Neorealism’s Affective Dimension

“We’re all in the same boat here—you’ll learn that soon enough.”
—Doris Dowling (Francesca) to Silvana Mangano (Silvana) in Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro)

Italian Neorealism (Neorealismo) emerged as a cinematic response to the devastation of World War II and the oppressive legacy of Fascism. Originating in Italian cinema’s “Golden Age,” the genre often features stories of the impoverished and working class. It has expanded to other art forms and literature, showcasing a waywardness with societal realities or as symbolic relativity through the subconscious and affective dimensions. Neorealism presented the power of a contrary proposition and thought to a crude new world, where elements have aesthetic value beyond their narrative function, connecting with the internal, perhaps latent, desire to be vulnerable to the mellifluous charge from another.

Initially, cinema was viewed as a tool for Fascist propaganda for its use of an idealized image for Italy to promote its nationhood–a typical example of what Walter Benjamin had observed a decade before Italian Neorealism came into aesthetic prominence from his book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility:

“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”—Walter Benjamin, (1935)

As anti-fascist directors recognized the adequate potential of the raw and unvarnished portrayal of post-war life, they employed techniques out of practical economic necessity, such as on-location shooting and casting non-professional actors. This aesthetic ultimately led to a heightened sense of realism and authenticity, abandoning the possessive hold of an idealized Italy in cinema. This subversion contrasted with the so-called escapist deco films endorsed by fascist Italian propaganda that inhabited an avoidance of critical issues or representations that fostered apathy, inertia, or disengagement with societal problems and towards the Italian national aesthetic.

Characterized by its unembellished narratives, Italian neorealist cinema is centered on the internal struggles of the everyday, backdropped against the social realities in post-WWII Northern Italy. Neorealist films often explored themes of industrialization through the lens of subjectivity, proletarian class, the denunciatory question of rebuilding Italian national identity, and the economic perils a nation faces in the aftermath of the war. Neorealism forged an emotional connection with audiences in Italy and internationally by depicting the needs, ideals, frustrations, and despairs as central plot devices. The cinematic genre reimagined the visual language of cinema into a broad affective dimension, through understated storylines, as its focal aesthetic experience.

Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro in Italian), directed and co-written by Giuseppe De Santis, is an exemplary offshoot blending realism with subtle romanticism. The film is a crime drama that unfolds after a jewelry heist, where “lovers” are on the run, Walter (played by Vittorio Gassman) and his accomplice, Francesca (Doris Dowling); to Francesca’s disheartening astonishment, Walter is only using her as a cover. In an attempt to escape and to throw the police off her trail, Francesca hides among the rice workers boarding their trains from Turin, Italy. She is aided by a seasoned mondina named Silvana (Silvana Mangano) to become a clandestina—an “illegal” worker, carrying a double meaning for Francesca, being rendered invisible: both a criminal who is hiding from the law and someone working outside the union’s contracts. As an unregistered worker, she has to hand over part of her wages to the skiving job brokers. While Silvana, throughout the film, sways between wanting to help Francesca and turning against her. The narrative unfolds as mishaps, betrayals, romantic love, and camaraderie set to the antifascist-resilient tone of the 1940s. 

Mostly taking place outside Turin, the story traverses the lives of women whose toiling work in rice paddies bonds them, known as mondine (plural), and the soldiers they come into contact with after their military service at a nearby military base. In the film, the mondine and low-ranking soldiers come together in many scenes as an affinity in jovial or romantic respite, contrary to the relationship forged with the managerial class (their bosses), who are not so prominently depicted throughout the film, only as taskmasters.

Historically, the mondine, particularly prominent in the Po Valley region, were employed to weed and tend to the rice fields, performing laborious tasks standing knee-deep in water. The mondine played a significant role in Italian agricultural history, especially in the early to mid-20th century. They were known not only for their hard physical labor but also for their solidarity and collective actions to improve working conditions for themselves alongside other industries of that era. Bitter Rice introduces this in its opening scenes, where Fiat factory workers in Turin bid farewell to the women boarding trains bound for work in the rice fields. Mondine labor followed seasonal patterns, attracting impoverished women from Italy’s poorer regions who migrated northward toward more industrialized areas for employment.

