The second example of neorealist films of De Sica is Sciuscia (1946). There are two kids who try to earn money with shoeshine in the film. The film begins with the children ride a horse and they talk to the man selling the horse. They save the money up and buy the horse. However, they are caught because they try to sell contraband. This kind of bad behavior is not a big thing because when they are in prison, they have to face the real bad condition and they have to show their bad behavior there. Before the prison, two friends are very close but in prison, another person and the warden provoke them. Therefore, they begin to fight each other. At the end of the film, one of the children escapes from the prison, the other finds and kills him.

  The film is important because it reflects the poverty after the war, the starvation, the theft in the eyes of children.

With Sciuscia (Shoe-Shine, 1946), Zavattini and De Sica launched one of the most creative and firtile partnerships in the history of cinema. Zavattini cooked up treatments by the dozen, and tried to insert them into a framework of individualized and group poetics. The war pushed him to harness his imagination and the surreal, fantastical aspect of his personality, even though there was already a strong symbolic component in Sciuscia. The set for the film was built partially on a sondstage, including the interiors and the backgrounds. But the camera seemed to capture the authentic life of the main characters, Pasquale and Giuseppe, and their desires, their dreams, and their imagined future.

   However, the success of the neorealist cinema movement didn’t continue for a long time even though there were successful directors like Vittorio De Sica. When we look at the 1950s in Italy, we can see the end of the neorealist movement. The neorealist cinema ended because the Italian audience didn’t want to see their own realist world on screen. They preferred to watch comic films in the cinema. The other reason of the end of the movement is that there was a change in politics in Italy. The oppressive regime took the head in Italy. Therefore, we can say that the movement which quickened with an oppressive regime ended with another oppressive regime.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? London: University of Colifornia Press, 2005.

Brunetta, Gian Perro. The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century. Torino: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Shiel, Mark. Italian Neorealism/Rebuilding the Cinematic City. London: Wallflower, 2007.