Stuart's Nite
Peter Matthews via Criterion Collection:
The particular battlefield for La Strada was the 1954 Venice Film Festival, where right-wing Catholic critics lustily endorsed what they saw as Fellini’s turn to religion. It proved a red flag to their Marxist and leftist counterparts, who fired back that the movie represented a grievous abdication of social responsibility. Fellini had made three previous films (including the sly small-town satire I Vitelloni), yet he was still chiefly known as co-screenwriter on Rome: Open City and Paisà, both directed by Roberto Rossellini, the founding father of Italian neorealism. Arising from the ashes of the Second World War, that enormously influential school had astonished the world with its raw photographic immediacy and fervent championing of the dispossessed. But though acclaimed abroad, the neorealists were increasingly isolated figures at home —attacked by the church for wallowing in filth and by the state for a reckless defeatism that threatened to sap the spirit of Italy’s postwar recovery.
It didn’t help that their gritty, downbeat films mostly bombed at the domestic box office. Italian audiences favored so-called pink neorealism, which retained a working-class ambience, but usually amounted to Silvana Mangano or Sophia Loren parading her charms around some rambunctious peasant hamlet. The movement in its unalloyed form was declared obsolete when 1950s consumer affluence changed the national mood from black markets and street urchins to la dolce vita (a stereotype that Fellini himself would later enshrine in the movie of that title).
The leading lights were obliged to strike out on their own. Vittorio De Sica settled down to those rose-tinted sex comedies, Luchino Visconti mounted gorgeously operatic costume spectacles, and Rossellini launched a series of cryptic existential dramas starring his wife, Ingrid Bergman. Hard-liners were naturally aghast at these developments, and spoke of a crisis in neorealism. For them, the shift to upper-class settings and interior probing could only be a shameful desertion of first principles. Rossellini and the others had betrayed the collective struggle by succumbing to the vice of bourgeois individualism. The filmmakers answered that neorealism was never a testament carved in stone, and that they must be free to explore and invent as their artistic consciences dictated.
