An Italian cinematic movement that lasted from 1942 to 1952. Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1942) is generally credited as being the first neorealist film, but Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) is usually regarded as the archetype of the genre. Conceived in response to the regulation of film content imposed by Mussolini’s Fascist regime which prohibited the depiction of crime or immorality (indeed, anything that did not show Italy in the best possible light), neorealism sought to counter the unreality of the propaganda films with an aesthetic described by Rossellini as moral because its central purpose was to confront audiences with their own reality. Neorealism’s aesthetic had four basic principles: (i) it should project a moment of everyday life rather than construct a fictional tale; (ii) it should focus on social reality, i.e. the lives of the majority of people, the poor peasants and urban dwellers eking out an existence under difficult conditions, not the privileged few; (iii) it should use non-professional actors and improvised script so as to preserve the natural speech rhythms of the people it represents; (iv) and for the same reason it should film on location using hand-held cameras, rather than in a studio. Only one film, namely Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di bicicletti (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948), actually adhered to all four of these precepts. Neorealism was a significant influence on the French Nouvelle Vague as well as a host of other directors such as the great Indian novelist and film-maker Satyajit Ray. Deleuze, Gilles, in his two-volume ‘natural history’ of cinema, cites neorealism as the moment when cinema finally breaks free of an action-reaction mode of narrative and develops a true cinema of ideas.