La Terra Trema

The Italian Communist Party paid for this film and had asked Visconti for a documentary. He diverged from the brief and made a fiction set in the Sicilian village of Aci Trezza, drawing on Giovanni Verga's 1881 novel I Malavoglia. Shooting began on 10 November 1947 and ran to 26 May 1948. The cast is the village itself. Visconti was not satisfied with non-professionals in general; he wanted the film performed by the actual fishermen of Trezza, and that is what he did. They speak their own Sicilian dialect rather than Italian. The dialect was impenetrable enough that mainland audiences, and reportedly even Sicilians from other districts, struggled with it, and Visconti eventually had to add a voice-over narration. That addition is now the film's most argued-over element. A fishing family tries to buy its own boat to escape the middlemen and loses everything by degrees. Who it is for: viewers curious about neorealism at its furthest limit and how far a claim to reality can be pushed on film. Who it is not for: impatient viewers. It runs two hours forty, the pace is very low, and it deliberately offers no dramatic rescue.