for the hell of it

The Place of Rhetoric in Italian Film

Rhetoric is the act of catering to an audience by evoking emotion and utlizing logic to persuade them to see things in the light of the speaker, or in this case the director. Benito Mussolini was a huge fan of rhetoric, using propaganda to sway the Italian masses to see and do things his way. Because Mussolini and Fascist Italy were so involved in rhetoric, naturally anti-fascists, such as Neorealist filmmakers, were interested in antirhetoric. In Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Millicent Marcus argues that exact point, pertaining particularly to Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. The idea of Italian films being antirhetorical will be discussed through the analysis of Vittorio DiSica’s Ladri di biciclette. Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria will be analyzed to provide the counterargument (Italian films as rhetoric). Federico Fellini’s divergence from rhetoric, anti- or otherwise, will be discussed using La Strada as an example.
Marcus maintains that Rome, Open City is antirhetorical both in style and story. Rossellini’s masterpiece is technically speaking, rather minimalist. He rejected conventional cinema (Fascist approved propaganda) and instead conjured his own voice through the means available to him (the gritty newsreel quality of the filmstock, location shooting, outdated equipment), thus intrinsically creating the antirhetoric. His storyline is more a dramatic chronicling of events rather than an escapist narrative like the white telephone comedies of the same era. He depicts the facts and the hard truths that were being ignored in an up front, take-it-for-what-it-is way, unlike the obvious manipulative rhetoric in Mussolini’s propaganda films. He was not purposely trying to change people’s minds or even raise awareness in a plea for help; he merely saw a skewed aesthetic in the hope of the marginalized people and thought that ought to be chronicled in the only way he knew how—cinema.
However, Marcus’s use of the term “antirhetoric” is a misnomer. Rhetoric is effectively using (cinematic) language to convey a message in hopes of changing the audiences’ mind. Given the definition of rhetoric, antirhetoric suggests that there is no message being conveyed at all. This is not the case with Italian Neorealist films. A true antirhetorical film would be, perhaps, a Rita Hayworth film. Marcus’ antirhetorical films could more appropriately be labeled as anti-Mussolini’s rhetoric, anti-convention, or even rhetorical with a leftist persuasion. Instead of the “empty bombast” (Marcus, p. 34) elicited in Mussolini’s rhetoric, Italian Neorealist directors such as Vittorio De Sica and Michelangelo Antonioni created a new type of cinematic language; a fusion of their prose and their technical styles to make accessible art with interpretive complexities.
Ladri di biciclette is one of De Sica and Zavattini’s masterpieces. It expands Rossellini’s idea of Neorealism by maintaining social issues of Post-WWII Italy and at the same time focusing on a micro-level (a personal journey for one man and his son) rather than a chronicling of historical events. By 1948, when Ladri di biciclette was released, the Neorealist motif had shifted from the Resistance to the insipid daily lives of the proletariat during post-war restoration. Ladri di biciclette is a simple story of a desperately determined man combing the streets of Rome in a futile attempt to find his stolen bicycle so he can provide for his family. De Sica stretches this simplistic plot into ninety-three minutes of beautifully touching “neorealist superspectacle.” (p. 56) Like Rossellini, De Sica tediously shot and edited his film to create an illusion of effortlessness but unlike Rossellini, De Sica had a generous budget to aid his vision of self-concealing artistry. De Sica’s rhetoric about cinematic conventions comes into play here; despite his million lire budget and huge cast, his distaste for commercial films can be plainly seen in the irony of the main character’s, Antonio Ricci’s, bicycle being stolen in front of a movie theatre as he pastes a poster of Rita Hayworth as Gilda on the wall and a sly reference from a driver noting how he does not even want to go see a movie even though it is raining. De Sica’s ultimate purpose for Ladri di biciclette, disregarding his personal contempt for commercial films, was to take a commonplace situation (something that could have easily happened to any one member of his audience) and portray it in a heart wrenchingly dramatic yet simplistic fashion so as to plainly reveal the everyday injustices committed against the sub-marginalized populace. The quintessential example of how De Sica rends neorealist simplicity to capture his audiences’ emotions is the mere one line uttered by the police officer after a journalist asks for any news to report on—“No, nothing, just a bicycle”. The audience knows that this is not just a bicycle; it is a man’s life, and the lives of his family. And the audience can relate to Ricci because the audience is Ricci, but the audience is also the police officer, the thief, and all the other nameless faces roaming around Rome with distant dreams of a better life. That sentiment is what one feels after Ladri di biciclette is over, that sentiment is exactly what De Sica wanted from his audience, and that sentiment is why this film is “antirhetorical”, or rather rhetorical through the lens of a leftist.
