Your essential guide to Italian classic cinema

Telefoni Bianchi films were made in Italy in the 1930s in imitation of American comedies of the time. For example, there would be expensive Art Deco sets featuring white telephones (status symbol of bourgeois wealth and generally unavailable to the movie-going public), and children would have Shirley Temple curls. The films tended to be socially conservative, promoting family values, respect for authority, a rigid class hierarchy, and country life, all stances perfectly in line with the ideology of the fascist regime.

neorealist films are generally shot with non-professional actors; the scenes are shot almost exclusively in the outer, mostly in the periphery and in the country; the subject is the life of workers and destitutes, impoverished by the war. It is always emphasized the stillness, the plots are built mainly on scenes of ordinary people engaged in everyday activities, completely devoid of awareness as normally happens with amateur actors. Children occupy roles of great importance because they reflect what the grown-ups should do. Hope, redemption, the desire to leave the past behind and start a new life, frustration, poverty and desperation are the main feelings and living condition present in this movement.