“WHAT IS AMERICAN NEOREALISM?”

I had gone to join my friend A at the LAX airport. It was January of 2016, a day after the travel bans were announced. Hundreds of people had flooded the lanes at LAX to obstruct the flow of cars in hopes of shutting the airport down. I joined throngs of protesters and flummoxed travelers, and for a time I walked beside a man in a Tommy Bahamas shirt and straw hat lugging a rolly suitcase. Rather miraculously I found A, who by then had run into more friends, including a person I had briefly dated and this particular slice of the LA queer art scene that individually I may have loved but as a group I found impossible.

The others were actually on their way out, satisfied with the amount of protesting they had done. They had looped the airport enough times. One of them asked if we wanted to join them for dinner. Oh, but the place is this place in Venice, they said. What's the name? I asked. It's called, well, no one really knows how to pronounce it. They held their phone to my face. It started with a G and then a J and that was causing problems for them. Ja-lee-na? Sh-ligh-na? Do you want to come?

A and I actually wanted to hang out a little longer, we said, and see what might develop. But also we had heard of that spot. It was fancy.

Protesting and fine dining make a weird combo. To go from the wildly inspiring public display of collective rage to the privacy of an exclusive meal. I’ve been thinking about that clash in part because three years later, for my thirty-first birthday in 2019, I spent the day on the picket line at the base of UC Santa Cruz's campus. I was in the midst of a wildcat strike, demanding a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for myself and my fellow grad workers, which would ultimately get a bunch of us summoned for disciplinary hearings. To mark the occasion of my birthday, my partner L and I had decided to cap the day with a nice meal at the one okay veg-friendly restaurant in town.

Pulling up, I remembered LAX and that other post-protest dinner, and how I would sometimes bring that story up in socially mean ways to call out the hypocrisies of the queer art world. But there I was. The restaurant was a total fishbowl, with enormous plates of glass for windows, illuminated from the inside by these industrial chic light fixtures. 

Oh, come on, L said. It’s your birthday. 

He was trying to make me feel at ease, and he managed to coax me inside. 

What happened was that we got seated next to the director of the university’s film department.

This was twisted in its own way, I assure you. L had applied to the film department. He had named the director in his statement of purpose as the very person he wanted to work with. It was February, and he was waiting to hear back from this man, if he was accepted, any day.

I said seated next to and I mean our tables were basically touching. I could hear everything this man said to the beloved filmmaker sitting across from him and he could probably hear everything we said, because we talked loudly. It was the fakest conversation I think I've ever had. We tried to be charming and smart, and in a way it was a rather fun convo.

One of the things we talked about was this upcoming film exhibition at UCLA called American Neorealism. It was actually a misnomer, L explained. First of all, what is “American”? But his specific bone to pick was with the use of the term “Neorealism.” He explained to me that neorealism was actually a historically specific term used to describe a number of Italian filmmakers after the second World War. Even if there were some characteristics shared by that work, like the occasional use of amateur actors, shooting on location, and telling working class stories, to abstract that style from the specific historical, political, and social conditions of post-war Italy and drop it in the U.S. obscured the particular relationship between place, production, and aesthetics taking place. For instance, the decision to film in the street was out of necessity, as the studios where films had been previously made were badly damaged during the war and couldn't be used.

I didn't really know anything about neorealism, and asked a dumb question. Couldn't you say Andy Warhol was neorealist? I was eating this weird dish that cost twenty dollars, which I already felt guilty about, and it was sadly disappointing. It had an oily broth, and there were these soggy potatoes and chickpeas in it that were as tough as marbles.

Andy Warhol was not neorealist by any means, L explained. For one thing, Andy Warhol was an underground director without the same relationship to story and acting. L added that although Warhol wasn't included in the UCLA exhibition, the list of films seemed so arbitrary that he wouldn't have been surprised to find Warhol amongst the directors. They were showing Shirley Clarke, Charles Burnett and Julie Dash of the L.A. Rebellion, and Barbara Loden’s film Wanda. Referring to all of these disparate filmmakers with their vast range of objectives as a single movement was like trying to characterize performance artists Reza Abdoh and Anna Mendieta as second-wave Fluxus. No one would do it because it made no sense and did a total disservice to what made each of those projects singular and interesting. The curators might as well lump that film Antonioni shot in the U.S., the one about student activists, into their so-called American Neorealism, L said.

Which one? I asked.

He bit his lip and looked to the side, frustrated he couldn't recall the name.

Momentarily, I could hear the film department’s director speaking about the teaching strike I had participated in earlier that day. He was saying something about a communication from the Provost, which obviously I was interested in. But I couldn’t hear, as L went on trying to describe the Antonioni film. He said it was about drifting young people in California who ended up meeting in the desert. One of them steals a plane after participating in student protests in the Bay Area, and then there’s that scene of a lot of people screwing in the sand.

