Jeff Holley

Richard Simpson

ENGL 342

Oct 21, 2020

 

Cinema after the Second World War

 

 

The birth of the "Neorealist" movement, brought about by several of the unemployed former documentarists who once worked for the government agencies mostly around Europe and the US, found a rekindling of their cinematic approach evolving from making war propaganda films to something more palatable. Sidney Meyers was one of these filmmakers; a Photo League Veteran was one of the great ones (Barnouw, 185). this neorealist cinematic movement also included the post-war Shoeshine, a post-war film depicting two boys and their life and demise in the boys' prison for their involvement in a burglary. Such films gave a different understanding of the world but probably had poor connectivity to what we would typically classify as a documentary these days. 

One phenomenon was the "short film odes" that started in the middle of the second world war by Swedish filmmakers looking to change this tragic subject.  The possibility of being accused of sympathizing with the wrong side of "nervous" neutrality and getting unwanted attention from neighboring war spies bent on finding incriminating material in such films might create unwanted scrutiny against them to incite public awareness. (186) these films about nature become widely popular during and after the war, leading to other post-war trends. 

After the war, an exciting trend of independent filmmaking resulted from economic prosperity and the traumatic public scaring left on the minds of the public artists like Bert Haanstra, filmed alone and created a sort of class of world wanderers (193). These films typically shot with poetry in mind, and the contrasting of industrialized nations competed in a "cold war" productivity competition between the capitalists and the soviet bloc (194).