The Roots of Neorealism: Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis)

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Almost seven decades after neorealism's post-war heyday, the bulk of English-language writing on the trend continues to focus on the canonical trio of Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica. It may be that they engage more with genre or it may simply be down to availability of subtitled copies of their films, but directors such as Alberto Lattuada, Carlo Lizzani, Aldo Vergano, Pietro Germi and Luigi Zampa – all of whom made precious contributions to the development of neorealist cinema – are continually overlooked. Critic-turned-filmmaker Giuseppe De Santis shares this group's fate but stands out as the most iconoclastic of the so-called 'second-tier' of neorealists. His impassioned writing for the journal Cinema includes a famous piece called 'Per un paesaggio italiano' ('For an Italian Landscape'). In it, he praises Jean Renoir (and his 1938 film La Bête humaine in particular) for the very precise use of landscape to reflect character and emotion: "Renoir seems to tell us that there are some emotions that man cannot give voice to so we must draw on everything that surrounds him to express them." Of all the retrospective comments on the legacy of neorealism, De Santis's voice shines out. In a 1981 interview, he argued: "Even the most stubborn and faithful belief in pursuing the daily life of this or that character comes to nought if the director is not able to know himself, to choose and select, to give a particular look and sense to the most representative moments of this human condition." De Santis's career in fiction film began with screenwriting credits on Visconti's Ossessione and Rossellini's Desire (1946). For his own first feature A Tragic Hunt (1947), he drew on the services of important figures such as Cesare Zavattini, Lizzani and none other than Michelangelo Antonioni. Funded by ANPI (the National Association of Italian Partisans), the film anticipates much of De Santis's subsequent cinema in its exploration of themes of ideological conflict through the prism of genre (in the case of A Tragic Hunt, the Hollywood crime/gangster film). Two years later came the rush of wild, unabashed sensuality that is Bitter Rice, a picture that in content and tone is about as far from the world of films such as Germany Year Zero or Umberto D as it's possible to get. Perhaps most famous for a star-making appearance by 19-year-old Silvana Mangano, De Santis's film centres around the fateful meeting of two couples in the rice fields of the Po valley. Famously, the romantic intrigues in the film itself were put in the shade by those behind the camera. Producer Dino De Laurentiis married Mangano shortly after the film was made while – shockingly – writer Cesare Pavese committed suicide after being jilted by Constance Dowling, sister of Bitter Rice actress Doris.