  has  in  it  the   potential for enormous resonance, and for meeting all our expressive needs.87 Giacomelli  felt  this  same  need  to  “stay,”  in  order  to  capture  the  expressive  quality   of the scene. Capturing movement, either through the movement of the subject or his own movement of the camera, is the most common technique employed by Giacomelli. It is evident even in his very first photograph. Giacomelli intentionally moved the camera in order to blur the waves as they flowed over the beach in Senigallia (fig. 21). Though exaggerated camera movements seem to be anti-Bazintian, Rossellini employs the shaky handheld camera in his films. This is most apparent in the earlier reference to the visually active Florence scene in Paisan (fig.  22).  Just  as  Rossellini’s  shaky  camera  reflects  the   protagonists hurriedly  running  through  the  streets  of  Florence,  Giacomelli’s  blurry   images capture the movement of his subjects. In this way a seemingly distortive effect on 86 Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell, "long take," A Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford University Press, 2012), http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199587261.001.0001/acref- 9780199587261-e-0460, accessed April 28, 2014. 87 Cesare Zavattini, in his preface to the script of Umberto D., first published in Rivista del Cinema Italiano 2  (1952);;  now  in  ‘Alcune  idee  sul  cinema’  in  Zavattini,  Neorealismo, ecc.,96-97, Quoted in Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 86. 41 the part of the photographer speaks more to the real time reality that he captured. This image of a young working girl from The Good Earth reproduces her movements as she pushes through the grass(fig. 23). The blurriness of the image emphasizes her actions as she works in the fields It is almost as if Giacomelli was trying to force the medium of photography to function more like cinema, with its ability to depict longer durations of action. This is likely because it was the action, not the individual performing it, that concerned him. The performance of an action inherently involves the duration of time. It is only through moving the camera that Giacomelli can capture the action, extending the movement and the action itself, into infinity. The close-up While  Giacomelli’s  blurred  imagery  captures  cinematic  time,  a  select  few  of   Giacomelli’s  photographs seem to put time on hold. This is unusual for Giacomelli, as it is in neorealist cinema. Just as Rossellini keeps his camera at a distance for the majority of the shots in his films, Giacomelli includes no close-ups in the majority of his photographic series. Instead, he usually captured the scene as it happened from a distance without  interference.  An  example  of  this  is  Giacomelli’s  Puglia series, where he gets close, yet not too close, to the inhabitants of the region (fig. 24, fig. 25). The result is a detached appearance. There are a few images that break this trend, such as this portrait of a farmer from The Good Earth (fig. 26) and this image of a couple from One man, one woman, one love (fig.  27).  They  have  been  described  as  “film  stills”  by  previous scholars for their dramatic cinematic appearance.88 But what is a film still and why do these 88 Allistair  Crawford,  “Mario  Giacomelli,” from Mario Giacomelli, Mario Giacomelli, A Retrospective 1955-1983 (Ffotogallery: 1983), 3. 42 images provoke that description? A film still is a single frame pulled from a film. Film stills are often close-up  shots,  which  emphasizes  a  character’s  reaction to a dramatic highpoint of the plot. A close-up  elicits  an  emotional  response  because  only  the  subject’s   face can attract the viewers attention. In order to establish the cinematic quality of Giacomelli’s  photographs,  the  description  of  “film  still”  should be interchanged with the term  “close  up.”  Giacomelli  employs  the  close-up to emphasize the romantic, nostalgic nature of the narrative just as Rossellini does in the Rome episode of Paisan (fig. 28). De Sica and Zavattini also used the close-up shot regularly in their films. Close-ups, like this one of Bruno in Bicycle Thieves, heighten the emotional expressiveness of their characters (fig. 29). Bicycle Thieves is often understood as functioning solely based on an exchange of glances from Bruno to his father Antonio. The narrative of the film itself, which is strictly character development, hinges on the close-up. Visconti also made regular use of the close up in The Earth Trembles. Here it calls attention to the emotional distress of the Valastro family as they come to terms with their poverty. It is important to note the close-up in neorealist films is not considered to be against the rules of neorealism, but rather enforces them. Bazin makes this distinction with  an  example  from  Rossellini’s  Germany Year Zero (fig. 30). Bazin believed that forms of manipulative montage (cutting from one thing to another, which often involves close-up shots) are against the truth of mise-en-scene. In contrast, Bazin argued that Rossellini’s  close-up of Edmund in Germany Year Zero does not function as a narrative device. It does not imply something more about his character or actions like a traditional film would. Instead of juxtaposing the close up with a shot of another object that would tell the viewer something more, Rossellini leaves the close-up to stand on its own. This 43 leaves  the  viewer  with  an  “ambiguity  of  the  real.”89 Rossellini, like Giacomelli, only asks that we witness the close-up and reflect on it. Neither forces us to anticipate anything beyond the presence of the figure at that very moment. Through various elements of mise-en-scene including the choice of subject, the depiction of the subject, and the visual composition of the shot through aesthetic choices, Giacomelli’s  neorealist  aesthetic  can  be  better qualified. The subject matter of his photographic series has already been deemed comparable to neorealist subjects. Moving further, a closer analysis of less obvious mise-en-scene elements allows his work to move beyond its manipulated appearance towards a neorealist approach. Therefore, it is not necessarily that Giacomelli distorts his images, but how he distorts his images that conveys  a  connection  to  neorealism.  Giacomelli’s  manipulations  have  a  foundation  in  the   artistic manipulations of Rossellini and the other neorealist film directors. His manipulative process can be understood in conjunction with notions of cinematic representation as it was established in neorealist cinema. 89 Schoonover, Brutal Vision, 27. 44 CHAPTER III SEQUENCING REALITY: NEOREALIST FORMS OF MONTAGE IN GIACOMELLI’S  PHOTOGRAPHS Given that the medium of photography is limited to a single image at a time, Giacomelli turned to a different kind of cinematic technique to enhance his ability to tell a story: the montage. An analysis of this technique in his work reveals a dialogue with the style  employed  by  neorealist  directors.  Giacomelli’s  use  of  montage  can  be  understood   on several levels that balance between photographic and cinematic conceptions of the term. The elements of montage that will be discussed below are the photographic concepts of the photomontage and double exposure and the cinematic conception of montage, the sequencing of several images. Both the photomontage/double exposure and the cinematic montage hold a stake in the dialogue between Giacomelli’s  photographic   process and the processes of the neorealists. The photomontage and the double exposure Giacomelli was so concerned with the ability to capture the duration of an event that he experimented with several techniques to move beyond the still photographic frame. One of these techniques is photomontage. A photomontage is a manipulated photograph where elements of two or more negatives are cut out and collaged together to create  a  single  image.  Giacomelli’s  photomontages  are  nearly  seamless  and often difficult to  discern.  In  fact,  Giacomelli’s  most  famous  photograph, The Scanno Boy, is a photomontage, although it is rarely discussed as such (fig. 31). The collaging is evident in the white halo around the woman to the right hand side of the image. This figure does not 45 have the same clarity as the other figures. This image is often praised for its ability to capture a decisive moment,90 whereby Giacomelli had the quick reflexes to capture the boy looking up just as the composition was balanced by the two older women.91 The fact that the image is a photomontage takes away from the decisiveness of the moment to some degree (though arguably it is the glance of the boy that matters most here). Photomontage extends the amount of time that Giacomelli had to capture the perfect composition into other areas of Scanno, and eventually into the darkroom. Although photomontage is a highly manipulative process, Giacomelli used it to depict several shots simultaneously. This allows Giacomelli to extend the duration of an event beyond the restrictive frame of a single image. In addition to photomontage, Giacomelli employed a slightly different method of combining images together in the double exposure. In contrast to the cinematic montage of juxtaposing two contrasting scenes, the double exposure captures two or more images on the same negative to form a single complex composition. This can be seen in the double negative exposure of several of the images from Homage to Spoon River, where two images are printed together (fig. 32). The result is a double image, superimposed as if it is caught in the split second of a film where one scene fades to the next. This series uses  double  exposure  so  heavily  that  the  photographs  have  been  described  as  “all  liv[ing]   together in  the  same  negative.”92 This  description  is  more  in  keeping  with  Zavattini’s   notion  of  the  long  take  of  a  single  moment  than  a  series  of  separate  images.  