Having abandoned Soviet Realism in the late 1940s, the recently formed Yugoslav fi lm industry looked elsewhere for suitable models with which to develop a national style of fi lm. One option was to imitate the characteristics of other progressive cinemas, such as Italian neorealism. For this reason, in the second half of the 1950s, aspiring Yugoslav directors like Veljko Bulajić were sent to study to the Italian Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografi a in Rome, while Italian neorealist directors such as Giuseppe De Santis were invited to work in the Yugoslav fi lm industry. Moreover, fi lm coproductions with western European countries such as West Germany, France, and Italy, provided a profi table way of acquiring technical and stylistic know-how. Accordingly, this essay focuses on a the case of the West German-Yugoslavian-Italian co-production of František Čáp’s Sand, Love and Salt in order to examine how co-productions were used by the Yugoslav fi lm industry to test out new fi lm styles and genres, in this case by adopting the “lowbrow” neorealism of Italian melodrama and comedy.
Looking for New Aesthetic Models through Italian-Yugoslavian Film Co-Productions: Lowbrow Neorealism in Sand, Love and Salt
DI CHIARA, FRANCESCO
2013-01-01
Abstract
Having abandoned Soviet Realism in the late 1940s, the recently formed Yugoslav fi lm industry looked elsewhere for suitable models with which to develop a national style of fi lm. One option was to imitate the characteristics of other progressive cinemas, such as Italian neorealism. For this reason, in the second half of the 1950s, aspiring Yugoslav directors like Veljko Bulajić were sent to study to the Italian Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografi a in Rome, while Italian neorealist directors such as Giuseppe De Santis were invited to work in the Yugoslav fi lm industry. Moreover, fi lm coproductions with western European countries such as West Germany, France, and Italy, provided a profi table way of acquiring technical and stylistic know-how. Accordingly, this essay focuses on a the case of the West German-Yugoslavian-Italian co-production of František Čáp’s Sand, Love and Salt in order to examine how co-productions were used by the Yugoslav fi lm industry to test out new fi lm styles and genres, in this case by adopting the “lowbrow” neorealism of Italian melodrama and comedy.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
