Topic:  Rossellini, De Sica, and the Heritage of Italian Neorealism in Film
and Literature.  FRIT M390 is crosslisted with CMCL C398; CMLT C310; and
WEUR W406.  This course satisfies distribution requirements for Arts and
Humanities(AHLA) and the Cultural Studies Requirement List B.  M390 and
its crosslisted equivalents require no prerequisite and no previous knowledge
of Italian, although an introductory course in film, such as C190, would
certainly be useful.  No special course fee required.

The particular topic of this course will be the Italian "school" of
neorealism.  Italian neorealism became an international force in film
immediately after the end of World War II and presented an ideal of film
that abandoned the studio system for non-professional actors, documentary
photography, non-Hollywood scripts, and a progressive ideology that seemed
directly opposed to the cinema Italy had developed under the Fascist regime
from 1922 to its fall in 1943.  We shall examine films by such directors as
Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini,
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Taviani brothers, and Maurizio Nichetti.  Italian
neorealism will be examined in terms of its genesis within Fascist cinema,
its brief but influential flowering in a single decade immediately following
the end of WWII, and its subsequent "crisis" and evolution. As neorealism
represents Italy's major cinematic tradition, an understanding of it is
crucial to any study of Italy's film history.

Films screened will include some of the following: Rossellini's Open City,
Paisan, The Machine to Kill Bad People, Voyage in Italy, General Della
Rovere; De Sica's Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D., Miracle
in Milan; De Santis's Bitter Rice; Fellini's  La Strada, The
Nights of Cabiria; Visconti's Rocco and his Brother's; the Taviani
Brothers' The Night of San Lorenzo; and Nichetti's The Bicycle
Thief.  Two neorealist novels--Italo Calvino's The Path to the Nest
of Spiders and Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli--will be
read to juxtapose neorealist style in literature to that in the cinema.

Students will be asked to read two novels and two critical works (one
history of postwar Italian cinema and one introduction to Rossellini's
cinema).  In addition to class lectures, a regular film series will be
presented once a week (students missing a film may see it in the Main
Library's Media Collection).  Students will be asked to take three quizzes
during the semester, covering lectures, readings, and screenings, and
will be given an essay-type final exam.