In  Zavattini’s   90 The  ‘decisive  moment’  is  a  term  coined  by  famed  street  photographer  Henri  Cartier  Bresson.  It  describes   the photographers ability to take a photograph at the height of visual interest and compositional strength. 91 Bryn  Campbell,  “Scanno  Boy,” from Victoria and Albert Museum, Personal Choice: A Celebration of Twentieth Century Photographs Selected and Introduced by Photographers, Painters, and Writers, 23 March-22 May 1983 (London: The Museum, 1983), 39. 92 Giacomelli and Carli, Giacomelli: La Forma dentro, 40. 46 long take, several significant moments happen one after the other, but they retain the empty space that connects them. The double exposure also shows several significant events  in  the  same  “take,”  but  the  process  does  not  capture  time  continuously.  The  shutter   is clicked, capturing a moment, and clicked again, capturing a later moment. The time in between  the  clicking  of  the  shutter  is  not  reflected.  Therefore,  even  though  Giacomelli’s   double exposures capture longer durations of time by photographic standards, the double exposure  is  opposed  to  the  long  take’s  ability  to  capture  duration  uninterrupted. For this reason, the double exposure diverges from the interests of neorealist filmmakers on technical  terms,  yet  it  can  be  understood  as  expanding  Giacomelli’s  photography  towards   a cinematic approach. Giacomelli  said  about  this  series,  “In  ‘Spoon  River’,  I  destroy  reality  and   photograph memory, I distort reality in order to remake it; what I see and shoot are copies of  reality.’”93 This complex statement describes these images as both a copy of reality and a destruction of reality. These ideas move away from his earlier interests in capturing reality  without  distortion.  They  mark  a  shift  in  Giacomelli’s  thought  process  during  the   late sixties and early seventies. At this time, Giacomelli moved towards a more poetic existential conception of the photographic process. Giacomelli would go on to use double exposure extensively in his photographs. The technique adds to the surreal quality of his later work. Further, the technique of double exposure diverges from his earlier interests in depicting his subjects in a realistic way. By superimposing multiple subjects in multiple locations, Giacomelli dislocates the subject from a singular reality, which is at the core of his  connection  to  realism.  With  the  loss  of  the  realist  subject,  Giacomelli’s  photographs no longer align with neorealism, whose priority is the realistic portrayal of their subjects. 93 Crawford, Mario Giacomelli, 194. 47 I  would  argue  that  the  use  of  double  exposure  is  a  key  factor  in  Giacomelli’s   movement beyond a neorealist aesthetic. This is similar to the way that De Sica and Zavattini’s  Miracle in Milan and later Fellini films like 8 1/2 (1963) would attempt to move beyond the detached quality of neorealism towards manipulated imagery. In any case,  the  double  exposure  functions  as  another  way  in  which  Giacomelli’s  photographs become less photographic, and more cinematic, in their ability to capture a series of instances, rather than a single moment. Although different in technique, photomontage and double exposure both function much  in  the  same  way  as  Bazin’s  collapse of time in the photographic image compared to the cinematic.94 Giacomelli’s  photomontages  and  double  exposures  have  been  described   in  a  very  similar  fashion.  They  are  “double”  images  in  which  photography  is  capable  of   evoking time.95 This evocation of time transforms these images from the realm of the photographic into the territory of the cinematic. In choosing to combine elements together, Giacomelli usurps the static nature of the photographic image. In these photographs he displays the scene continuously, as it would move before our eyes in a film. Unusual forms of montage After his first experiments with stand alone images, Giacomelli began producing images solely in the form of photographic series. Giacomelli constructed each series over the course of several years, and was notorious for changing their titles and sequencing. For  this  reason  most  authors  do  not  reproduce  Giacomelli’s  series  in  their  intended  order.   94 Bazin,  “The  Ontology  of  the  Photographic  Image,”  14-15. 95 Sandro Genovali and Mario Giacomelli, Mario  Giacomelli:  L’evocazione  dell'ombra (Milano: Charta, 2002), 124. 48 Also, the number of photos in a series can be as high as fifty. Therefore, reproduction of all  of  the  images  from  a  series  is  a  rare  occurrence.  Giacomelli’s  intended  sequences  are   depicted  in  Quintavalle’s  monograph  that  displays  all  of  the  photographs  in  each  series   up to 1980 with a number indicating their placement. Giacomelli’s  choice  to work in series in creating socially-concerned photographs (a technique that is said to have been inspired by neorealist cinema) was inspired by one of his early mentors, Luigi Crocenzi.96 When asked why he chose to photograph in series, Giacomelli stated:  “Why  do  I  tell  stories  rather  than  using  single  images  as  many  do?   Because you can develop an idea in a story, whereas a single image is sometimes only a beautiful  image  and  nothing  more.”97 This interest in developing an idea indicates the importance of the subject and the narrative for Giacomelli as primary components of his work.  For  Giacomelli’s  ideas  to  come  through,  the  subject  must  be  visible  and  present  in   the photograph. His manipulations do not distort the person in the image; they distort the image quality. This lays rest to the claim that he was only interested in anti-realist aesthetics.  Giacomelli’s  series  have  been  described  as  “series  of  ‘instants’  laden  with   duration.”98 I agree with this assessment but believe it can be pushed further, towards a cinematic  interpretation.  Each  photograph  in  itself  is  a  “shot,”  just  as  it  is  called  in  film,   that captures an instant (which as Zavattinian practice goes to show can be both extremely short or extremely long). These shots are then montaged together into a sequence, which is the final film. Wagstaff describes this process of cinematic montage 96 Crocenzi  was  a  a  prominent  figure  in  Italian  postwar  photography.  For  more  information  on  Giacomelli’s   relationship with Luigi Crocenzi see Allistair Crawford, ed., Mario Giacomelli, A Retrospective 1955-1983 (Ffotogallery: 1983), 34. 97 “The  Series,”  from  Mario  Giacomelli  and  Alessandra  Mauro,  Mario Giacomelli: The Black is Waiting for the White (Rome, Italy: Contrasto, 2009), 231. 98 Genovali and Giacomelli, L’evocazione dell'ombra, 100. 49 as  “the  intention  to  assemble.”99 Following  this  logic  Giacomelli’s  series  can  be   understood as mini-films: a series of instants chosen by the director with the intention of being put together into a sequence to form a narrative. Giacomelli photographs with the series in mind as a final format, just as a film director understands each shot as a component, not a means unto itself. With the understanding that Giacomelli’s  seriality  is  very  similar  to  that  of   cinematic  montage,  how  does  Giacomelli’s  montage  relate  to  montage  as  it  was   conceived in neorealism? When asked if he had any preconceived notions of montage in his films Rossellini stated: None at all. I have no fixed plan. What I do have, rather, is a particular speed of observation, and I work according to what I see. I always know that if the eye is drawn to see certain things, then they are the things that matter...I  don’t  have  conventional  continuity in mind. I always shoot things  in  movement.  I  couldn’t  care  less  about  whether  I  get  to  the  end  of   the movement so as to fit in with the next shot. When I have shown what matters,  I  cut:  that’s  enough.  It  is  much  more  important  to  bring  together what is in the image.100 Rossellini’s  non-montage can be better conveyed as his ability to capture idiosyncratic moments that traditional film directors would normally cut out. Scholar Gian  Pietro  Brunetta  summarizes  this  tendency.  He  states,  “Rossellini demonstrated that anyone could film by simply inserting himself into the flux of collective history and by isolating moments without any particular preliminary constructions. By doing so, one was obliged to see images that had been previously left out of  the  frame.”101 99 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 43. 