By foregrounding the experience of those who were socially and economically disadvantaged, the Italian neorealists opened the way for other filmmakers in marginalized groups to exploit cinema’s potential for representing the experience of their own cultures on screen. One of the great masters of cinema, the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, has revealed that he was inspired to make his first film, Pather Panchali (1955), as a result of seeing Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves in 1950, while he was staying in London. Pather Panchali, which was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, receiving many awards from film festivals around the world, was soon extended into a trilogy with the addition of Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959), all of which traced the developing experience and turbulent emotional life of its central character, Apu, as he seeks to come to terms with the personal conflicts facing a young man who has to confront the prospect of separating himself from his family and their traditional way of life. To do so means leaving his rural, impoverished village in order to embrace the expansive possibilities of a new, emerging world, following the independence of India after more than a century’s colonial rule.

Later, filmmakers in other countries would follow in Ray’s footsteps. To take but one example, in New Zealand, the pioneering Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay (1944–2008) developed a comprehensive theory of what he called a “Fourth Cinema.” In contradistinction to the preoccupations and conventions of First-World cinema, Barclay argued, this Fourth Cinema should aim to transmit the stories of indigenous people in their own image, drawing upon indigenous stories and cultural values, and using indigenous crews and actors. This theory found its perfect exemplification in Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988), which, through a representation of the psychic torments of a Māori man who has transgressed against the tapu of his own culture, showed that a woman could depict masculine interior experience just as profoundly as any male director could portray that of a woman.

Satyajit Ray’s Imitation of Italian Neorealism

When Satyajit Ray saw De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, what appealed to him about the film was its “triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of cinema,” which, for Ray, consisted of “the simple universality of its theme, the effectiveness of its treatment, and the low cost of its production.”