The foundation for any canonical reading of Italian cinema is neorealism, the film movement which would inspire such diverse international phenomena as American film noir, the French New Wave, and Brazilian Cinema Novo. Yet film scholars have been hard-pressed to define what neorealism is: a genre, a moment, a philosophy, an orientation, a mode? While many Italian studies of neorealism have continued this conversation, Charles Leavitt's recent intervention makes an important move away from the problematics of categorisation; it focuses instead upon neorealism's centrality in Italian cultural criticism. This original, intensively researched approach makes his book a unique contribution to the historiography of Italian cinema.

Leavitt begins by framing neorealism as first and foremost a ‘complex cultural tendency’ (p. 4) that found its expression as an ongoing conversation among the Italian intelligentsia in the first half of the twentieth century. His holistic approach examines neorealism not just as a cinematic expression but in a wide range of Italian cultural forms, including painting, poetry, prose, theatre and music. Each chapter compares one film with another artistic work not as discrete texts but as representative texts of a specific intellectual discourse regarding neorealism. By diminishing the traditional focus on textual analysis in film studies, the book argues for increased recognition of the centrality of the critical debates that took place amongst the leading figures in Italian cultural theory.

In his first chapter Leavitt asks, ‘What was neorealism?’, taking as a primary example Luchino Visconti's La terra trema (1948), which has been viewed as the most orthodox of neorealist films. Leavitt declines to proclaim it a neorealist urtext but instead argues that films such as Visconti's were culminations of discussions already taking place across a variety of art forms. As he points out, the term neorealism was widespread in cultural circles throughout the 1920s and 1930s, where it became applied not just to Italian texts but also to artistic production in the USSR, the United States, Great Britain, and France. This leads Leavitt to look at the relationship between modernism and Italian neorealism, examining the way that the Italian critics perceived such figures as Joyce and Proust as expressive of a new, hyper-realist examination of subjectivity that soon became extended to Italian cultural production as well.

Chapter 2 moves on to look at how the cultural conversation on neorealism during the years of the Fascist regime transformed into an expression of anti-fascism in the postwar period. Recent Italian criticism has argued for a recognition of the continuities between cinematic production in the Fascist and postwar periods, a perspective that, according to Leavitt, overlooks the way artists at the time very consciously configured neorealism as a break with cultural precedents. Leavitt argues that cultural continuity and rupture can coexist, and here his argument's historical grounding in the written discourses on neorealism is critical. He notes how neorealist practitioners, such as Roberto Rossellini, were not doctrinaires about the notion of an anno zero, as Rossellini himself argued that neorealism was a palpable presence in Fascist cultural production. Rather than debating the validity of Fascist versus post-fascist dichotomies, Leavitt looks at the way films such as Giuseppe De Santis's Caccia tragica (1947) and novels such as Italo Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno demonstrate that the distance between Fascism and the Resistance was ‘perilously thin’ (p. 76), and were capable of reinforcing continuities between Fascist-era and postwar cultural works while also remaining rigorously anti-fascist.

In his third chapter Leavitt looks more closely at neorealism's representation of history by examining the reception of the term cronaca. This term became representative of debates regarding history from below versus the Crocean top-down view of Italian history, which found vocal support in the Italian literary establishment. The postwar arguments, taking place in journals such as Il Politecnico and Società, illustrated how the memory of the Resistance was torn between those who advocated an objective reading of history versus those who championed personal testimony. Neorealism soon came to advocate the latter, as seen in works such as Leopoldo Trieste's 1946 play Cronaca, which used personal narrative as a means of communicating the experience of the masses. Leavitt convincingly extends Trieste's defence of the cronaca to Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (1948), a film that exemplifies the neorealist project by depicting the chronicle of one man's experience as both ‘unique and universal’ (p. 127).

This discussion continues in Chapter 4, which looks at how neorealism was the conduit for complex critical debates regarding the ethical function of culture in the wake of the Fascist era. This chapter examines figures such as Elio Vittorini, who expressed a sentiment widely shared amongst cultural figures that Fascism resulted from the failure of Italian culture to exercise its own moral function. Vittorini's call for a radical new culture took on a messianic tone that expressed the interplay between politics and Catholicism in postwar Italian culture. This Catholic-inspired ethics of culture is seen in films such as Aldo Vergano's Il sole sorge ancora (1946), which represents the political awakening of its protagonist, who moves from the self-interest of the ‘I’ to the collective ‘we’, in religious terms. Neorealism thus became the ultimate expression of the redemptive power of art, ‘raiding the storehouse of Christian symbolism in order to represent the immanent salvation of the Italian polis’ (p. 170).

In his conclusion, Leavitt asserts that neorealism was much more than a particular form of cinematic expression. It was an ‘all-embracing cultural conversation’ (p. 172), an affirmation that is borne out by his extensive citations of Italian cultural criticism. Leavitt's examinations of the critical writings of the era are persuasive and important for scholars of Italian culture, although the contextual specificity may render the book of less use for those outside of Italian studies. As debates on the definition of neorealism will undoubtedly continue, Leavitt's historicising of neorealism is an essential contribution that will greatly enable our understanding of the enduring place of neorealism in Italian culture.