The dreamer and the seer. Notes on post-war Italian cinema, from Deleuze and Zambrano

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze considered Italian neorealism a “cinema of the seer”, by which he meant (like María Zambrano, and contrary to André Bazin’s arguments) that it was not a new form of realism, but a rupture with it, and, by extension, with the prolongation of optical and sound situations in sensorimotor schemes, replacing which would have given rise to pure optical and sound situations. Why, then, did Zambrano refer to this peculiarity of post-war Italian cinema as “dream” and not “vision”, as Deleuze did? This is the question these pages seek to answer.