directly to the heart of each scene. For the most
part, the editing is conventional, most often taking
place within the long takes (and thus within the
camera). Welles avoids such avant-garde tech-
niques as Soviet Montage, for example, unless he
wants to call attention to the editing, as he does in
the “News on the March” sequence and the pans
and swipes that create the passing of time during
the famous breakfast-table sequence. Before going
to Hollywood, Welles revolutionized American radio
broadcasting, and his sound design for Kanecreates
an aural realism equivalent to the movie’s visual
realism. He frequently uses overlapping sound,
which, like the deep-space composition, bombards
us with a lightning mix of information that chal-
lenges us to choose what to listen to (just as in real
life). The film is also much louder than the typical
movie of the time, which is another innovation, and
the bravado of its dialogue, sound effects, and music
puts it in your ears as well as in your face. Bernard
Herrmann’s musical score was spare, modernist,
and completely ahead of its time. In the film’s acting,
Welles called on his stage and radio experiences to
break another Hollywood convention. Actors did
not normally rehearse their lines except in private or
for a few minutes with the director before shooting,
but Welles rehearsed his cast for a month before
shooting began, thus enabling his ensemble of
actors to handle long passages of dialogue in the
movie’s distinctive long takes. And the perform-
ances, including Welles as Kane, are unforgettable.
Although Citizen Kanehas been enormously influ-
ential on filmmakers around the world— Martin
Scorsese said that Welles influenced more young
people to become film directors than anyone else
in film history—and references to its unique style
have been quoted in dozens of other films, Welles’s
overall style has never been fully imitated. Even
after repeated viewings, its tantalizing story, coura-
geous political stance, provocative ambiguity, and
razzle-dazzle style continue to exert their hold.
1942—1951: Italian Neorealism
With German Expressionism, Soviet Silent Realism,
and the French New Wave movements, Italian Neo-
realism stands as one of the most vital movements
in the history of world cinema. Developed during
the Second World War, neorealism rose to promi-
nence after the war and then flourished for a rela-
tively short period before ending abruptly. Benito
Mussolini, the Fascist dictator who ruled Italy from
1922 to 1943, believed, as did Lenin, in the propa-
ganda power of film. To revive the lackluster film
industry, he instituted government subsidies and
control, banned American movies, established a
national film school, and constructed vast new stu-
dios. Although the Italian movies produced during
his regime were commercially successful (audi-
ences had no choices), they were artistically infe-
rior to what the French were producing before the
war. Mussolini was driven from power in 1943 and
executed in 1945, thus providing an opportunity for
revitalizing the Italian cinema.
In 1942, Cesare Zavattini, a prolific Marxist
screenwriter, launched what came to be known as
the neorealist movement, influenced its style and
ideology, and led a group of young filmmakers to
make film history. The group was influenced not
only by Zavattini but also by French poetic realism,
a movement that consisted of filmmakers seeking
freedom in the increasingly repressive French
society of the 1930s, and by two contemporary
Italian films: Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione(1943)
and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City(1945).
Rossellini’s film more clearly exhibits every charac-
teristic of neorealism and became the standard for
the films that followed.
In cinema, as well as the other visual arts, real-
ism, often an elusive concept, is nothing more or
less than the depiction of subjects as they appear to
the artist in everyday life, without adornment or
interpretation. In the postwar period’s neorealism,
this definition adhered, but the movement was rev-
olutionary because it deliberately broke with the
Fascist past and adopted an ideology that reflects
Marxist, Christian, and humanist values. The neore-
alist filmmakers placed the highest value on the lives
of ordinary working people; decried such postwar
conditions as widespread unemployment, poverty,
child labor, government corruption, and inadequate
housing (the results of Fascist rule); and focused
on the struggle for a decent life in the postwar
world. Politically, neorealism is antiauthoritarian,A SHORT OVERVIEW OF FILM HISTORY 455