INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL DEBATES SURROUNDING REALISM IN FILM NOIR AND ITALIAN NEOREALISM

In his introduction to ‘American Cinema’ in the compiled works of the Cahiers du Cinéma from the 1950s, Jim Hillier explains that ‘what Cahiers felt much American cinema (and much Italian cinema) offered, and French cinema did not, was what Roger Leenhardt called a ‘direct engagement’ with reality’ (1985: 1). He goes on to suggest that the critical position of Cahiers’ group of French critics and future filmmakers goes against much of the scholarly debate surrounding American cinema to this day because films produced in Hollywood are often dismissed as escapist fantasy. Cahiers often approaches films in isolation to emphasise what they believe constitutes the definitive work of auteurship, a status only given to filmmakers whose work best represents the power of cinema to evoke truths about life unconstrained by the confines of entertainment industries. The practice of singling out themes and ideas may be problematic when discussing the entirety of national cinematic output, but the type of work singled out in Cahiers better helps us contextualise the current output of realist Italian crime films and suggests the relevance of film noir’s aesthetics in film historiography as a style that breaks away from Hollywood escapism by incorporating cinematic realism – a style more generally associated with its transnational, postwar counterpart, neorealism. Cahiers’ understanding that realism functions as a state of mind allows us to make sense of the dissonance brought on by war and fascism (Hillier 1985: 203); that postwar disorientation leads to the melding of noir and neorealism as a means to provide social commentary through mafia representation.

If, like Cahiers most prominent critic André Bazin, we are to understand neorealism as a cinema of social action, then neorealist aesthetics are always in service of its non-diegetic claims to reality and not vice-versa (1967: 21). This assertion allows scholars to expand the canon of neorealism, including post- Mussolini crime films, and thus our understanding of their ability to function as an instrument of social change, and as a reflection of societal realities.