Through its neorealist and affective lens, Bitter Rice reimagines the mondina, challenging idealized depictions of the hardworking agricultural laborer by foregrounding moments of idleness and transgression. The film also explores the relational function of her gendered autonomy and subaltern experience—seen in scenes of self-administered medical procedures, train cars used for transporting the mondine and animals, and the presence of sweat and fatigue—all while her sexuality, hypervisible and tailored to the male gaze, is muddied in the so-called monstrosity that clashes with bourgeois ideals of propriety; much like Gramsci’s interregnum, where abjection destabilizes hegemonic norms.

The relationships among the workers, whether sexual or social, suggest a collective desire for union and release from the confines of the self, a state of non-self-boundedness—akin to the “oceanic feeling” theorized in Jackie Wang’s Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect. How reality, truth, and identity dissolve into expansive expressions of relational autonomy, reflecting a desire to momentarily transcend economic and social constraints. 

The emotional aspect of this film doesn’t rely on melodrama or exaggerated pathos. Instead, the camera closely frames the facial expressions performed by the actors with ease in moments of poignantly realistic upset, agitation, yearning, or even when unaffected. For Bitter Rice, the status of women workers is shaped by their feelings and realities of absence, invisibility (clandestina), and abjection (subalternity). They are seen as transgressing by being unproductive, swept up by desires to love and be loved, affected by the breadth of illness or family duty, and inherently critical of the authority within their post-war agricultural context.

I was initially drawn to a historical materialist analysis of the mondine who inspired De Santis’ Bitter Rice—viewing them as relics enshrined in cellulose. Yet, I was utterly moved by the polyphonies in the film’s opening scene, where a radio broadcast declares, “Only women can do this work—delicate hands are needed for the rice shoots.” High-pitched singing voices swell as women walk through the flooded fields, singing while knee-deep in water, their hands clasped in a collective choreography navigating the flooding (a commoning of the self, a sense of exteriority). The women’s songs—both diegetic and historically political [1]—become a sonic commons, underlining the film’s visceral realism. Later, this communal energy erupts in celebration and dance—another form of commoning, another dissolution into the collective. In Bitter Rice, moments of collective deviation from labor—like these examples—allow the audience to witness a uniquely ecstatic joy on-screen, or what Wang aptly calls: “a kind of terrible gift.”

Forbidden by their employers from conversing while working, the mondine cunningly communicated through song—a central act of resistance against managerial authority. Even when songs were initially weaponized in the film, as when Silvana targets Francesca by singing that unionized workers shouldn’t work alongside the clandestine (illegal workers), this vocal subterfuge ultimately reveals itself as a collective language. Amid rising tensions between contracted and non-contracted laborers—due to job scarcity—the women eventually refuse to work unless the clandestine are included. Their solidarity is exemplified by the proclamation: “Either we all work, or none of us work,” threatening the bosses while affirming empathy across labor divisions.

These narratives confront Eurocentric imaginaries of the abject Other that the mondine involuntarily embodies. Following Gramsci’s subalternity, such depictions permeate neorealist cinema, to counter hegemonic visual regimes perpetuating the idealized nation, moving towards the opposite aesthetic direction with its bare aesthetics. By focusing on women’s lived experiences across Italy’s positivist-industrialized history—from factory workers to psychiatric inmates, from resistance partisans to marginalized laborers—these images bridge heterogeneous timelines of subalternity throughout Italy. Many experiences are defined by invisibility and subordination, but this raises a crucial question: To what extent is subordination not just systemic, but a profoundly intimate, affective enactment?

In the temporal disjunction between the time of the film and my attempts to recall the collective expressions that resonate from it, pluralistic for their forms and functions, they are portrayed by De Santis through several characters to show affection in varying dimensions and detail, a sociality that distinctively sets the work within the neorealist genre. A form of sociality for the mondine serves as the sentimental crux of an “experiential study,” bringing a singular plight into a collective emotional realm. 

The relational function is deeply ingrained in Italian collective memory among the mondine, signifying a desire for union and an unbounded state of being through their legacy in song. The gendered cinematic depictions of the worker subject parallel across temporalities, within historicized notions of labor and “productive” work. The neorealist dimensions of affect tend to the protagonists’ complex relational needs while obstructing their individuality in the process.

