Postwar cinema: neorealism, golden ages and widescreen

The years after the Second World War reshaped cinema around the world. In Italy, filmmakers working amid ruins created Neorealism, a style of location shooting, non-professional actors and everyday stories that influenced filmmakers everywhere. Japanese and Indian cinemas entered celebrated periods and gained international recognition through new film festivals. In the United States, the Supreme Court's Paramount decision broke up the studios' control of cinemas, and television drew audiences away, pushing Hollywood toward widescreen, colour and spectacle. This lesson connects these developments.

Italian Neorealism

Italian Neorealism emerged as fascism collapsed and the war ended. Studios were damaged or occupied by refugees, equipment and film stock were scarce, and filmmakers wanted to show the reality of a country that had endured dictatorship, war and poverty. Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), partly shot while Rome was still recovering from occupation, tells of resistance fighters and a priest under German occupation. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), written with Cesare Zavattini, follows a poor worker and his son searching the city for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose his job.

Typical features of Neorealist films include:

• Shooting on real locations, especially streets, apartments and rural landscapes, rather than studio sets.
• Casting non-professional actors alongside professionals.
• Stories of ordinary people, poverty, unemployment and the aftermath of war.
• Loose, episodic plots without neat resolutions.
• Available light and a documentary-like look, though many films still used scripts, dubbing and careful staging.

Neorealism's core period was short, roughly 1945 to the early 1950s, as Italy's economy recovered and governments discouraged films that showed the country in a poor light. Its influence, however, was enormous. Filmmakers in India, Latin America, Iran, Africa and the French New Wave cited it as a model for making serious films cheaply, on location, about real lives.

Film festivals and the rise of art cinema

After the war, international film festivals became showcases for national cinemas and new directors. Venice, first held in 1932, resumed after the war; Cannes was launched in 1946; Berlin in 1951. Festivals created prestige, press attention and markets for films that might never be shown widely, helping build an international audience for "art cinema": films by recognized directors, often with ambiguous narratives, personal styles and serious themes. Specialized art-house cinemas, film societies and university film clubs grew in Europe and North America to show them.

In Canada, the Stratford Film Festival in Ontario began in 1956, the Montreal International Film Festival ran in the early 1960s, and the Vancouver International Film Festival dates from 1958. The festival that became the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was founded in 1976 as the Festival of Festivals and is now one of the most important festivals in the world, especially for launching films into awards season.

Japanese cinema's golden age

Japanese cinema of the 1950s is often described as a golden age. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), which tells the story of a crime through the conflicting accounts of several witnesses, won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and introduced many Western audiences to Japanese film. Kurosawa went on to make samurai epics and modern dramas, including Seven Samurai (1954), whose story of hired warriors defending a village was later remade as an American western and imitated in countless action films.

Yasujirō Ozu made quiet family dramas such as Tokyo Story (1953), with low camera positions, mostly static framing, and transitional shots of empty spaces and objects between scenes. Kenji Mizoguchi made historical films with long takes and fluid camera movement, often focused on the suffering of women. The Japanese studios, such as Toho, Shochiku and Daiei, operated in many ways like Hollywood studios, with contract staff and genre production, and Japan also produced popular monster and science-fiction films from 1954 onward.

Indian cinema

India had a large film industry from the silent era, and by the late twentieth century it produced more films than any other country. Production was centred in several cities and languages: Hindi-language films from Bombay (now Mumbai), later nicknamed "Bollywood", and major industries in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada and other languages. Popular Indian films developed a distinctive form combining melodrama, comedy, action, romance and musical numbers, with songs often released before the film and becoming hits in their own right.

In Bengal, Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), the first part of his Apu Trilogy, followed a poor rural family with a quiet, observational style influenced by Neorealism, which Ray had seen while visiting London. It won a prize at Cannes in 1956, and Ray became one of the most respected filmmakers in the world. His work founded what became known as Indian "parallel cinema", an art cinema distinct from the commercial mainstream.

The Paramount decision and the end of the studio system

In the United States, the federal government had sued the major studios in 1938, arguing that vertical integration and block booking violated antitrust law. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures that these practices restrained trade. The resulting consent decrees required the majors to sell their theatre chains and ended block booking. Without guaranteed screens, studios cut production, dropped long-term contracts and began financing independent producers and star-driven packages rather than making everything in-house.

The Paramount decrees shaped the American industry for decades. In 2020, a federal court agreed to the Department of Justice's request to terminate them, concluding that the industry had changed fundamentally, though studios' influence over exhibition remains a subject of debate.

The decrees did not apply in Canada, where the large theatre chain Famous Players, controlled by Paramount, continued to operate alongside the Odeon chain. A 1948 deal known as the Canadian Cooperation Project, negotiated between Hollywood and the Canadian government, promised to mention Canada and shoot more scenes in Canada in American films instead of Canada imposing quotas on American films; critics saw it as a missed chance to build a Canadian feature industry.

Television and Hollywood's response

Television spread quickly in the late 1940s and 1950s. Weekly cinema attendance in the United States, which peaked in the mid-1940s, fell steeply over the following decade as families stayed home to watch TV and moved to suburbs far from downtown cinemas. Hollywood responded in several ways:

• Widescreen formats and larger images that television could not match.
• More colour films, as single-strip colour negative made colour cheaper.
• Spectacle: epics, musicals and location shooting in exotic places.
• Gimmicks such as 3D, which had a brief boom in 1953 and 1954.
• Selling or licensing old films to television, and producing television series, as studios realized television was also a market.

Drive-in theatres also boomed in the postwar years, serving suburban families and teenagers.

The widescreen revolution

For two decades after 1932, almost all films used the Academy ratio of about 1.37 to 1. In 1952, Cinerama used three synchronized projectors to fill a vast curved screen, creating a sensation but proving impractical for most cinemas. In 1953, Twentieth Century-Fox introduced CinemaScope with The Robe. CinemaScope used an anamorphic lens to squeeze a wide image horizontally onto standard 35 mm film; a matching lens on the projector unsqueezed it to a ratio of about 2.55 to 1, later reduced to about 2.35 to 1 to make room for an optical soundtrack, and standardized in the 1970s at about 2.39 to 1.

Other studios adopted or competed with their own systems. Paramount's VistaVision ran 35 mm film horizontally through the camera to create a larger, sharper negative. Large formats using 65 mm camera negative and 70 mm prints, such as Todd-AO, gave the highest image quality for roadshow epics. Meanwhile, most studios began cropping standard films to "flat" widescreen ratios by masking the projector: 1.85 to 1 became the North American standard, while 1.66 to 1 was common in Europe.

Widescreen changed composition. Filmmakers learned to stage action across the width of the frame, use longer takes because the wide image held more information, and place characters at the edges for tension. Early CinemaScope lenses distorted close-ups, so some directors avoided them at first. When films were later shown on 4:3 televisions, the practice of "pan and scan" cropped wide images to fit, a compromise that many directors disliked.

Why widescreen still matters for analysis

Aspect ratio is not a neutral container. When you analyze a film from the 1950s or later, note its original ratio and check that the copy you are watching preserves it. Many films circulated for decades on television and home video in cropped versions, and some older films have been reissued with altered framing. A scope composition that places two characters at opposite edges of the frame, separated by empty space, loses its meaning if one character is cropped out. Ask, too, what a filmmaker gained or gave up by choosing a ratio: wide frames favour landscapes, groups and lateral movement, while narrower frames concentrate attention on faces and vertical space. Some recent filmmakers deliberately return to the Academy ratio to evoke earlier cinema or to create a sense of confinement, showing that historical formats remain living choices.