Quotes from Geoffrey Nowell-smith

it is one thing for experimentation to take place: it is another for it to acquire critical mass – or, to use a different metaphor, for ripples to become a wave. ... One sign was the emergence or re-emergence of an international audience that actually sought out artistically challenging films.

In Italy the chairman of the Film Commission, Admiral Stone, began a meeting by roundly declaring that Italy, as a rural and former Fascist country, did not need a film industry and should not be allowed to have one.[...] Neo-realism signalled an affirmation by Italian film-makers that they could create a cinema whose aesthetic (and political) assumptions were opposed in equal measure to those of Hollywood and of Italy's own cinema in the Fascist period.