De Santis champions this symbolic expression of ecstatic joy, or terrible gift, as a form of social-political camaraderie—preserved only as spectral traces in black and white film. His real-life encounters with the mondine, those who sing in Bitter Rice, are what drove him to make the film; he was struck by the sight of train carriages packed with mondine in Turin’s central station one day, the enjoyment he witnessed by women heading home after weeks of backbreaking work. Despite their fatigued appearance, they were boisterous, sang songs, and joked among themselves. Given the abject subjectivity bestowed upon the mondine, singing cultivated a sort of mystical rapture against their conditioning, the oceanic experience that originates from a relative self and out into collective possession, as modes of relationality, and bound by song.

What the film, I think, wanted to depict was the disparity between the industrialized north and the poorer regions within Italy, as most women working in the rice paddies are migrants from more austere southern parts of Italy. This is signified mainly by their dialects, and their hierarchies are exempted by their contracted and non-contracted status by De Santis. The status of their legitimacy to exist, produce, desire, dream, and reap the benefits of their work is foremost.

Abolitionist sentiments also underline their solidarity with one another. Though Silvana exposes Francesca’s criminal acts, none of the characters consider turning her in—a tacit rejection of the authorities that underscores their shared distrust of class hierarchies and the systems that uphold them. The revelation that Francesca’s stolen jewels are fake sets in motion a chain of betrayals. Walter then plans to steal the harvested rice, a percentage intended for the mondine to have as goods to sell for profit. He coerces Silvana into joining him by selling her false promises of love. In a dramatic climax, Silvana floods the rice fields to distract the women from the rice heist, causing them to lose their hard-earned gains. Overwhelmed with guilt, the weight of this betrayal proves unbearable for Silvana, culminating in her tragic suicide.

This tragic mode of subalternity offers a differently affected transcendence following Wang’s notions of the Other (Autre) to describe forms of transcendence as “models that do not rely on discrete selves,” and oceanic feeling is outlined as dialectical understandings—defensive, infantile, and dissociative (Silvana) or joyful, connective and integrative (Francesca and the mondine). Oceanic feeling unsettles subjectivity and disintegrates the ego, ultimately altering one’s orientation to the world through a radical disruption of the self. In Bitter Rice, oceanic feeling is exemplified as both union or death by suicide. Influenced by Fred Moten’s articulations in paraontology, the refusal of mandates of ontological being, Wang understands radical disruption “of one’s orientation to the world” (Wang 7) in an arena of psychoanalytical affect and as a conceptual move for a more social communist relativity, rather than a Marxist sociality solely dependent on economic and political factors, and, most notably rooted in the mystical—an experience of being bound to eternity: “a feeling of indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” (Wang quoting Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents 4) 

Underlined by the internal and external conflicts between gendered relations and social class power shown in Bitter Rice, catharsis is used as a climactic device but not to provide a sense of release or renewal.  The status of the Other (Autre) is preconditioned as a whole with the mondine, attaching the importance of affect and radical disruption of the self and “to come” into oneness through the use of jouissance; clearly, this aspect is what drew De Santis to the subject of the mondina (Other/Autre). From the moment De Santis witnessed women singing together, there is a hint of gleeful satisfaction in resistance to conformity of a discreet self, these moments serve, or can be read, as a sort of emancipatory catharsis after a season of grueling work conditions on the field, unsettled status—working towards or going against that of which you are expected to perform–be it seclusion, discretion, or labor. 

The subaltern classification—as preconditioning to exploitative and dangerous conditions when traveling to different locales in search of a good life—makes their abjection a defining characteristic throughout neorealist films, as we watch protagonists fall into states of total devotion to subconscious desire. This status of the mondina in De Santi’s work can be considered across different axes of identifying the feminine subject Other; Julia Kristeva, in Black Sun, associates this with feminine melancholia and regression. Her understanding of the experience of oceanic feeling as, “lethal as it is jubilatory,” results in a conditioning of, “a premature death that is paradoxically preemptive defense against death.” (Wang 5)

Silvana’s tragic flaw, her desire to be wanted by Walter and her compliance with his schemes, perfectly exemplifies the theme of regression into the isolated self often found in neorealist works. Despite her awareness of his indifference—“He told me he’d take me away from all this… but men like him only know how to lie”—she still yearns for his affection, highlighting the nature of her regressive predicament. Meanwhile, the other women all decide to go back to work despite a week-long spout of torrential rain during the season, which becomes a joint attempt to maximize their shared earnings from this work. Silvana, instead, decides to join Walter and who then rapes her—a didactic and moralistic thwart by the director— the consequence of separating herself away from the collective, the camera then cuts to the women working in the rice paddies in horrendous weather conditions. The women are almost submerged in the water from the amount of rainfall. A young woman working alongside the mondine suddenly screams in pain and falls to her knees. 

