Calligrafismo

Calligrafismo is in a sharp contrast to Telefoni Bianchi-American style comedies and is rather artistic, highly formalistic, expressive in complexity, and deals mainly with contemporary literary material,[1] above all the pieces of Italian realism from authors such as Corrado Alvaro, Ennio Flaiano, Emilio Cecchi, Francesco Pasinetti, Vitaliano Brancati, Mario Bonfantini, and Umberto Barbaro.

In this sense, the influence of contemporary French cinema is dominant, in particular of poetic realism and the works of Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Julien Duvivier, but also of the American and German.

[5] The best-known exponent of the movement is Mario Soldati, a long-time writer and director destined to establish himself with films of literary ancestry and solid formal structure: Dora Nelson (1939), Piccolo mondo antico (1941), Malombra (1942), Tragic Night (1942), In High Places (1943).

The inner conflicts of the characters and the scenographic richness are also recurrent in the first films by Alberto Lattuada (Giacomo the Idealist, 1942) and Renato Castellani (A Pistol Shot, 1942), dominated by a sense of moral and cultural decay that seemed to anticipate the end of the war.

The first film by Luchino Visconti, Ossessione (1943), is completely anomalous, which, while presenting some typical elements of calligraphy (the literary origin, the references to 19th-century culture, and the accurate formal composition) radicalises the self-destructive tension of the characters and, above all, the importance of the setting, effectively paving the way for the revolution of Italian neorealism.