Although, by
the late-1970s, Vittorio De Sica’s reputation had been overshadowed by his
neo-realist peer Roberto Rossellini, De Sica’s influence can still be felt
whenever a director takes to the streets and employs non-professional actors
from where the film is actually being shot. For David Thomson, De Sica is the
“pioneer sponsor of the non-professional actor”, his portraits of urban working-class
people in Sciusciá (Shoeshine, 1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) setting a fresh
standard for spontaneous and naturalistic performance in European cinema.
Recruiting his actors where he found them, De Sica saw them as key to the
integrity of a new realist cinema: “against the absence of human solidarity,
they are a word in favour of the poor and the unhappy.”
Non-establishment
acting is not without its precedents. In De Sica’s casting of individuals who
personify the social types and values he sought to show, there is something of
the technique of “typage” employed by the Russian directors Eisenstein and
Pudovkin in the 1920s. The passage of time in a quotidian Rome in Bicycle
Thieves anticipated something of the formal splendour of Antonioni’s modernist
environments in works like L’eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964). However, it
is perhaps a measure of the late twentieth century’s decline of traditional
values that, whereas De Sica’s characters belong to their environments, the
post-war arthouse cinema presented characters progressively alienated from
their worlds. In the late-1940s, neo-realism’s influence spread to Hollywood:
real locations, long takes and deep focus brought verisimilitude and urgency to
American thrillers and the social conscience genre, whether studio-made or
independent, in films such as The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) and The
Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948). The Best Years Of Our Lives (William Wyler,
1946) featured Harold Russell among its actors, a paraplegic ex-navy veteran,
who brought veracity to the film’s account of postwar readjustment. Further
afield the likes of Satyajit Ray in India, Akira Kurosawa in Japan, the German
directors who briefly created the new sub-genre of the Trümmerfilm (rubble
film), and filmmakers in Spain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe all took note.
While these decades saw crises in studio
filmmaking around the world, whenever filmmakers sought to escape studio acting
and arthouse artifice to return to real life, they were responding to the
influence of neo-realism. The minimalist meditations on experience in Bresson’s
A Man Escaped (1956) and Mouchette (1966) remind us of Lamberto Maggiorani’s
intensity as the bereft father of Bicycle Thieves. Consonant with a movement
marginal to the Italian industry, neo-realism’s legacy has tended to be felt
less in canonic establishment cinema and more in improvisatory experimental
trends typified in America by John Cassavetes – Shadows (1959), for example –
and developed in Faces (1968), A Woman Under The Influence (1974), and in
Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961).
Neo-realism
was an aesthetic which tapped into a particular transition in Italian life. In
Britain’s New Wave cinema, which also drew on its own native documentary
tradition, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1959) and Billy Liar (1963)
poignantly recorded an industrial revolution giving way to the jukebox inner
cities of postmodernity. Ken Loach’s films, such as Poor Cow (1967) and Kes
(1969), regularly employed unknown actors from the environments in which the
drama took place. Although sometimes criticized for his actors’ mannerisms,
Mike Leigh extended the representation of British types while proffering a
desultory portrait of the urban scene following the ravages of Thatcherite economic
reform in High Hopes (1988), Naked (1993) and Secrets And Lies (1995).
The 1990s saw
a renewed interest in filmmaking which uncovered underrepresented pockets of
experience. While the Danish Dogme “manifesto” decried traditional acting, this
era also witnessed filmmakers such as Larry Clark and Harmony Korine
experimenting with non-professional actors in, respectively, Kids (1995) and
Gummo (1997). Independent American features like Heavy (1995), Trees Lounge
(1996) and Sling Blade (1996) found drama in the everyday tribulations of the
American social undergrowth. The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought together
actors who had never acted before and who have scarcely been heard from since,
while United 93 (2006) used non-professionals to depict the ordinary citizens
who downed hijacked United Airways flight 93 on September 11, 2001. The 1990s
also saw a renaissance in Iranian cinema, in which directors like Abbas
Kiarostami (And Life Goes On…, 1992) and Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple, 1998)
drew upon quirky experiences and non-professional actors to chronicle the
everyday vicissitudes of life under Islamic law.
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