We hear the screams, as she cries out, the woman’s voice carries with it all the physical pain the mondine endured from her hard labor. It quickly becomes a cry of grief and anger, an expression of the unspeakable conditions. As she suffers, she is surrounded by the other sympathetic mondine who rush to comfort her and take her indoors to safety. The social implications highlight the seclusion that Silvana experiences compared to a temporary dissolving of boundaries among the Others, the unbounded subject as part of a rhizomatic node, where one “I” stops and another begins through the mondine.

A fundamental example of enduring is a sense of being detached from the world through a traumatic event; the Other stands apart from, and the Other ex-ists, (hyphenated by Wang in her writing to refer to Lacan’s notions of a “link to the ecstatic” 7), in relationship to the Other’s symbolic experience or signified subalternity and the unspeakable experience. Thus, symbolically approached, signified, and depicted through mediations on singing, dreaming, defiance, dance, submergence, gendered violence, and so on. These orientations of expressions serve as a sort of evidence of knowing, the subterranean need to believe or give meaning to unspeakable trauma. However, as Wang notes, oceanic feeling is not only regression but also the productive state of expression, such as the women who bond themselves together in Bitter Rice, and exhibit, “the creation of constellations enchants our social worlds by giving intention and meaning to our webs of relation.” (Wang 24) 

De Santis’s Marxist analysis of power and oppression, presented through fictionalized experiences of worker feminine subjects, reveals the complex dynamics between the subalternity and those in power or have control over, such as European factories, institutions, or patriarchy. This analysis, while examining how oppression operates across various identity axes, often overlooks the unique perspectives and agency of the marginalized individuals themselves. As a result, the international proletariat (subaltern Other) is portrayed as a homogenous global working class, irrespective of race, gender, or nationality, and is included only through the lens of signified classification. This approach restricts the workers’ autonomy by reducing the extent of their experiences, voices, screams, or songs to a single intonation of exploitation.

In 1975, well after the rise of Neorealism in the 1940s, A Seventh Man by John Berger and Jean Mohr portrays a contemporary male migrant worker in Europe. Berger, working with Mohr’s documentary-style photographs, captures a neorealist sense of subjectivity, desire, individual progress, and masculinized autonomous selfhood in the protagonists. This sense of selfhood is represented through the subconscious act of dreaming. Berger’s migrant worker subject exists outside of the context of European borders and within the European imaginaries of abject status that shape him.

Unlike Giuseppe De Santis’s neorealist classic Bitter Rice, Berger’s book does not articulate its subject’s motivation through the lived experience of the feminine Other. Where Berger describes a migrant who “slept (and dreamed) for six months” upon returning home—a stasis or being “poor and therefore unproductive” (Berger, 47); while Bitter Rice roots its power in collective memory. Berger’s affected subject remains abstracted, while De Santis’s mondine emerges from embodied historical struggle.

A Seventh Man uses a polyphonic narrative, weaving together the voices of migrant workers, their families, employers, and excerpts from labor contracts—all intercut with Berger’s own critical commentary. This multiplicity of perspectives intensifies the reader’s sense of oppression, which Berger substantiates through ethnographic research, statistical analysis, and intimate testimonies. The work interrogates whether the subaltern can transcend socio-political constraints by synthesizing empirical data—interviews, observations, and structural critiques. Ultimately, this collage of voices constructs a detailed survey of workers mapping their struggle for autonomy and self-definition within and against dehumanizing systems.

