Gomorrah
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
3. Primary Texts: Film
Matteo
Garrone. Gomorrah.
Key Terms (tags): neorealism, italy,
gangster film,
Supporting References:
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- Kuhn, Annette, and Guy Westwell. "Neorealism." A Dictionary of Film Studies. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2012. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
Neorealism (Italian Neorealism)
1. A body of socially conscious films,
made on small budgets and shot on location
using non-professional actors, that emerged in Italy
between the mid 1940s and early 1950s; the films dealt with the
everyday lives of ordinary working people in the aftermath of war and
subscribed to the ideals of a post-Fascist popular social renewal.
2. A political-aesthetic disposition,
inspired by the spirit and methods of these films, informing a range
of national
cinemas worldwide from the 1950s on. A term
previously used in relation to art and literature, Neorealism was
first applied to film in reference to Luchino Visconti's
Ossessione/Obsession (1942), which is widely regarded
as the movement's precursor. Neorealism shares with realism
a disposition towards seeing truth in the visible world and a
confidence in cinema's capacity to convey that truth. It also
embodies the notion that cinema can and should be socially critical,
and that films may properly have a consciousness-raising function.
Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta/Rome Open City
(1945), regarded as the first Neorealist film, was a worldwide
critical and commercial success. It was followed, among others, by
Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscià/Shoeshine (1946) and
Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948), and
Giuseppe De Santis's Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (1949). A
rise of conservatism and an eclipse of populist anti-fascism in late
1940s Italian politics contributed to the decline of Neorealism,
whose endpoint is commonly dated to 1952, the release year of De
Sica's box-office failure, Umberto D. The directors
associated with Neorealism continued to make films, while a new
generation of filmmakers—influenced by, but pushing the boundaries
of—Neorealism arose in the 1950s, among them Federico Fellini,
Michelangelo Antonioni, and Per Paolo Pasolini.
The most prominent movement in
international cinema in the years following World War II, from the
1950s Neorealism exerted a worldwide influence on many emerging
cinemas and ‘cinemas of poverty’, particularly in Latin
America, where the films’ directness,
immediacy, and down-to-earth subject matter, along with their
capacity to achieve much at relatively low cost, were immensely
attractive. In India, the work of directors Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit
Ray, and others is explicitly indebted to Neorealism (see new
indian cinema), while its methods and
principles are incorporated in the idea of Third
Cinema. In Italy itself, the legacy of
politically aware cinema is visible in historical films like
Visconti's Senso (1954), about the Risorgimento; in
mafia thrillers such as Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco
Rosi, 1962) and Il giorno della civetta/The Day of the Owl
(Damiano Damiani, 1967); and in recent conspiracy films such as
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008). Within film studies,
Neorealism has been studied in terms of the tenets of realism
in film; of the relationship between cinema and politics; and in
studies of film
movements and new
waves, while Neorealism's wider influence in
World
cinema is a subject of recent and current
interest in the discipline.
- Kuhn, Annette, and Guy Westwell. "gangster film." A Dictionary of Film Studies. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2012. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013 <http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199587261.001.0001/acref-9780199587261-e-0321>.
gangster film.
A subgenre of the crime
film, set within the milieu of organized crime. There are numerous
antecedents of the gangster film in early crime films such as A
Daring Daylight Burglary (Frank S. Mottershaw, UK, 1903),
The Moonshiners (Wallace McCutcheon, US, 1904) and
Desperate Encounter Between Burglars And Police
(Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon, US, 1905). D.W. Griffith's
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (US, 1912) is among the
best-known early gangster films. There was a major cycle of gangster
films (or ‘crook melodramas’) in the mid 1910s and the late
1920s. Underworld (Josef von Sternberg, US, 1927),
written by former reporter Ben Hecht and based on real events, is
often said to herald the arrival of a cycle of the ‘classic’
studio-produced Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s. More than
fifty gangster films were made between 1930 and 1932, including
Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930), The Public
Enemy (William Wellman, 1931), and Scarface
(Howard Hawks, 1932). Examples of the US version of the genre were
popular with audiences and quickly established a distinct iconography
of city settings (Chicago, New York), sharp suits, fast cars, and
machine guns. The gangster's tough, masculine physical demeanour was
marked in the performance styles of key stars such as James Cagney,
Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Paul Muni. The introduction
of synchronized
sound ensured that hardboiled dialogue, gunfire, and screeching car
tyres also became central features of the genre. The most common
narrative
arc in the ‘classic’ period follows the gangster from rags to
riches to destruction (inviting comparison to classical tragedy). The
genre's strong association with Warner Bros., a studio with a
commitment to making social
problem films, ensured that the sensational
violence, stylized mise-en-scene,
and sharply-paced plots were combined with a desire to shed light on
organized crime as a pressing social problem (see studio
style). As such the gangster movie often makes
claim to a certain kind of social realism,
especially given its symbiotic relationship with contemporaneous
events (with plots often taken from newspaper reportage) and
fascination with real-life criminals such as Al Capone, John
Dillinger, Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano, and Bonnie Parker and Clyde
Barrow.
From this point of origin the gangster
film has remained a staple of film production inside and outside the
US: in this respect it is often compared with the western.
Aspects of the gangster film surface in Hollywood genres of the 1940s
and 1950s, such as the G-Men cycle (a series of films showing
FBI agents, or ‘government men’, fighting crime) and film
noir; and continued to be made into the 1960s.
