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Brutal vision : the neorealist body in postwar Italian cinema

While film history identifies Italian neorealism as the examplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities, Schoonover offers an entirely original and sophisticated reconceptualization of this movement, arguing that its classic films should be understood as agents of a post-war reorganisation of cultural relations. His complex thesis demonstrates the ways neorealist films used images of the suffering body in order to reconstitute the concept of the human and to redefine cinema's role in citizenship. It is also underpinned by use of extensive primary sources, featuring newly discovered documents on neorealism's international distribution from American and European archives.