100 Rossellini,  “Interviews  with  Roberto  Rossellini,”  Rohmer  and  Truffant,  translated  by  Liz  Heron,  from   Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave, 231. 101 Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema, 125. 50 Giacomelli’s  process  can  be  described  much  in  the  same  manner.  By  inserting   himself into the daily lives of various people, he was able to catch inconspicuous moments  that  were  unplanned  and  unposed.  This  is  best  seen  in  Giacomelli’s  series Puglia and Scanno. In both instances, he entered into a situation without spending a long period of time acclimating himself to his subjects. These decisive moments seek to document reality and engage with it. This was especially relevant at the time, as this period  in  Italy  was  marked  by  the  “southern  question,”  while  the  rest  of  the  country   quickly modernized.102 In these series, the villagers go about their daily routines until they notice the camera, when their expressions take on a puzzled or curious appearance (fig. 33, fig. 34). Giacomelli combines them together to form a portrait of the villagers. At times walking in front of the camera aimlessly like this man from Scanno (fig. 35) or this woman from Puglia (fig. 36). Other moments provide deeper reflection through their composure. This can be seen in the framed composition of the stairs in this image from Scanno (fig. 37) and the composed central figure in this photograph from Puglia (fig. 38). This combination of unscripted moments with moments that appear more staged is very common in neorealism and, in particular, in Rome, Open City. The camera seems to peer through the crowd to get the action. Wagstaff describes this as the filming of the “ensemble”  (with  all  of  its  unknown  factors)  rather  than  resorting to close-ups of individuals to construct the crowd.103 Both  Giacomelli  and  Rossellini’s  talent  as   photographer/directors lies in their ability to click the shutter or role the film at the right time. Giacomelli said, 102 Giacomelli and Carli, La Forma dentro, 28. 103 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 99. 51 Chance is not chance in the normal sense. Chance arises like a miracle, like  something  not  expected  or  wanted,  so  it’s  bigger  than  man  itself.  But   also it is true that chance has to be controlled: you have to know what that thing called chance gives you.104 Both artists underscore the importance of chance in their work, while their abilities as artists hinge on knowing how to best take advantage of it. Although  Rossellini’s  sense  of  montage  can  be  detected  in  most  of  Giacomelli’s   early series, the series The Good Earth and One man, one woman, one love appear less focused on chance in their shooting and seriality. These series are most often described as “films”  in  Giacomelli’s  oeuvre,  for  their  combination  of  full  frame,  mid-length and close- up shots that seem to progress in a logical order.105 The order is slightly randomized in the progression of The Good Earth. It begins with several close-ups of farm workers that seem to pause time (fig. 39), but moves progressively forward in several images depicting the harvest (fig. 40, fig. 41). The series ends with the community coming together in celebration. Images depicting the beginnings of a wedding procession (fig. 42 and fig. 43) are interspersed with the celebratory slaughter of a hog (fig. 44). The series with a single image that returns to the wedding process. This final photograph is a layered imaged that speaks to both the everyday and the ceremonial aspects of life (fig. 45). The montage of The Good Earth is  in  keeping  with  Visconti’s  inseparability  of   the individual from their setting as it was conceived in The Earth Trembles.106 The 104 Giacomelli, et. al., Nati in un fosso: dialogo tra due artisti di provincia, 45. 105 For more on the cinematic qualities of The Good Earth see Crawford, Mario Giacomelli, 3. For more on the cinematic qualities of One man, one woman, one love see Liva, La Fotografia e il neorealismo in Italia, 24.  For  more  on  both  series  as  ‘mini  films’  see  Sandro  Genovali  and  Mario  Giacomelli,  Mario Giacomelli: L’evocazione  dell'ombra (Milano: Charta, 2002). 106 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti (Garden City, NY Doubleday, 1968), 12. 52 combination of close-ups and wider shots that incorporate the landscape is also reminiscent  of  De  Santis’s  approach  to  montage  in  Bitter Rice (fig. 46). In Bitter Rice, “The  purpose  of  each  shot  was  to  underline  De  Santis’s  belief  in  the  essential  need  for  an   individual  to  be  closely  connected  to  a  community.”107 Although there are over fifty images in the series, Giacomelli uses jump cuts to depict small progressions of momentary action. In The Good Earth, Giacomelli not only uses cinematic photography techniques in different shot lengths, he reconstructs cinematic time by depicting events in progress. In every shot this progress is tied to the community and to the landscape, enforced  by  Giacomelli’s  comprehensive approach to montage. The combination of shot lengths and multiple angles is most apparent in A man, a woman, a love. In this series, Giacomelli composes different shot lengths and camera angles of the same scene together, capturing the couple as they meet on various occasions. Giacomelli leaves little room in between his takes, recreating the feeling of a film being played. This feeling is strongest in the image sets of close-ups (fig. 47-49). These images provide emotional intensity to the mise-en-scene that is reminiscent of De Sica’s  approach  to  the  technique.  In Bicycle Thieves, De Sica drives the narrative forward through a series of glances between Bruno and Antonio. This is often said to be the closest  to  Soviet  forms  of  “shot  and  countershot”  montage,  whereby  the  close-up is the key to developing the desires of the character.108 Wagstaff elaborates on this idea, stating that  De  Sica’s  manipulation  of  camera  angles  in  Bicycle Thieves forces the viewer to 107 Celli and Cottino-Jones, A New Guide to Italian Cinema, 58. 108 Ibid., 59. 53 “read  the  image.”109 Giacomelli also forces the viewer to read the story of One man, one woman, one love, in a more complete, emotionally resonating way than he had in any series previous. Although a similar process was initially begun for One man, one woman, one love, Liva points out that  Gicomelli’s  role  as  a  “director”  was  cemented  in  his  later  series,   Homage to Spoon River.110 If  we  take  the  term  “director”  as  it  is  understood  in  film  to   mean  the  person  who  translates  a  written  script  into  a  visual  depiction,  then  Giacomelli’s   work on this series fits the definition perfectly. This series, like One man, one woman, one love, was one of many photographic projects that were commissioned by the television company RAI. The process began with Giacomelli following a script, written by Crocenzi, in order to produce the types of images that Crocenzi wanted. A passage from  Crocenzi’s  script  displays  the  amount  of  detail  that  he  provided  Giacomelli:  “the   sequences of images will almost always have luminous, transparent hazy tones, and they will be very subtly linked in a succession of shots of details very close to the great views of  skies,  stars  and  nocturnal  landscapes...”111 Giacomelli’s  interpretation  of  these   directions is striking, both for his ability to capture the transparent hazy quality of Crocenzi’s  description  and  for  his  interpretation  of  the  “subtle”  linking  of  the  succession   of the images. Placed  into  the  numbered  order  indicated  in  Quintavalle’s  monograph,   Giacomelli’s  cinematic  interpretation  of  the  series  becomes  apparent.  None  of  the images 109Christopher  Wagstaff,  “Ladri  di  biciclette,”  from  David  Forgacs  and  Robert  Lumley,  Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 261. 110 Liva, Photography and Neorealism in Italy, 24. 111 Ibid., 25. 54 flow together seamlessly. There are, however, sub series such as this pair of photographs (fig. 50, fig. 51), numbers 10 and 11, and the following pair, numbers 12 and 13 (fig. 52, fig. 53), that if superimposed one on top of the other create the appearance of a panning camera from the sky to the ground. This vertical panning occurs several other times in Spoon River. This technique displays a new experimentation with the progression of cinematic montage (usually described as moving forward) towards a new form of cinematic camera movement that describes space as well as time. This interest in the exploration of space, rather than time, in very in keeping with the post-neorealist films of Antonioni and Fellini. The exploration of space was crucial to their use of the neorealist long take. In this case, the long take to captures longer periods of time that allow for the camera to continuously move through space, or, if the camera is stationary, for the viewer to observe its nuances. Both directors used the long take in an observational, wandering manner that explored a sense of existentialism. This sense of existentialism is often represented  by  looking  up,  as  is  the  case  in  Fellini’s  flying  objects  in  8 1/2 or his elevated Christ statue on a crane in the beginning of La Dolce Vita (1960). The otherworldly nature of verticality in post neorealist cinema is perhaps best displayed in De Sica and Zavattini’s  Miracle in Milan. The entire premise of the film lies in looking towards the heavens in order to move forward. This new interest in verticality also directly correlates to  Crocenzi’s  description,  which  emphasizes  the  presence  of  the  sky  in  the  series.  