Despite their invisibility and subaltern status, these characters’ experiences of migration, labor, and relational needs are given depth and humanization through symbolic and thematic elements. The depiction of laborers within their historical contexts emphasizes how oceanic feeling might authentically approach the autonomy of the abject Other. Their social relativity from the unspeakable conditions is expressed in either regressive (individualist) or jubilant (rhizomatic) methods. Furthermore, oceanic feeling symbolizes a vast, unrestricted space for characters’ realities and identities, representing freedom and transcendence from what unsettles the being. Unlike John Berger’s Marxist understanding of the abject Other that can only relate to continuity, “The self (Other) cannot relate to a single point in time because it is predicated upon a continuity. I was, I am, I may be, is the minimum proposition of the word I when pronounced by itself.” (Berger, 180) However, this denies any experience of collectivity which, according to Wang, can not be named as it is unbounded, unmappable, and spilling over, into, undone, and remade in relation to another.

These characteristically neorealist works foreground a crucial tension in representation—between subject and object of study—interrogating how social relativity is constructed through authorial signification. The texts further articulate a dialectical examination of lived experience versus empirical reality, revealing how this dichotomy manifests differently across gendered contexts: where masculine migrant labor is framed through objective material conditions, feminine subjectivity is rendered through affective interiority.

The affective dimension is where the distinctive aesthetic qualities of the neorealism genre are defined. Originating in cinematic characterizations using stories set amongst the poor and the working class, neorealism is a form that can be detected in other art forms and literature, showcasing resistance to a given reality given one’s social environment, that “seems to be constituted as a new subject of knowledge, which itself builds and develops. It produces a new world in which the main elements do not have so many narrative functions as they have their own aesthetic value, related to the eye that is watching them and not with the action they are coming from.” (Sainati) 

The question of representation in neorealist works involves examining how the subject of study (the marginalized “Other”) and the object of study (their social context) are portrayed. Similarly, progressive capitalist and colonialist positivism [2] fueled Italian Fascists’ ideals of modernity, which portrayed women who transgressed as a threat to modern society. This “transgressor woman” has become a recurrent figure and protagonist in neorealist cinema, opposing the matriarchal, productive, or determined worker subject—she is static and therefore the unproductive one (Calabrò Visconti).

The works of De Santis highlight the gendered nature of subjugation and control over women in the labor force—a political recognition of the psychological impacts of positivism. In Bitter Rice, transcendence from the “I” is used as an act of emancipation, autonomy, and elation. This transcendence into a commonality symbolizes the characters’ yearning to overcome their social and economic limitations, even if just for a moment. The film employs themes of death as humanizing devices. This is achieved by actualizing the workers’ social death, their abject status, and as the Other.

In the context of today’s resurgence of fascism and the accompanying geopolitical shifts, former right-wing factions are attempting to distance themselves from their historical alignment with Mussolini’s totalitarian regime that set the tone for Italian Neorealismo. As sentimental nationalism and populist ideologies gain political traction, the indispensable fragmentations and underlying working-class consciousnesses can no longer remain inert or unaffected.

De Santis’s Bitter Rice, through its focus on affective modalities—especially song—sets up a central image: the mondina, as a woman who migrates from the impoverished South to the industrialized North. It is the mondina, and her struggle with the precondition of social death. It is also the vanguard who resorts to crime, she falls in love, or she needs to be loved; she idealizes a version of some kind of wrenching love, which altogether represents a subversive desire to radically disrupt the self from its regressive state. It is a form of resistance against and within social uncertainty, shattering the confines of the self, to move away from separation. It is the need to coalesce.

[1] The song Bella Ciao is theorized to derive from a late 19th-century folk song sung by mondine (female rice workers in Northern Italy). Their protest song Alla mattina appena alzata, shares melodic and thematic similarities with Bella Ciao, particularly in protesting harsh labor conditions. Bella Ciao remains a universal protest anthem, adapted across languages and causes (e.g., anti-authoritarianism, climate activism).
[2] Established in the late 19th century, The History of Psychiatry Museum Library in Reggio Emilia is one example of an archive found in Northern Italy that documents the psychiatric practices that gained prominence during the late 20th-century Italian Positivist era. Positivist ideals, which mirrored totalitarian rule and the criminalization of  “degenerate” positionalities, served as a strategy for intellectuals to accumulate symbolic capital and establish a social science that they believed imitated natural science methodology.

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