Italian Neorealism is a cinema movement that had influence after World War II in Italy. In the years of the fascist government in Italy, a new cinema movement, ‘Telefoni Bianchi’, arose because Benito Mussolini’s government wanted to drive society to distraction. The government wanted to fun people and so they cannot see the oppressive regime. Actually, this cinema movement succeeded. In the years between 1930-1940, just about 300 films were that kind of film. This cinema movement called Telefoni Bianchi which means that white telephones because of using white telephones in the films’ actually had another name which is ‘salon films’. First examples of that kind of film shot under the influence of American comedy films. The common features of these films are using the flashy material in films’, about the lives of the bourgeois class. Goffredo Alessandrini’s La Segretaria Privata (1931), La Telefonista (Nunzio Malasomma, 1932), and Questi Ragazzi (Mario Mattoli, 1937) can be seen the examples of Telefoni Bianchi’s films. However, this cinema movement didn’t persist because at the final of WW II Italian’s society condition wasn’t very well. Society has affected the war in economic and social ways. The people who saw the difficulty of war and were affected by the influence of war economic and social decided to shoot films about looking at Italy in the eyes of realism. Therefore, the neorealism movement rose in Italy. Italian Neorealism is a cinema movement about the poor and working class. Mark Shiel describes neorealism:

Few moments in the history of cinema have been as hotly debated in their day and by succeeding generations as the moment of Italian neorealism in Italy after World War Two. Most critics and historians agree that neorealism was a watershed in which realism emerged for a time as the dominant mode of Italian cinema, with decisive impacts on the ways in which films would be made ant though about in Italy and worldwide generations. One of the most important ways of thinking about neorealism has been to see it as a moment of decisive transition in the tumultuous aftermath of world war which produced a stylistically and philosophically distinctive cinema that achieved a limited but influential popularity from the mid-1940s until sometime in the early or late 1950s. (…) In particular, neorealism marked a significant stage in the transformation of cinema from classical forms which dominated in Europe and in the US prior to World War Two to the modernist art cinemas which came to dominate in Europe after the war and which had considerable impact and influence on Hollywood too from the 1950s to the 1970s.

  The common features of neorealist films are that films made in point of humanistic view, emotions are in the foreground instead of abstract ideas, films shot in streets instead of studios, characters mostly nonprofessional, children in the major role, there is improvisation without literary dialogue, and the topics are about poor and working-class and everyday life. The directors wanted to show the condition of Italy after the war, so they shot their films in the street. We can see easily these features in Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti’s films such as Roma, Citta Aperta (Robert Rosselini, 1945), Ladri di Biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), and La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948).