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.
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