Perhaps   it  was  Crocenzi’s  instruction  that  inspired  Giacomelli’s  reinterpretation  of  the  photograph   as cinema, just as it was his suggestion to use the form of the photographic narrative in the first place. 55 To format them for television, a camera would slide over the images while the text of Spoon River was recited by a voice offstage.112 In Spoon River, it is not simply the seriality of the images or their numerous instances of blurring and double exposure that create the illusion of movement in the images. In this case a film camera literally panned over the photographs, transforming them from cinematic form to cinematic subject. The process behind Spoon River may be closer to cinema in its completed form, but  I  would  argue  that  it  changes  the  dynamic  of  Giacomelli’s  cinematic  photography   towards a more complete form of cinema proper. This series ultimately moves beyond photography.  Liva  seems  to  agree  with  this  assessment.  He  states,  “This  was  an  ulterior   attempt at a dialectic between a visual text (a fixed image) and a literary text, the television camera lingering over the photographs thus broke up its cinematographic continuum.”113 The  descriptive  language  of  Crocenzi’s  instructions  also  undermines   Giacomelli’s  directorial  vision.  The  visual  quality  of  the  photographs,  the  mise-en-scene, was determined by Crocenzi in this case, rather than Giacomelli. Giacomelli admitted himself  that  he  “illustrated”  Crocenzi’s  script  so  that  he  would  be  better  able  follow  the   narrative, a process that he would reject in his later years.114 Crocenzi’s  directorial   involvement and the real time animation of Spoon River is what truly marks a distinct shift  in  Giacomelli’s  oeuvre,  away  from  a  personal  aesthetic  with  its  roots  in  reality  and   in  neorealism.  The  period  of  social  reflection  in  Giacomelli’s  career  had  found  its   completion in his earlier series. In its place, the experimentations of Spoon River allowed 112Ibid. 113Ibid. 114 Giacomelli and Mauro, The Black is Waiting for the White, 29. 56 him to develop a different cinematic approach to photography: one less rooted in reality and more rooted in fantasy. Giacomelli’s  montage  is  composed  of  several  techniques  that  attempt  to  usurp   photography’s  inability to depict duration. In some instances, he employed the techniques of photomontage and double exposure to fix longer durations into a single frame. He also employed  a  more  cinematic  conception  of  montage.  Giacomelli’s  montage  technique   began with a looser interpretation of cinematic framing and sequential order that is reminiscent  of  Rossellini’s  neorealist  films.  Over  the  years,  it  progressed  towards  a  more   formal, composed approach that mirrors the pictorial techniques of Visconti and De Santis. Giacomelli’s  most  compelling  “cinematic”  series  come  the  closest  to  manipulative   forms of montage in their ordered construction of image instants from various angles and shot depths. These series are in dialogue with the construction of emotional narrative in De Sica’s  films.  Just  as  De  Sica  and  Zavattini’s  exhaustion  of  emotional  and  temporal   duration pushed neorealism to the limit, Giacomelli pushed the limits of photographic montage in Homage to Spoon River. From that point on his work turned towards a post- neorealist spiritual existentialism. 57 CHAPTER IV A NEOREALIST PERSPECTIVE ON REALITY: THE NARRATIVE “Is  not  neorealism  primarily  a  kind  of  humanism  and  only  secondarily  a  style  of  film- making? Then as to the style itself, is it not essentially a form of self-effacement before reality?”115 -André Bazin,  “The  Evolution  of  the  Language  of  the  Cinema” In  Giacomelli’s  photographic  series,  as  in  cinema,  the  elements  of  the  mise-en- scene and montage combine to form the narrative. Given the thematic and formal resemblances  between  Giacomelli’s  series  and  neorealist  films,  it  is  not  surprising  that   many aspects of their narratives are also similar. This can be deduced through neorealist qualities  both  in  the  structure  of  the  narrative  in  Giacomelli’s  photographs  and the narrative content -- the overall message that the photographs convey. Neorealist form in Giacomelli’s  photographic  series:  structure One of the most defining characteristics of neorealist films is the untraditional structure of their narratives. Neorealist narratives are often described as episodic for their denial of the continuity of traditional narratives. Instead, they take the form of non-linear, circular, or inconclusive moments that leave the viewer with a sense of incompletion.116 115 André  Bazin,  “The  Evolution  of  the  language  of  Cinema,”  A composite of three articles: the first written for a Venice Festival anniversary booklet, Twenty Years of Film (1952);;  the  second  “Editing  and  Its   Evolution,”  Age Nouveau, No. 92, July 1955; and the third in Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 7, 1950, from André Bazin and Hugh Gray, What is Cinema? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 29. 116 Blandford, Grant, and Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary, 85. 58 This disorientation of the viewer is present in the style of various neorealist directors in several ways. In  the  case  of  Rossellini’s  war  trilogy  films,  a  sense  of  disorientation  is  derived   from the shifting focus of the plot between characters and plot lines. Rome, Open City and Paisan were conceived as a series of episodes strung together. This leaves the viewer without a central character or plot with which to follow the narrative from beginning to end. The result of the disorientation of the viewer is a more objective point of view, which  lends  much  of  the  “realist”  character  to  the  films.117 Rossellini was conscious of his untraditional, disorienting narrative. He stated, I hate the obligations which the story places upon me. The logical thread of the story is my enemy. Passages of reportages are necessary to arrive at the fact; but I am naturally inclined to leave them out, not to bother with them. And this is -I admit it- one of my limitations- the incompleteness of my language. Frankly, I would like to shoot just episodes...118 If this quote were not attributed to Rossellini, one could easily mistake it for a statement by Giacomelli himself. He too attempts to move away from what he considers to be a documentary approach by discarding images that don’t  strike  him  as  having  any   significance.119 This makes his photographic narratives, with their inherent lapses in time, episodes in and of themselves. Further, setting aside the unusual cases of One man, one woman, and one love and Spoon River,  Giacomelli’s focus shifts between protagonists and  plot  lines  throughout  his  series.  In  each  serial  “episode,”  the  viewer  is  left  with  a   series of disjointed images that are not concerned with providing a singular point of 117 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 141-159. 118 Mario  Verdone,  “Colloquio  sul  neorealismo,”  Bianco e Nero, February 1952: 7-16, from Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 85. 119 Giacomelli, A Retrospective 1955-1983 (Ffotogallery), 7. 59 reference. Instead, they are concerned with telling several portions (also episodes) of the same story. De Sica and Zavattini also employed non-traditional narrative techniques that dislocated  the  viewer.  Comparable  to  Rossellini’s  shifting  points  of  reference,  De  Sica   and Zavattini relied on the absence of chronological narrative events in favor of the mundane. Zavattini often said that he would prefer to get rid of narrative altogether.120 De Sica  and  Zavattini’s  films  are  riddled  with  scenes  that  do  not  seem  to  advance  the  plot.   