Realism - Can you have true realism?

[deleted]

the realism in this film doesn't necessarily mean that the film itself is "real"--that the action is happening live and there no actors or script. rossellini wanted to reflect a reality. the events in the film actually happened during the war. a lot of the shots were filmed in the exact places where the events took place. the neorealist movement wasn't to pretend that what was happening on screen was real but rather to be rid of all the propaganda and fantasy films that were made prior to World War II.

You are confusing the name a movement with a word definition from the dictionary. Modernism, for example, isn't the latest artistic achievement but a name for a movement that began over 100 years ago and ended decades ago. Neorealism is "a film style using documentary techniques for fictional purposes. Most neorealist films rely on high-contrast black-and-white film, nonprofessional actors, and natural settings."

Contrary to some of the comments here, I found this movie to be quite compelling and the stories and characters to be multi-dimensional and convincing. This was probably because the story was based on actual people and events. With a brutal and even sadistic rise of the far right in the US and an insensitive tendency to occupy foreign countries—it is no surprise that Americans might want to see the fascists portrayed with greater sympathy. That, in and of itself, doesn’t make the figures from the Nazi resistance any less noble. I found this movie to be anything but predictable even though it has been studied and emulated for decades.

There is a difference between realism in art and reality. Italian neo-realism is a very good example of thta: it displays an unmistakable, quite artificial style while telling very realistic stories. That's what makes it work.

Reality in art however never works.

Well you have to ask, what exactly is the movie trying to portray as real? The destroyed city is real, the living conditions and the feelings of the Romans are all very real. The open end is perfectly real, as if the news or the history books are there for us, almost like some sort of sequel. It has characters who represent the people of the time, none of whom are protagonist. Of course it had to be scripted because otherwise it's just going and shooting random things in a desolate city, and in reality, the viewer isn't going to get any sense of reality at all. What it takes is an Italian who has been ravaged by the war and knows the minds of the people of Rome who can then write and direct a film that accurately depicts the feelings of the people towards the nazis. So to some up, it's realism not real