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) heralded the
arrival of New
Hollywood and Francis Ford Coppola's The
Godfather trilogy (1972–90) and 1980s remakes of the
classic gangster movie, such as Scarface (Brian De
Palma, 1983) and Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio
Leone, 1984), as well as the films of the Coen Brothers and Quentin
Tarantino, have ensured the longevity of the genre. The HBO-produced
and immensely successful, The Sopranos (1999–2007)
and the prohibition-era set, Boardwalk Empire
(2010–ongoing), indicate that the genre is still thriving on both
cinema and television screens.
The gangster film is an important genre
across a wide range of national cinemas, including Britain—Brighton
Rock (John Boulting, 1947), Lock, Stock and Two
Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998); France—Touchez
pas au grisbi/Don't Touch The Loot (Jacques Becker, 1954),
Mesrine (Jean-François Richet, 2008); Italy (mafia
films)—Salvatore Giuliano(Francesco Rosi, 1962),
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008); Japan (yakuza
films)—Battles Without Honor or Humility (Kinji
Fukasaku, 1973), Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, 1993);
Hong Kong (triad films)—A Better Tomorrow (John
Woo, 1986), Infernal Affairs (Lau Wai-keung, 2002);
and Brazil—Cidade de Deus/City of God
(Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) (see also india,
film in; mexico,
film in; south
africa, film in).
In film studies, the US 1930s gangster
film has been a key focus and has been examined as a symptom of, and
commentary upon, the experience of prohibition and the Great
Depression, and as a critical account of the US/capitalist ideal of
unfettered upward social mobility. Studies of the genre in the
context of censorship
and regulation note that despite the requirement that the resolution
of any given gangster film must show that crime does not pay, the
preceding narratives were often replete with (for the time)
ultra-violence, anti-authoritarian attitudes, and potentially
seditious sentiment (see production
code).
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- Kuhn, Annette, and Guy Westwell. "Italy, film in." A Dictionary of Film Studies. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2012. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
Italy, film
in. In 1895 an Italian, Filoteo Alberini, patented the Kinetograph, a
device for making, printing, and projecting films; but the country's
earliest public exhibition of moving images, via the Lumière
Cinematograph, took place on 13 March 1896 in Rome. Italy's earliest
fiction film is thought to be a 1905 historical drama called La
presa di Roma, 20 settembre 1870/The Capture of Rome, 20 September
1870. Film production flourished in the silent era, with
numerous, mostly small, companies scattered around the country: one
of these—Cines, founded in 1906—remained in operation in various
guises until 1957. Between 1911 and 1914, with stars such as
Hesperia, Maria Jacobini, and Emilio Ghione (who was also a director
and screenwriter and created the character Za la Mort in a popular
serial), Italian films proved extremely successful in gaining entry
to international markets. From the earliest years, historical
spectacle, especially films set in ancient Rome and Greece, was a
staple genre: examples include La caduta di Troia/The Fall of Troy
(Giovanni Pastrone, 1911) and the big-budget international hit
Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) (see epic
film; history
film). After 1922, the film industry was
brought under the control of the Fascist government and centralized
in Rome, and the Istituto Nazionale LUCE was established with the
remit of harnessing cinema for propagandist purposes. Censorship
was widely applied, there were restrictions on film imports, and
dialogue in foreign-language films was dubbed (see dubbing);
but the government appears to have supported the development of the
national industry, and filmmakers such as Rossellini began their
careers during the Fascist period. In the mid 1930s the Direzione
Generale per il Cinematografia was founded as part of the Ministry of
Popular Culture and a film school, the Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia, opened. Rome's renowned studio, Cinecittà, boasting
Europe's most advanced production facilities, opened in 1937 and
remained the main locus of Italian film production through to the
1970s. Cinecittà played a part in the creation of a distinctively
Italian genre of the 1930s—telefoni bianchi, or white
telephone films: glossy comedies and dramas with glamorous
metropolitan settings. Outside the capital, government-sponsored
mobile cinemas took films to rural areas.
Following the fall of Fascism in 1943
there emerged a socially and politically aware cinema epitomized most
famously by the Neorealist films made between the end of World War II
and the early 1950s. Characterized by real-life plots and characters
and authentic settings, as in Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves
(Vittorio de Sica, 1948) and Roma città aperta/Rome Open City
(Roberto Rossellini, 1945), Italian Neorealism
became hugely influential, inspiring numerous ‘new’ cinemas
around the world and launching or consolidating the careers of
significant auteurs such as Federico Fellini, Rossellini, and de
Sica. Neorealism also paved the way for the careers of prominent art
cinema directors such as Luchino Visconti,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Liliana Cavani. The
decline of Neorealism overlapped with gli anni facili, Italian
commercial cinema's ‘easy years’ of the 1950s and early 1960s,
when locally-made films were enjoying peak popularity with domestic
audiences, and producing international stars
like sex goddesses Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. This was the
period of ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, when Cinecittà hosted a
number of US co-productions, most prominently spectacular
biblical/historical epics like Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959)
and peplum
films such as Le fatiche di Ercole/Hercules
(Pietro Francisi, 1958). In the 1960s and 1970s, with the spaghetti
western, Italy made a distinctive contribution
to an established Hollywood genre; but after the 1970s, film
production in Italy became increasingly decentralized and the
industry suffered a decline in both production output and cinema
admissions. But with the domestic and international successes of
confessional films like Nanni Moretti's Caro diario/Dear Diary
(1994), nostalgia films like Nuovo Cinema Paradiso/Cinema Paradiso
(Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988) and La vitaè bella/Life Is Beautiful
(Roberto Benigni, 1997), and mafia thrillers like Gomorrah
(Matteo Garrone, 2008), Italy has found market niches, and its annual
feature production and co-production output is now the third highest
in Europe.
See also exploitation film; futurism; horror film; pornography;
science
fiction.
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