Instead,  their  “tenuously  connected  events”  can  be  qualified  as  a  looser  version  of   episodic  narrative  when  compared  to  Rossellini’s  literal  interpretation  of  the  term.121 The foundation  of  Giacomelli’s  photographic  process  resides  in  this  wandering  depiction  of   common events. Although Giacomelli embarks with the intention of creating a thematic narrative, it cannot take its form until the action unfolds in front of his lens. Although the neorealist directors claimed to refuse a documentary style, neorealism is often praised for its documentary qualities. Scholar Rachel Gabara qualifies this seemingly contradictory nature of the movement when she states, Neorealist films rely on a spectatorial familiarity with the codes of documentary, which have been imported into fiction; although we have not seen this particular combination of documentary and fiction before, we must recognize its parts for the whole to be effective. Neorealism refused a certain kind of fiction filmmaking, but not the conventional realism associated with documentary.122 Gabara’s  statement  helps  to  place  neorealism  as  a  form  of  “post  documentary”   filmmaking. Documentary qualities are present in neorealism, but they are paired down to 120 Shiel, Rebuilding the Cinematic City, 13. 121 Ibid., 55. 122 Rachel  Gabara,  “Neorealism  from  Italy  to  Africa,”  from  Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 191. 60 their  essentials  in  the  form  of  multiple  “episodes.”  Gabara’s  statement applies to the photographs  of  Giacomelli  as  well.  Therefore,  it  is  in  a  “post  documentary”  context  that   the  episodic  narrative  structure  of  Giacomelli’s  photographs  and  neorealist  films  can   most accurately be categorized. Giacomelli’s  neorealist  message: content Neorealism is said to evoke a kind of empathetic reaction in the viewer which calls  them  to  action.  In  his  famous  1953  essay  “Some  Ideas  on  the  Cinema,”  Zavattini   explains how the neorealist depiction of reality was meant to affect the viewer. He writes, The most important characteristic, and the most important innovation, of what is called neorealism, it seems to me, is to have realized that the necessity  of  the  ‘story’  was  only  an  unconscious  way  of  disguising  human   defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts. Now it has been perceived that reality is hugely rich, that to be able to look directly at it is enough;;  and  that  the  artist’s  task is not to make people indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect (and, if you like, be moved and indignant too) on what they and others are doing, on the real things, exactly as they are.123 First, he proclaims the necessity of the cinema to observe and capture the minutia of reality. He then adds a moralistic tone to his analysis of what film should be, and how neorealism  fulfills  this  claim.  He  states,  “I  believe  that  the  world  goes  on  getting  worse   because we are not truly aware of reality. The most authentic position anyone can take up today is to engage himself in tracing the roots of this problem. The keenest necessity of out  time  is  ‘social  attention.’”124 Through showing reality directly Zavattini promotes 123 Cesare  Zavattini,  ‘Some  Ideas  on  the  Cinema,”  Sight and Sound 23:2, October-December 1953, 64-9, Edited from a recorded interview published in La revista del cinema italiano 2 (December 1952), Translated by Pier Luigi Lanza, Reproduced in Stephen Snyder and Howard Curle, Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 50-51. 124 Zavattini,  ‘Some  Ideas  on  the  Cinema,”  in  Snyder  and  Curle,  Vittorio De Sica, 53. 61 cinema as the highest moral art form.125 By extension, neorealism, which he describes as the  “elimination  of  technical-professional  apparatus”  is  the  greatest  artistic  and  moral   accomplishment in the medium.126 Zavattini hopes that by viewing moralistic cinema, audiences will be inspired to live a moral life. Like  the  practices  of  his  neorealist  contemporaries,  Zavattini’s  own  process  is  not   without contradiction to his idealized theories. He admits that as a screenwriter (a profession  which  he  describes  as  a  “technical-professional  apparatus”  that  neorealism   attempts  to  dispose  of)  he  claims  to  “insert  as  much  as  possible  of  my  own  world,  of  the   moral  emergencies  within  myself.”127 Therefore, although Zavattini admires neorealism for its non-technical depiction of reality, his description of the process reveals a more personal interpretation of the ideal neorealist style. With the understanding that the neorealists were cognizant of the presence of their personal interpretations of reality, but were convinced of their ability to convey  the  spirit  of  that  reality,  Giacomelli’s  personal   interventions can no longer be said to undermine the intentions of neorealism. But how does neorealism use reality (as interpreted by the filmmaker) to convey empathy? In neorealism, empathy is derived first and foremost in the transfer of focus from the individual onto the collective group, which becomes humanity itself. This transfer of agency from the individual to the group involves two steps. First, the subject is depicted  as  a  “type”  that  is  readily  recognizable.  Second,  a  dissociative  “documentary”   style  of  montage  refuses  the  sequential  description  of  a  single  character’s  life,  thereby   creating a sense of dislocation through episodic narrative rather than traditional narrative. 125 The  word  ‘directly’  is  also  emphasized  in  Zavattini’s  text.   126 Zavattini,  ‘‘Some  Ideas  on  the  Cinema,”  in  Snyder  and  Curle,  Vittorio De Sica, 58. 127 Ibid., 59. 62 These elements combine time and time again in neorealist films beginning with Rossellini’s  clearly  defined  figure  types.  Although  his  characters  appear  truer  to  life  than   those of earlier films (especially those in their falsifying predecessors of fascist cinema), they are  representative  of  a  historical  “type”  rather  than  a  singular  individual.128 The examples  of  Rossellini’s  “types”  are  numerous.  In  Rome, Open City, Pina is considered the representative woman of the people, la popolana. She stands in for an entire generation of oppressed Italians.129 The characters of Paisan are perhaps even better examples  of  the  “type”  phenomenon  in  Rossellini’s  films.  Every  episode  in  Paisan depicts  a  historical  “type”  that  was  involved  in  the  resistance:  the  American  G.I.,  the   peasant southerner, the street urchin in the Italian city, the desperate young Roman woman, the partisans, and the detached Franciscan monks in their monastery to name only a few. In Paisan, the brevity of each episode never allows the viewer to get past the “type” casting to discover real characters. The film is not so much about them, but what happens to them. Germany Year Zero follows a single German family, but again focuses on  the  “type.”  Edmund’s  choices  throughout  the  film  are  never  personal.  They  are   constantly shaped by the sociopolitical circumstances of his Nazi education and poverty. He is one child that stands for many.130 Rossellini’s  use  of  “type”  casting  can  ultimately   be described as detached. The viewer relates to his characters on a social level rather than a personal one. 128 Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 37. 129 Ibid., 38-39. 130 Amedee  Ayfre,  “Neo-Realism  and  Phenomenology”  from  ‘Neo  Realisme  et  Phenomenologie’,  Cahiers du Cinéma 17, November 1952, translated by Diana Matias from Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985), 183. 63 To  better  convey  an  authentic  “type,”  Rossellini  employed  trained  actors,  who   were more capable of fitting an assigned role, as the key figures in his war trilogy films. For  example,  Rossellini’s  casting  of  famed  comedic  stars  Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi in the roles of Pina and Don Pietro highlights the complexity of the reality/ fiction of their situation in the film. Despite their dramatic turn, Magnani and Fabrizi provide moments of comedic relief throughout Open City. These moments,  like  Don  Pietro’s   covering of a nude statue (fig. 54), diffuse the tension of their difficulties in the film. This pulls  the  viewer  out  of  the  “reality”  crafted  by  Rossellini.  In  these  moments  the  film   reveals its scripted nature and highlights the freely flowing quality of the other scenes. Thus, Rossellini breaks one of the primary rules of neorealism intentionally. In using trained actors rather than real people, Rossellini establishes his desired effect of a greater reality beyond reality. His is an every-mans reality: a reality filtered through collective experience. In his blatant use of photographic manipulation, Giacomelli also intentionally breaks the rules, this time of documentary photography. Like Rossellini, his goal is to temporarily pull the viewer away from reality in order to construct a new one. Through visual transformation, Giacomelli unites the individuals within his series. They become part  of  Giacomelli’s  language,  shifting  back  and  forth  between  fiction  and  reality,  with   the ultimate goal of capturing universal human experiences. In his series, Giacomelli uses manipulation  to  “type”  cast  his  subjects  as  recognizable,  but  generic  representatives  of   farmers, peasants, the elderly, the young, and the religious. The theme of one standing in for many is more complicated in De Sica and Zavattini’s  films.  Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, and Umberto D. appear to counteract this 64 qualification at first; each narrative focuses on one or two protagonists. We get to know the characters on a personal level in a way that other neorealist filmmakers do not allow. De  Sica  and  Zavattini’s  construction  of  an  emotional  narrative,  rather  than  one  based  on   events, is most profoundly displayed in Bicycle Thieves. The plot of Bicycle Thieves is haphazard and random. Antonio and Bruno wander the streets of Rome in search of a bicycle, but they never find it. In place of a narrative, the viewer focuses on the subtle emotional exchange between the characters. A combination of emotional poignancy and aesthetically  pleasing  visuals  showcases  De  Sica’s  ability  to  inspire  a  desired  emotional   quality.  Meanwhile,  Zavattini’s  subtle  twisting  of  the  narrative  guides  the  emotional   connection without forcing it. Although it seems antithetical, this emotional connection is precisely how the viewer  transforms  them  into  iconic  characters.  De  Sica  and  Zavattini’s  approach  conveys   the most potent form of empathy through collective humanism. It is derived from the inability of their main characters to fulfill their needs in an oppressive society. Wagstaff states, In I bambini ci guardano, Sciuscià, Ladri di biciclette, and Umberto D. events and circumstances progressively strip the protagonists of the autonomy on which the free exercise of their humanity depends, and the viewer is left with knowledge not only of the vulnerability to which their progressive diminishment exposes them, but also of the characters experience (their own acquisition of knowledge).131 Giacomelli’s  photographs  do  not  call  for  empathy  in such an explicit manner. We do not have knowledge of the needs of his characters. Rather, I would argue that his photographic technique (an exploration of the self through the experiences of others) functions in a way that is in dialogue with De Sica/ Zavattini-style  narrative.  Giacomelli’s   131 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 322. 65 photographic narratives do not let his protagonists speak of their needs. He speaks of his needs through them, battling frustrations and coming towards a new understanding of humanity with each project. He empathizes with his subjects, and uses visual manipulation (contrast, movement, ect.) to make us empathize with them too, experiencing reality through his lens. These  forms  of  empathy  in  Giacomelli’s  work  are  ignored  by  Cajoulle.  In   asserting that Giacomelli is not a neorealist, Cajoulle states that neorealism is not necessarily  concerned  with  subject  matter,  but  rather  with  the  “tension  between  ethics   and  aesthetics,  using  devices  of  demonstration  and  realization,  rather  than  themantics.”132 While I agree with his statement  about  neorealism’s  greater  interest  in  ethics  balanced  by   aesthetics,  I  disagree  with  his  assertion  that  Giacomelli’s  photographs  rely  on  themantics   rather than devices of demonstration and realization. Giacomelli described his photographs  as  “Images to remember, for my own reminiscence and for those who wish to escape from the day-to-day  existence,  from  everyday  life’s  stupidity.”133 From Giacomelli’s  own  words  we  can  determine  that  he  does  not  view  his  photographs  as  just  a   personal empathetic reaction. They are a call for others to come to terms with reality, especially in its negative consequences. This call, like that of neorealism, is projected through style. Although Giacomelli’s  photographs  are  composed  thematically,  it  is  important  to  remember that the plot  of  each  neorealist  film  follows  a  particular  postwar  “theme”  as  well.  Rome  during   the resistance, the progress of the Allies through Italy, the working class families and regionalism: all of these themes describe the premises of neorealist films. It is only 132Caujolle,  “Neo-realism?,”  186.   133 Giacomelli, et.al., Nati in un fosso : dialogo tra due artisti di provincia, 41. 66 partially through the choice of these themes that neorealist devices of demonstration and realization function. Contemporary themes such as these have the potential for activation, but it is the directorial aesthetic that activates them. Through formal choices of mise-en- scene (including shot distance and movement), the viewer is pulled into the scene. The postwar  Italian  public’s  familiarity  of  the  formal  codes  of  documentary  signals  to  them   that these images are realistic.134 The neorealist conception of non-manipulative montage furthers this feeling of reality. As viewers experience longer durations of time, they become more aware of all of the elements in a scene and become more invested in it. As the films play out without a conclusion, they demonstrate a problem without solving it. Only at the end of the film is does the viewer come to the realization that they must act. My  research  has  shown  that  Giacomelli’s  photographs  employ  these  same  techniques   towards realism. When a realistic feeling (created through neorealist aesthetics) combines with (often confrontational) contemporary subject matter, neorealist viewers were prompted to respond personally, just as Giacomelli prompts his viewers to react to universal issues. The fact that Giacomelli’s  themes  are  more  universal,  and  less  rooted  in  a  specific   cultural  and  historical  moment  such  as  the  resistance,  is  likely  the  basis  for  Caujolle’s   refutation  of  Giacomelli’s  “themantics.”  As  I  have  just  stated,  the  nature  of  the  theme  is   only a small  portion  of  neorealism’s  devices  of  demonstration.  I  argue  that  through   Giacomelli’s  neorealist  aesthetics,  he  intended  his  universal  themes  to  serve  as  devices  of   demonstration as well. This is most profoundly conveyed in his earliest series Death will 134 During the war, Italians became used to viewing documentary footage and news clippings interspersed with entertainment films at their local theaters. As the war escalated, wartime newsreels became extremely popular. After the war, spectators felt a new form of respect for images that could show them reality and the demand for documentary style films increased. 67 come and it will have your eyes.  Years  later  he  stated,  “These  images  are  more  realist.   Even technically speaking they are my simplest and my truest. Because what I was trying to show, rather than what I saw, was what was within me: my fear of getting old- not of dying- and  my  disgust  at  the  price  one  has  to  pay  for  one’s  life.”135 For Giacomelli, realism lies not just in photographing reality, but in using it to speak to an interior reality; one that conveys a humanist message. The intended universality of  Giacomelli’s  humanist  message  becomes  more   apparent in his descriptions of other photographic series. About The Good Earth Giacomelli  stated,  “I’m  telling  an  important  story,  the  story  of  man  and  his  work,  the   story of life.... I wanted to leave behind a record of work throughout the revolving seasons, work that for these people, at least, is endlessly repeated throughout a lifetime.”136 The ethical considerations of Giacomelli are clear in this statement. He intends his photographs to bear witness to the hardworking nature of the farmer, not just these farmers in the region of Senigallia, but all farmers in Italy who share the same experience. The conception of One man, one woman, one love was similar. It was meant to  present  “a  slice  of  real  life,”137 the “universal  phenomenon”  of  the  love  affair  between   a man and a woman.138 Both of these descriptions privilege the people depicted as figure “types”  rather  than  individuals.  Although  he  spent  large  amounts  of  time  getting  to  know   his subjects, in the end it didn’t  matter  to  Giacomelli  who  the  people  were.  It  mattered   135 Crawford and Giacomelli, Mario Giacomelli, 380. 136Ibid., 210. 137 Ibid., 246. 138 Ibid. 68 how  they  lived  their  lives.  It  is  the  “how”  that  Giacomelli  translates  into  a  narrative  of   collective experience that he, and everyone else, can relate to. Although he is often described as being an intensely personal, introspective artist, Giacomelli understood, and desired, the universal quality of his subject matter. He explains the technique of the photographic series as a narrative that stems from documentary yet feels the need to move beyond it, which becomes a personal endeavor. He  stated:  “Even  I  would  like  to  be  a  reporter,  and  inside,  I’m  a  realist.  Instead  I  do   things  with  regard  to  poetry.  