Neorealism
"They shot in the streets because the studios weren't available" is the usual explanation for this band — but the reason the studios weren't available turns out to be the real story here. After Rome was liberated in June 1944, the Allies converted Cinecittà studios into a refugee camp. For six years, until 1950, thousands of people from more than 30 countries — including Holocaust survivors — lived in the film capital. Neorealism's golden years line up almost exactly with those six years. The place where films were made had people living in it, so the cameras went outside. That's all it was. But what the cameras found out there hadn't been on screen before.
Where the movement starts is still unsettled. Some point to Visconti's Ossessione (1943) as the first film — it was banned from release under the Fascist government. Others mark the day the flag went up as Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), the first postwar film to show "what actually happened." Casting non-actors in lead roles came partly from having no money, and partly from the belief that it felt more true. Lamberto Maggiorani, the lead in Bicycle Thieves, was a real lathe operator. He used his fee to buy furniture and take his family on a trip. But when he went back to the factory, he was seen as "the man who made a fortune from a movie" and was fired. He couldn't keep working as an actor after that and made his living laying bricks. He appeared in 16 films over his life, without any notable success, and died in 1983. The screenwriter Cesare Zavattini tried to write his later life itself into a script — a man who had played poverty and dignity was pulled into that same structure once the cameras stopped. Between depicting reality and changing it, there was still a distance.
The end of the movement came from politics and economics. The Andreotti Law of 1949 set up a system where the government reviewed scripts before funding them, and films judged to "defame Italy" could be blocked from export. In 1952, after De Sica's Umberto D., Andreotti himself wrote a public criticism — if the world mistook this film's Italy for the real Italy of the mid-20th century, De Sica would have done his country a great disservice. Around the same time, Italy entered a period of rapid growth. Films that showed poverty no longer matched the country's image of itself.
Even so, the seed crossed the ocean. In 1950, a young Indian man in London watched Bicycle Thieves. Satyajit Ray later wrote that the film, and neorealism's lessons, stayed with him for the rest of his time in London. Five years later, he made Pather Panchali.