NEOREALISM AS IDEOLOGY: BAZIN, DELEUZE, AND THE AVOIDANCE OF FASCISM LORENZO FABBRI University of Minnesota, USA Although the very existence of neorealism has been under scrutiny at least since the 1950s, an obstinate outlook on Italy’s cinema history still reduces all national films to anticipations, prolongations, or betrayals of this elusive new wave. Why is this the case? In this article, I explain the persisting critical hegemony of neorealism from the point of view of ideology critique. I argue that Bazin’s and Deleuze’s influential accounts of neorealism as a revolutionary, anti-narrative, zero-degree cinema have streamlined the fantasy of an innocent post-war Italy, of a child-like nation that redeemed itself from its past and was ready to start afresh. In this light, I suggest that the attachment to neorealism ought be recognized as a collective defence mechanism repressing the aborted ‘de-fascitizzazione’ of Italian post- Fascist society. KEYWORDS: Neorealism, Fascism, Deleuze, Bazin, film theory & history, ideology, historical guilt, trauma Neorealism as such does not exist. —Andre ´ Bazin, In Defense of Rossellini 1 No one is more responsible for the simultaneous appreciation and misunder- standing of the history of Italian cinema than Andre ´ Bazin. No one, except perhaps Gilles Deleuze. Driven by the illusions of an Italian school of liberation or of the epochal transition from movement-image to time-image, Bazin and Deleuze contributed to the invention of neorealism and cemented it as a turning point in the history of European new waves and world art-house cinema. Neither Bazin nor Deleuze considered neorealism to be a monolithic phenomenon. Still, their cinema volumes sanctioned neorealism as an obligatory point of reference for anyone engaging with Italian film. Whether one discusses works from before the fall of Mussolini or after the liberation of Rome, from the time of the Kingdom of Italy or of the second Republic, from the silent era or the digital one, the tendency is to hold up neorealism as the touchstone against whose backdrop all Italian cinema ought to be situated, if not judged. Once Italian film history is viewed from the perspective of neorealism and neorealism rises to the status of ‘via maestra of Italian film’, one cannot but indulge # Italian Studies at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Reading 2015 DOI: 10.1179/0261434015Z.000000000115 The Italianist, 35. 2, 182–201, June 2015