I  also  use  reality  as  such:  I  modify  it  and  make  it  mine.”139 Neorealist directors arguably felt this same drive. Inspired by a pressing reality, they whittled it away to craft their own interpretations as reflection and inspiration. Their interpretations ultimately take the form of cinematic poetry.140 De Sica himself confirms this,  stating  “...Neorealism is not shooting films in authentic locales; it is not reality. It is reality  filtered  through  poetry....”141 Wagstaff comes to this conclusion as well, stating that through neorealism, …[N]arrative  was  meeting  a  need  at  this  historical  moment,  among  all   social classes, and that this narrative was closely linked to historical experience. Hence, even if the narratives themselves were not entirely ‘realist’,  they  gave  ‘expression’  to  concerns  with  practical,  concrete   matters that existed outside the realm of the aesthetic, in contemporary reality.142 Therefore,  Giacomelli’s  ability  to  capture  universal  interests  through  the  depiction  of  one   individual standing in for many is directly related to the humanist message of neorealist 139 Giacomelli, et.al., Nati in un fosso: dialogo tra due artisti di provincia, 47. 140 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 87. 141 Vittorio  De  Sica,  “Interview  with  Charles  Thomas  Samuels,”  from  Stephen  Snyder  and  Howard  Curle,     Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 31. 142 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, 27. 69 cinema. Neorealist directors intended more than anything to present an image of Italy during postwar recovery, united through their collective experience. Even though their experience as Italians is not universal, the international success of their films speaks to their universal message. Still today, neorealist films spark an active humanist response in all  who  view  them,  just  as  Giacomelli’s  photographs  provoke  the  viewer  to  not  only   reflect on their life, but to live it well. 70 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION: MARIO GIACOMELLI’S  CINEMATIC   PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE LIGHT OF NEOREALISM143 In the postwar period in Italy, many artists like Giacomelli sought creative outlets as personal reactions to their wartime struggles. It is often stated that Gicomelli was influenced by the most prominent Italian artistic movement of the postwar period, neorealist cinema, for his similar interests in depicting postwar social conditions. Many scholars  refute  a  connection  of  Giacomelli’s  work  to  neorealist  cinema  however,  due  to   his manipulative photographic processes. My  research  suggests  that  an  analysis  of  Giacomelli’s  processes  in  cinematic   terms, rather than photographic ones, reveals that manipulation is inherent to his connection to neorealism. Manipulation of the image may be seen to be anti-neorealist, however this research has shown that numerous scholars have emphasized the various techniques used by neorealist filmmakers to add a personal dimension to their films. Through  an  analysis  of  Giacomelli’s  photography,  I  believe  that  neorealist scholars can better understand the technical and theoretical subtleties of neorealist practice. Further, in the case of photography, this research has shown that manipulation has the capability to change the context from a photographic image to a cinematic one. The issue of manipulation is perhaps best qualified by Giacomelli himself. When discussing his process, he did not consider his manipulations as individual techniques. He described them instead as part of a cohesive methodological approach. He stated, 143 This  title  references  Millicent  Joy  Marcus’s  book  Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, which was essential to the construction of my thought process throughout the duration of this project. 71 I  don’t  know  if  it  can  be  said  that  I  use  several  techniques.  To  me  there’s   only one technique that I modify little by little: sometimes I want a lighter white, sometimes a darker black. But all this has meaning: the black holds something tragic,  it  hides;;  the  white  discovers,  it’s  the  light.  If  we  take  the   light  away,  we  don’t  see  anything  anymore:  with  light  we  discover  things.   So the use of various techniques depends on the poetry or on the image I use. For i[n]stance, to me the blur or the out of focus has a meaning: if something  moves,  it  means  it’s  alive.  However,  the  photograph  is  always   the image of something dead: from the moment I take the photograph, it dies. It only starts to live- and this is important- when the observer interprets the image and tries to understand it: thus enabling it to be liberated, and come to life. So it may seem that I use many techniques, but in  the  end  it’s  always  one,  used  in  a  way  to  express  best  what  I  intend  to   say.144 For Giacomelli, the modifications that he makes to his photographs are all one technique in service to a greater poetic meaning. This poetry is derived from the experiences of everyday life, depicted literally in black (the bad) and white (the good). For Giacomelli, the most commonly used manipulation is movement, which he uses to bring the still, lifeless  photograph  back  to  life.  But  the  cinematic  transformation  of  Giacomelli’s   photographs is not yet complete. Only when the viewer activates the work will his images breath life again. Walking past his serial images or flipping through them in a photographic  book,  we  are  transported  as  Giacomelli’s  Italy  flashes  before  our  eyes.  His   photographs, in their stark, harsh tonality and emotional poignancy call out to be looked at, put in motion. This message conveys the same urgency that inspired the neorealist filmmakers and subsequently made their films iconic representations of the postwar Italian situation. The viewer is forced to look and to react. It is here that one must return  to  Giacomelli’s  manipulations  with  the  new   understanding that they activate the photographs. Through his dedication to depict the spirit of contemporary subject matter, Giacomelli solidifies his connection to realism. 144 Giacomelli, et.al., Nati in un fosso: dialogo tra due artisti di provincia, 47. 72 Through manipulation of the photographic  image,  Giacomelli’s  realist  subjects  convey   their  humanist  message.  In  conclusion,  I  believe  that  an  analysis  of  Giacomelli’s  subject   matter, unique approach to photographic techniques, and socially oriented themes reveals the complexity that a neorealist  reading  of  Giacomelli’s  early  photography  requires.   These  elements  comprise  Giacomelli’s  cinematic  approach  to  photography,  which  has  its   roots  in  the  style  of  Italian  neorealism’s  most  respected  directors. 73 APPENDIX A FIGURES Figure 1: Mario Giacomelli, Paesaggi, 1954-2000, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 2: Mario Giacomelli, Prime photo (01), 1953-1956, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 74 Figure 3: Mario Giacomelli, Prime photo (19), 1953-1956, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 4: Mario Giacomelli, Prime foto (20), 1953-1956, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 75 Figure 5: Mario Giacomelli, Death will come and it will have your eyes (45), 1953-1983, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 6: Mario Giacomelli, I have no hands to caress my face (8), 1961-1963, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 76 Figure 7: Mario Giacomelli, I have no hands to caress my face (16), 1961-1963, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 8: Mario Giacomelli, I have no hands to caress my face (12), 1961-1963, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 77 Figure 9: Mario Giacomelli, I have no hands to caress my face (6), 1961-1963, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure  10:  Film  Nitrate.  “Miracle  in  Milan/  Miracolo  a  Milano  (1951)”.  Tom  Everson.   January 16, 2013. http://filmnitrate.com/vittorio-de-sica/miracle-in-milan-1951/ (accessed April 28, 2014). 78 Figure 11: Mario Giacomelli, I have no hands to caress my face (15), 1961-1963, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 12: Mario Giacomelli, I have no hands to caress my face (1), 1961-1963, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 79 Figure 13: Mario Giacomelli, Scanno (2), 1957-1959, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 14: Mario Giacomelli, Scanno (4), 1957-1959, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 80 Figure 15: Mario Giacomelli, Scanno (5), 1957-1959, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 16: Mario Giacomelli, One man, one woman, one love (2), 1960-1961, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 81 Figure 17: The Criterion  Collection,  “Roberto  Rossellini,  Paisan”.  2013.   http://www.criterion.com/films/2415-paisan. (accessed May 3, 2014). Figure 18: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (4), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 82 Figure 19: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (25), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 20: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (28), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 83 Figure 21: Mario Giacomelli, L’approdo, 1953, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure  22:  But  What  She  Said.  “Rossellini’s  War  Trilogy:  Saved  by  grace”,  Thursday,   August 26, 2010. Brandon Nowalk. http://bnowalk.blogspot.com/2010/08/rossellinis- war-trilogy-saved-by-grace.html (accessed April 28, 2014). 