I don’t know it, I said.

L said that one of his favorite things about Italian neorealism was the way it moved the highly scripted narratives and heightened emotional intensity of Italian cinema and dropped it all into the grim reality of the streets. Putting untrained actors alongside stars like Ingrid Bergman and Anna Magnani had the strange effect of amplifying the artifice of the performances. You could visibly see the way these bodies reckoned with the burden of a script, and yet the streets around them were alive with immense need, the actual poverty resulting from years of fascist rule and war. In some cases, the people in the background weren't even aware they were being filmed. The cityscape in Rome, Open City, for example, is both a fictional Rome under Nazi occupation as well as the documentation of Rome at the time of filming, of the near civic collapse after the war. It was this rich tension between both realities that makes the film so textured. Of course, this was in some ways true of Zabriskie Point, L said, remembering the name of that Antonioni film.

I glanced over at the table beside ours, and for a moment I thought we had finally attracted their attention. The filmmaker was staring vaguely in my direction, his eyebrows raised. 

L seemed to be aware of this as well, as he spoke more animatedly, saying that although it wasn’t accurate to call Antonioni’s later works neorealist, those films were undoubtedly influenced by the movement (the filmmaker seemed to have been actually in the middle of an internal debate, as I heard him announce that he probably shouldn’t get the chocolate mousse). The way that much of Zabriskie Point was made, for example, undermined the viewer's ability to easily distinguish what was real and what was fake. Antonioni used footage of actual student protests that he filmed while in the Bay Area, cutting from those real encounters to rehearsed scenes. The film even begins with a meeting on a college campus, where Black Panther Party members are calling on students to mobilize. At first it isn’t entirely clear to the viewer whether what we are watching is staged or not, especially given that one of the participants is Kathleen Cleaver, an actual organizer for the party.

Oh, that’s interesting, I said.

We’re first introduced to the film’s protagonist in that scene as well, when he shouts out that the meeting is killing him of boredom, and the others mock him as bourgeois. Although at that point the viewer might realize they are watching a work of fiction, L said, the production still involved an actual gathering that assembled real organizers and actors. This tension between the fictional story and the documentation of an encounter that was actually happening, L went on to say, confused the federal authorities so much that they infiltrated Antonioni’s filming and accused him of inciting the actual campus protests that he had merely documented.

But literature is the same way, I said, a little too loudly, glancing over at our neighbors. I had been kind of a lump throughout the discussion and wanted to say something. There's still a process of documentation happening. It’s just a question of how you get the real into the work. Like if I was to write about my participation in the COLA protests, I would be documenting the actual organizing that was happening on the ground, as well as the process of my remembering it. It wouldn’t always be clear what was a product of what. Wouldn’t that be neorealist?

Have you been listening to me? L asked. I’ve been trying to say that neorealism is a historically specific thing, and now you want anything and everything to be neorealist. In the case of your story, there’s no camera. Visual regimes are completely different. You would be representing the protests with a bunch of words.

I looked over and saw that the program director and his dinner partner had left. Well, I guess we don’t need to talk about film anymore, I said, nodding at their vacated table.

L looked over at it. Why? After a long moment, he said, Oh, I had forgotten about them.

Once we got back to my studio apartment, L asked if I was coming to bed, which was only a few feet away from the couch, where I was with my laptop. I snapped at him and said I was working.

I started writing a sketch of a story about the protest I had attended earlier that day in Santa Cruz. I was a little drunk, but it struck me as an intriguing idea to situate the UCSC grad workers protest not on our campus, but miles away at the airport in Los Angeles, inspired by that protest years earlier, where we had gathered to decry Trump’s travel bans. I suspected that this layering of locations might be a touch more neorealist, even though I was pretty sure I didn’t know what neorealism was. Then I started writing in present tense, thinking that might be neorealist, too. 

In the story, which was little more than an outline, L and I march with all of the striking UC grad workers outside of LAX, where we happen to bump into the ghost of Michelangelo Antonioni, who is filming everything. We talk to him about his new movie, and film theory in general, and then I make an argument about the superiority of literary fiction, and everyone agrees. Our conversation is interrupted, however, as UC cops in riot gear start to assemble underneath the arches of that iconic space-age building at LAX. Within minutes, they rush the march and start hitting students with their batons and dragging people out of the street to clear the lanes for traffic. Amidst the craziness, they cart off Antonioni, who they stupidly believe to have started the protests he was merely documenting. L, inspired by Rome, Open City’s high drama scene, breaks through the cordon of riot police to run after Antonioni, all to the backdrop of planes taking off and landing.

In the morning, I showed it to L, and he just laughed. You still don’t know what neorealism is.