Among the great Italian directors, no one is a more thorough neorealist than Luchino Visconti. To a large part he is honoured for having invented the genre, but there were some predecessors, while this film was the first to downright be designated as "neorealism", and it couldn't be more so. Visconti was a perfectionist and above all absolutely perfect in his consistent realism. Every detail had to be true, and it is, especially in this film, where there are no professional actors but only amateurs speaking their local dialect, a Sicilian language that no mainland Italians could understand - many of the best neorealistic Italian films were made with only amateurs. To make the context of the film clearer, Visconti himself comments the action in intelligible Italian and his gentle voice, while you don't really need to understand everything nor even any commentary. The epic is self-evident: one young fisherman rebels against his almost feudal servituded in dependence on those who buy the fish they work hard for at sea, and launches his own boat, for which he has to pay dearly, mortgaging the house of the family. He is unlucky, a storm wrecks his boat, he loses his and his family's livelihood, and one brother is seduced into illegal smuggling business by Americans - you must suspect he gets entangled in the mob. The bank has to take over the house, and the family is totally ruined without anything left. Yet 'Ntonis starts again, like the force of nature itself, with nothing to hinder the eternal fact that life always goes on.
Visconti is above all a great stylist in film, perhaps the greatest of Italy, and although his films can be felt as rather depressive sometimes, they are always profoundly human. This great sense of human nature and humanism is especially strong in this film, where everything goes against them, there is nothing but adversity in life for them here, and the brutal establishment just laughs at them in scorn, while 'Ntonis expresses everything, not even answering any more, with his deep unfathomable eyes.
Review of La Terra Trema
