Italian Neorealism vs Snapshot Aesthetic

イタリアン・ネオレアリズモ / スナップショット美学

Italian Neorealism comes from Cinematic Visual Styles and Snapshot Aesthetic from Photographic Genres. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.

Italian Neorealism

Italian Neorealism — アンナ・マニャーニ『無防備都市』1945 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domainItalian Neorealism — 『自転車泥棒』1948 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domainItalian Neorealism — 『無防備都市』資料（フランス国立図書館） — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Cinema that left the studio to film non-professional actors in the street, taking postwar poverty and daily life as its subject and standing on the side of reality.

Snapshot Aesthetic

Snapshot Aesthetic — アナスタシア・ニコラエヴナ コダック・ブラウニーによる鏡の自写像 1914年 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domainSnapshot Aesthetic — 《ノルマンディー、コードベック＝アン＝コーのマッジ・フリーマンら》1932年 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domainSnapshot Aesthetic — Billy Hathorn 撮影 コダック・ブラウニー・ホークアイのカラースナップ 1959年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

An aesthetic that takes the failures of amateur photography since Kodak, the tilted horizon, the head cut off at the edge, the flatness of the flash, and claims them on purpose. The intimacy of the family album became a grammar for art photography from Winogrand to Goldin.

Italian NeorealismSnapshot Aesthetic
Era1943–19521888– / 1960s art adoption
FamilyCinematic Visual StylesPhotographic Genres
KindStyleStyle
CuesLocation shooting / Non-professional actors / Available light / Postwar streetsTilted framing / Subjects cut by the frame / Direct flash / Album intimacy
Best used forShowing everyday work and streets through the faces of the people there · Social-issue film that must shoot on location without prettifying its subjectsAdvertising for everyday products that must not smell of a set · Private records of friends and family kept up over many years
TypeKeep titles plain and let the filmed thing speak insteadNo type, or at most a scrawl on the back of a print
CompositionPlace people small inside the street, keep the surrounding life in frameLeave the horizon crooked and keep figures cut by the frame
MaterialShoot in available light, hold shadow detail in a grainy scaleDirect flash with its hard shadow, color left uncorrected
CautionFilming poverty as raw material for a look reduces the people to texture, which inverts the whole premise of standing on the side of reality.The harder amateurism is staged, the more it shows, and the absence of real time spent with the subject becomes the only thing visible.

Put these two together

Cinematic Visual Styles ／ Photographic Genres

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