Giuseppe De Santis, the director of ‘Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice), was one of the protagonists of the neorealist wave that characterized post-war Italian cinema. In the ruined and exhausted Italy, Bitter Rice aims to be a documentary film that pays tribute to the ‘Mondine,’ the seasonal rice field workers who each year flocked for forty days of very hard labor in extreme conditions to meet material needs.
As such, comparing it to the current situation and many immigration dramas, “history is nothing but an eternal repetition” as GianBattista Vico said.
In the 1950s, the literary and cinematographic Neorealism movement was characterized, in opposition to the fascist and decadent culture, by a desire to describe reality as it is without concealing social problems and injustices.
Giuseppe De Santis was one of the best authors along with the more famous Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.
The neorealist experience constitutes one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema and also gave rise to intense political debates in a confusing period of Italian life between traditionalists and proponents of radical changes.
‘Bitter Rice,’ with its direct language, often mimicked the everyday language (the dialect spoken by many supporting actors) and was a violent protest against the sexual misery that Italian female workers were victims of at the time. The main actors, all now deceased, were: for the leading female role, Silvana Mangano (19 years old at the time of filming), dazzling in beauty, who revealed herself to the public on this occasion and thereafter became a very great ‘intellectual’ actress, starring in numerous films with directors Mario Monicelli, Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and especially Luchino Visconti (Death in Venice and The Damned). She ended her career under the direction of Nikita Mikhalkov (Dark Eyes), where she acted for the first time with another monument of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni.
Vittorio Gassman, Silvana Mangano’s male partner, was the chameleon of Italian cinema, capable of doing everything and transitioning from Greek tragedy (his performances in Xenophon’s plays are unforgettable) to Italian comedy (Il Sorpasso, The Monsters, Scent of a Woman by Dino Risi; and then The Great War by Mario Monicelli and We All Loved Each Other So Much by Ettore Scola) from cinema to theater, from acting to directing. His nickname, Il Mattatore, (from the title of a highly-watched TV show) is rightly his honour.