84 Figure 23: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (20), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 24: Mario Giacomelli, Puglia (9), 1958, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 85 Figure 25: Mario Giacomelli, Puglia (19), 1958, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 26: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (2), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 86 Figure 27: Mario Giacomelli, One man, one woman, one love (17), 1960-1961, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 28: Masterworks of World Cinema- Harvard  Film  Archive.  “Paisan”.   http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2007/spring/masterworks.html (accessed May 3, 2014). 87 Figure  29:  Versus  the  Screen.  “Studying  film:  Bicycle  Thieves  (1948)  Review”.  Kevin   O’Donnell.  March  3,  2014.  http://versusthescreen.com/?gamepress_reviews=studying-fil- bicycle-thieves-1948-review (accessed May 3, 2014). Figure  30:  My  Reviewer.com,  “Review  for  Germany,  Year  Zero”.  Curtis  Owen.   http://www.myreviewer.com/DVD/129937/Germany-Year-Zero/129953/Review-by- Curtis-Owen (accessed May 3, 2014). 88 Figure 31: Mario Giacomelli, Scanno (21), 1957-1959, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 32: Mario Giacomelli, Homage to Spoon River Anthology (20), 1971-1973, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 89 Figure 33: Mario Giacomelli, Scanno (11), 1957-1959, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 34: Mario Giacomelli, Puglia (26), 1958, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 90 Figure 35: Mario Giacomelli, Scanno (13), 1957-1959, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 36: Mario Giacomelli, Puglia (25), 1958, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 91 Figure 37: Mario Giacomelli, Scanno (1), 1957-1959, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 38: Mario Giacomelli, Puglia (16), 1958, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 92 Figure 39: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (5), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 40: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (33), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 93 Figure 41: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (34), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 42: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (42), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 94 Figure 43: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (43), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 44: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (52), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 95 Figure 45: Mario Giacomelli, The Good Earth (56), 1964-1966, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure  46:  USC  School  of  Cinematic  Arts.“School  of  Cinematic  Arts  Events”.  Assandro   Ago. http://cinema.usc.edu/event.cfm?id=12490 (accessed May 3, 2014). 96 Figure 47: Mario Giacomelli, One man, one woman, one love (20), 1960-1961, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 48: Mario Giacomelli, One man, one woman, one love (21), 1960-1961, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 97 Figure 49: Mario Giacomelli, One man, one woman, one love (22), 1960-1961, gelatin silver print. Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 50: Mario Giacomelli, Homage to Spoon River Anthology (10), 1971-1973, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 98 Figure 51: Mario Giacomelli, Homage to Spoon River Anthology (11), 1971-1973, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure 52: Mario Giacomelli, Homage to Spoon River Anthology (12), 1971-1973, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. 99 Figure 53: Mario Giacomelli, Homage to Spoon River Anthology (13), 1971-1973, gelatin silver print, Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia, Italy. Figure  54:  Italy  Through  Film,  “Rome,  Open  City,”   http://italyfilms.blogspot.com/2011/03/rome-open-city.html. Accessed April 28, 2014. 100 APPENDIX B SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCES Banfield, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958. Barański, Zygmunt G., and Robert Lumley. Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture. New York, NY: St. Martin Press, 1990. Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing about Art. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2008. Bazin, André. Vittorio de Sica. Parma: Guanda, 1953. Beckman, Karen Redrobe, and Jean Ma. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Campany, David. The Cinematic. Whitechapel Gallery, London: MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2007. Campany, David. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion, 2008. Carello, Adrian Nicola. The Northern Question: Italy's Participation in the European Economic Community and the Mezzogiorno's Underdevelopment. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1989. Celant, Germano. The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968. New York, NY: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994. Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing about Film. New York, NY: Longman, 2001. Duggan, Christopher, and Christopher Wagstaff. Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society 1948-58. Oxford: Berg, 1995. Eisenstein, Sergei, and Richard Taylor. The Eisenstein reader. London: British Film Institute, 1998. Giacomelli, Mario. Prime Opere: Vintage Photographs, 1954-1957. Milano: Photology, 1994. Giacomelli, Mario, and Enzo Carli. Il Reale immaginario di Mario Giacomelli. Bologna: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 1988. 101 Giacomelli, Mario, and Enzo Cucchi. Mario Giacomelli: Cose mai viste. Milano: Photology, 2006. Giacomelli, Mario, and Mauro Corradini. Mario Giacomelli: Immagini inedite 1954/1992. Brescia, Italy: Edizioni del Museo Ken Damy, 1993. Giacomelli, Mario. Edited by Benoît Rivero. Translated by Guia Boni. Mario Giacomelli Fotonote. Actes Sud, France: Contrasto, 2009. Giacomelli, Mario, Claudia Guarda, Charles-Henri Favrod, Claudio Adorni, Maria Garbetta, and Dominico Lucchini. Mario Giacomelli: Fotografie 1954-1994. Tenero, Italy: Edizioni Matasci, 1994. Giacomelli, Mario, and Angelo Schwarz. Mario Giacomelli, Fotografie. Ivrea, Italy: Priuli & Verlucca, 1980. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Haas, Ernst, and Bryn Campbell. World Photography. New York, NY: Ziff-Davis, 1981. Klein, William, Luciano Rigolini, and Thierry Garrel. Contacts: The World's Greatest Photographers Reveal the Secrets Behind their Images. Paris: Arte france Développement, 2000. DVD video, 429 min. Kogan, Norman. A Political History of Postwar Italy. New York, NY: Praeger, 1966. McCarthy, Patrick. Italy Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Minghelli, Giuliana. Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.), and John Szarkowski. Looking at Photographs; 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. New York, NY: Distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn, 1973. Orr, John, and Olga Taxidou. Post-War Cinema and Modernity: A Film Reader. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001. Roncoroni, Stefano, Sergio Amidei, and Roberto Rossellini. The War Trilogy of Roberto Rossellini. New York, NY: Grossman, 1973. Sichel, Kim. To Fly: Contemporary Aerial Photography: Boston University Art Gallery, September 7-October 28, 2007. Boston, MA: Boston University Art Gallery, 2007. 102 Stepan, Peter. Icons of Photography: The 20th Century. Munich: Prestel, 1999. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, NY: Picador USA, 2001. Weiermair, Peter. The Nature of Still Life: From Fox Talbot to the Present Day. Milan: Electa, 2001. Williams, Christopher. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the British Film Institute, 1980. Zavattini, Cesare. Italian Cinema 1945-1951. Roma: Edizioni d'Arte C. Bestetti, 1951. Zavattini, Cesare. Zavattini: Sequences From a Cinematic Life. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970. 103 REFERENCES CITED Armes, Roy. Patterns of Realism. South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1971. Bazin, André, and Bert Cardullo. Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. What is cinema?Vol. 1. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967. Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. What is cinema? Vol. 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Blandford, Steven, Barry Keith Grant, and Jim Hillier. The Film Studies Dictionary. London: Arnold, 2001. Bondanella, Peter E. Italian cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York, NY: F. Ungar Pub. Co, 1983. Brunetta, Gian Piero. The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Calvenzi, Giovanna. Italia: Portrait of a Country throughout 60 years of Photography. Rome: Contrasto, 2003. Celli, Carlo, and Marga Cottino-Jones. A New Guide to Italian Cinema. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Crawford, Alistair ed., and Mario Giacomelli. Mario Giacomelli. London: Phaidon, 2001. Forgacs, David, and Robert Lumley. Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 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