Talk:Ermanno Olmi

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers (assessed as Mid-importance).

Italy Mid‑importance

	Italy portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Italy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Italy on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ItalyWikipedia:WikiProject ItalyTemplate:WikiProject ItalyItaly articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Neorealism?[edit]

Olmi did, in fact, claim his movie Il Posto was not an example of neorealism. However, I find his statement unclear:

This is where the novelty of my kind of film lies. Everything you see is authentic. [Il Porto] is not a Neorealist film. Neorealism, from a practical and economic standpoint, had to go out into the streets or use real-life environments because the creators lacked the means to use conventional studios, etc. But they used real actors. "Rome, Open City", for instance, had Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani. At some point Rossellini, and others too, realized that the reality of the street didn't always mix well with the features of well-known actors. So if you shoot in a real factory, with real factory workers, and you add a professional actor with a little grease on his face, it smacks of artificiality. All the lessons learned from Rossellini, the early Visconti, perhaps even from Germi, were later lost, and Neorealism became a trend. Paolini, De Seta, and my film, Il Posto -- is, on the other hand, if you look at these three films -- De Seta and his Sardinian shepherds, Pasolini with his street kids, and me with my employees. Whereas in the case of Neorealism, professional actors were like guests in genuine settings, in our case the real, authentic characters could only be placed in an authentic setting. We could never have used a professional studio.

I think he was speaking of the later trend in neorealism to use professional actors. I don't believe it is accurate to make the distinction between his films with non-actors and the bulk of neorealistic films which did use non-actors in secondary and sometimes primary roles. ∴ Therefore | talk 04:32, 31 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]