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Giuseppe De Santis was one of the most important figures in the development of Italian Neorealism. De Santis's work lies firmly within the tradition of socially conscious filmmaking. De Santis started out as a film critic advocating a more realistic approach to filmmaking. After working on the script of Ossessione (1943) as an assistant to Luchino Visconti, the filmmaker remarkably hit his stride with his first feature, A Tragic Hunt (1946). In this debut—and in the impassioned films that followed in the 1940s and early 1950s—De Santis exposed the intolerable living conditions and insupportable class system of postwar Italy. His work advocated improved social conditions while eliciting luminous performances, especially from his actresses, in cleverly wrought stories, often written in collaboration with fellow filmmakers such as Elio Petri and Michelangelo Antonioni. While his plots are often melodramatic and the real issues are usually enveloped in narratives of love and disappointment, at the heart of De Santis's films are issues of class and political right and wrong. His frequent focus on dissonance within different class cultures provides his forceful Neorealist approach with colorful characters, as well as broad appeal.

Giuseppe De Santis (11 February 1917 - 16 May 1997) was an Italian film director. One of the most idealistic neorealist filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, he wrote and directed films punctuated by ardent cries for social reform.

He was the brother of Italian cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis.

Biography

De Santis was born in Fondi, Lazio. He was a member of the Italian Communist Party and fought with the anti-German Resistance in Rome during World War II.

He was first a student of philosophy and literature before entering Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While working as a journalist for Cinema magazine, De Santis became, under the influence of Cesare Zavattini, a major proponent of the early neorealist filmmakers who were trying to make films that mirrored the simple and tragic realities of proletarian life using location shooting and nonprofessional actors.

In 1942, De Santis collaborated on the script for Ossessione, Luchino Visconti's debut film, which is considered the first Italian neo-realist film.

While still working for the magazine, he began to increasingly work as a screenwriter and assistant director until 1947 when he made his own directorial debut with Caccia Tragica (translated at Tragic Hunt). Like the two films to follow, it was a sincere call for better living conditions for the Italian working class and agrarian workers. Issues of corruption, the black market, collaboration with the Germans, and treatment of ex-soldiers were also introduced in the film.

His third film Bitter Rice (1950), the story of a young woman working in the rice fields who must choose between two socially-disparate suitors, made a star of Silvana Mangano and was a landmark of the new cinematic style. It also earned De Santis an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story.

By the early 1950s, the neorealist movement was falling out of favour with critics and audiences alike. New filmmakers began using dramatic stories that centered on relationships and de Santis also altered his focus. Unfortunately this had an adverse effect on the artistic quality of his films, and though he continued making movies through the early 1970s, they were never as powerful as those first few.

In 1952 he filmed Roma ore 11 (Rome 11 o'clock), the first version of the real tragic accident that Augusto Genina remade in 1953 as Three Forbidden Stories.

In 1959 he won a Golden Globe with La strada lunga un anno; the movie, produced in Yugoslavia, had a nomination for the Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film.

De Santis died in 1997 at the age of 80, in Rome, following a heart attack, and a day of mourning was declared in Italy. A part of his archives have been donated to the Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University.