Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema

by Karl Schoonover

Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. Brutal Vision challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films—including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves —should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In his readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism’s international distribution, Karl Schoonover reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. He traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how—in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom—these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period’s call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid. Brutal Vision interrogates the role of neorealism’s famously heart-wrenching scenes in a new global order that requires its citizenry to invest emotionally in large-scale international aid packages, from the Marshall Plan to the liberal charity schemes of NGOs. The book fundamentally revises ideas of cinematic specificity, the human, and geopolitical scale that we inherit from neorealism and its postwar milieu—ideas that continue to set the terms for political filmmaking today.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Justine Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very rigorous reading of Bazin and the role of the body in his work on neorealism and cinematic ontology. Its kind of funny that he has to read so much into Bazin's ontology in order to discover the body when Maya Deren explicitly states in her ontological schema what Schoonover finds in Bazin, but Bazin has a historiographic importance here that warrants the attention (relation to neorealism and European cinema in general). Would be worth a footnote though to just mention that Maya Deren explicitly centers the body in her ontology of cinema, makes the body the center of cinematic space and time.

I wish the relationship between the ontological contigency of Bazin's realism was related more directly to his readings of the films. The readings become more generically about the 'gaze' of the bystander rather than the schema that Schoonover lays out in the first chapter. I wish that the critique of liberal humanitarian imperalism/capitalism was extended to a critique of humanism in general. It would be interesting to read this through Rizvana Bradley's critique of the body in Anteaesthetics.