What is neorealism?
A cinema experiment: what rival visions would emerge if you pitted the director of The Bicycle Thieves against the producer of Gone with the Wind on the same movie material? History can tell us…
The only great problem of cinema seems to be more and more, with each film, when and why to start a shot and when and why to end it.”Jean-Luc Godard
Every cut is a form of judgment, whether it takes place on the set or in the editing room. A cut reveals what matters and what doesn’t. It delineates the essential from the non-essential. To examine the cuts of a filmmaker is to uncover an approach to cinema.
The happenstance of Vittorio De Sica’s Terminal Station and David O. Selznick’s Indiscretion of an American Wife offers a rare opportunity to compare two cuts of the same film from a leading figure of neorealism and a leading figure of Hollywood.
If neorealism exists, it is in contrast to the dominant approach to moviemaking, shaped and exemplified by Hollywood. In comparing Terminal Station to Indiscretion of an American Wife, we must ask, What difference does a cut make?
The new issue of Sight and Sound
On the cover: award-winning director Christiopher Nolan on The Odyssey, oral tradition and Imax. Inside: tributes to Tony Rayns and Sam Neil, a look back on Chantal Akerman and Martin Scorsese’s New York, Gary Owen on bringing Effi O Blaenau to the screen, Pedro Almodóvar on Bitter Christmas, Maite Alberdi on A Child of My Own and we return to our Winter 1970/71 interview with Claude Chabrol.
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