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PATTERNS OF REALISM: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema BY ROY ARMES A. S. Barnes & Co., New York, 1971; hardcover $12.00; 226 pages; illustrations, index, bibliography, filmography.
REVIEWED BY DAVID BORDWELL
David Bordwell is a graduate student of film at the State University of Iowa and has written several articles and book reviews for FILM COMMENT.
The film historian who wants to explore a movement calling itself "realistic" is venturing into turbulent waters: one step too far and he may be carried out of his depth. The historical drift of a "realist" movement leads with powerful ease to a huge theoretical maelstrom, which in turn tugs one toward the deep waters of ultimate aesthetic judgments. The historian can quite properly study a "realist" movement as a set of stylistic and formal conventions operating at a certain time; he can compare the movement's program with what it actually turned out; he can trace sources, trends, influences, and deviations within the conventions of the "realism" in question. Beyond this, the historian need not go. He need not speculate whether the films in question ever actually "captured reality" (whatever that means), for this ushers in colossal theoretical problems; and although he can judge the films as films, he need not evaluate whether the notion of "realism" espoused by the movement makes its films superior to others, for this is an ultimate aesthetic judgment. Such speculations and judgments are valuable, of course, but they are not necessary to the historian's task. But more often than not, the historian is tempted to bite off more than he can chew, to venture into ahistorical areas that need more detailed analysis than he can muster in a historical enterprise. Few film historians have managed to resist this temptation, and Roy Armes, in his new volume on neo-realism, is no exception. Like many such studies of a brand of "realism," the book handles large theoretical and evaluative issues with some confusion, but as a critical history it is generally interesting and insightful.
Despite its very few primary sources, Patterns of Realism constructs an ordered historical account of a movement still too little known in England and America. Armes carefully traces neo-realism's sources in Fascist regional comedy and documentary, in the pedagogical and...