Before Neorealism, there was the cinematic movement that prompted the birth of it. The first Golden Age of Italian Cinema (1908-1914) predated even Mussolini’s reign of Fascism. In the first Golden Age, however, lie the roots of Mussolini’s propagandistic films. The first Golden Age of Italian Cinema included films like The Last Days of Pompeii, The Fall of Troy, Assunta Spina, and most notably, Cabiria; they were films experimenting with the idea of film as an artistic medium. They were mostly loose adaptations of plays or epic battles and contained much spectacle but they all had the underlying theme of Italian Unification. Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria is the perfect example of a spectacular epic that had little to do with plot, lots to do with visual stimulation, and left the audience with a feeling of happy Italian identity. Cinema was still new and had not yet developed into the 7th art form that it is accepted as today; people still mainly wanted to see things they had never seen before—the exotic. However, directors quickly understood the potential properties of film that make people feel differently or think differently. Cabiria enmeshes the idea of the unseen exotic and the idea of using film to invoke emotion from the audience together to create a spectacular metaphor. Pastrone’s Cabiria uses awesome shots of volcanic eruption, laughably exaggerated acting, enormous and intricate set designs, decadently poetic intertitles, voluptuous, silk-laden, hyper-feminine women, and oily, loincloth-laden, hyper-masculine men to create an exotic spectacular. Cabiria is the title character and Sofonisba is her foil. Cabiria represents Rome and Sofonsiba represents Carthage. Cabiria’s drama parallels the Third Punic War; Sofonsiba’s highly stylized, dramatic, and drawn out death scene symbolizes the death of Carthage—or more importantly, the victory of Rome. The character of Maciste, the devoted servant and exotic “other”, symbolizes the unerring loyalty of Numidia to Rome during the Third Punic War. Cabiria is a political allegory that was released with the intent to create a sense of pride for Italians. Thus, Cabiria can be seen as the beginning of rhetorical film.
Federico Fellini represents both the decline of Neorealism and the rise of Auteur Cinema. His La Strada has many aspects that could cause one to label it as a Neorealist film, but Fellini was more interested in an entirely new form of cinema, one that indeed portrayed impoverished characters in a bleak environment but strayed from “traditional” Neorealism in that its main concern was Fellini’s personal artistic expression. Film theorist Andre Bazin calls La Strada “neorealism of the person”, meaning it examines human problems apart from historical or societal contexts. (p. 146) Thus, La Strada has no political rhetoric or antirhetoric. Fellini was tired of the genre and wanted to create his own genre—films that when watched, one would recognize it not as a western or musical or Neorealistic, but as a Fellini film. His characters, like Gelsomina, Zampano, and The Fool, do not represent a socioeconomic class but are individuals with depth that the audience can grow to care for in a different way than they cared for Pina or Don Pietro from Rome, Open City. When Don Pietro dies, it is a symbolic death that inspires hope in the audience. When Gelsomina dies, the audience watches as Zampano has a personal epiphany. It is the same difference as reading Shakespeare’s historical drama Henry V1 or reading Shakespeare’s fictional comedy Much Ado About Nothing. This analogy represents the core of Auteur Theory, where the filmmaker becomes the author and the camera becomes the pen.
Rhetoric is a concept that is hard to avoid. It can be used to persuade the audience to do whatever the speaker (or director) suggests. From the very birth of the cinematic medium, films like Pastrone’s Cabiria were being made to conjure emotion from the audience in hopes of changing the audiences’ perspective. Mussolini used propagandistic rhetorical films to unite Italy over Fascism. Neorealist directors, like Rossellini and De Sica, made films that overtly opposed the Fascist Party by depicting a desolate Post-War Italy and the tribulations of the people that have to live there. Although Neorealist directors opposed the Fascists’ use of rhetoric, they used it themselves through a leftists’ point of view. Fellini heralded the decline of Neorealism and the purposeful eschewing of rhetoric in favor of the artistic expression that Auteur Cinema had to offer.