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Art and Man
[Reply to a questionnaire on neorealism, originally published in Bianco e Nero, September 1958; republished in different form as part of "Fare un film e per me vivere" in Cinema Nuovo, March-April 1959]
Making a film is not like writing a book. Flaubert said that living was not his trade; his trade was writing. Making a film, however, is living; at least it is for me. (I draw this flattering comparison, of course, only to give some tone to my remarks.) My personal life is not interrupted during the shooting of a film; indeed, it is then that it becomes most intense. What is one's compulsion to pour all the wine of one's personal life into the cask of the film, if not a way of participating in life, of adding something worthwhile (or at least intended to be so) from one's personal heritage - the richness or the poverty of which it is up to others to assess?
Since a film is a public spectacle, it is obvious that one's own affairs cease to be private, and they too become public property. For my own part, today, I have a clearly defined feeling on this subject (by today I mean in this postwar period, so full of disturbing facts, so thick with anxieties and fears about the destiny of the whole world). It is my feeling that to go on ignoring certain subjects is a distinct error, precisely because we are men of the cinema and thus exposed to the public view. We no longer have the right to allow it to be believed that our private lives continue as they once did. I should like to borrow a quotation from Giraudoux that I read in a newspaper article: "There are moments when one does not speak of trees, because one is angry with trees:' And indeed, the least worthy thing an intellectual can do when faced with the grave events that trouble the world is to go on concerning himself with subjects that distract attention from the seriousness of those events.
No one talked of neorealism during the war, nor even during the period immediately after the war. Searing reality gave birth to a movement which the critics later christened "neorealism." I believe that we are today, mutatis mutandis, living in an identical climate. I do not know what sort of films we will be able to make, but I want to find out. I feel that there is one thing that we absolutely must do: defend the principle of intelligence within the heart of the real. And reject the mental laziness and conformity of the many.
I know that by speaking in this way I lay myself open to the accusation of alarmism. It is a fashionable kind of accusation. It is also true that in Italy, where public opinion is nonexistent, no one in recent times has been afraid of war. It is also true that in France the most amazing sort of resignation has prevailed, despite the high intellectual level of that nation. But these are, at most, arguments in my favor. In any case, there is more than simply a moral commitment behind my remarks. I think that we men of the cinema must always find inspiration in our own era. Not so much to express and interpret it in its harshest and most tragic aspects, as to pick up from it the echoes it produces within us so that we, men of the cinema, may be sincere and coherent within ourselves, and honest and courageous with others. This is the one and only way to be alive. Intelligence which evades its responsibilities at a given moment is a contradiction in terms.