Searching for Japan. Twentieth-century Italy’s Fascination with Japanese Culture

Abstract

scant attention in discussions of neorealism but enacts in complex fashion the psychic and material obstacles involved in transforming society to reveal the “cracks and fissures in the allegedly solid structure of neorealism and to place renewed emphasis on post-war cultural conflict, which retains more explanatory power than does the retrospectively adduced consensus” (130). Lino Miccich e’s conception of neorealism as “an ethics of aesthetics” runs counter to that of Leavitt, who finds this view overstates consensus by diminishing “the many disparate artistic and political objectives pursued by individual neorealist artists” (130). Leavitt’s dissenting view is expressed by intellectuals and writers concerned with the creation of “a just society” (134). One such proponent, Elio Vittorini, a prominent voice for a new culture impelled by the memory of the war, turned toward the external world where a militant culture “would have to take over where religion had fallen short” (138). Carlo Bo turned to “inward cleansing” (147), others to Hermeticism, for expressing their belief in the imperative of “a new society founded in the civil religion of the Resistance” (152). Thus, these writers and filmmakers opposed Christian orthodoxy and restrictive interpretations but not the civil religiosity of neorealist filmmaking. Leavitt’s choral character of neorealism is exemplified by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a sermo humilis through interior monologues, humble language, and a mixture of styles “to reveal the substantial unity underlying the period's creative diversity and artistic hybridity” (178) that have often been obscured. Leavitt’s extensive research, his accessible and moving style, and the careful delineation of his arguments are exceptional. Since he claims there is still much to say about neorealism, we can wait eagerly to see where this work will take him.