Avis des critiques

After the war, the director moved on to the masterful La Terra Trema (1948), an expansive portrait of life in a Sicilian village and its fishermen’s efforts at collective action against powerful wholesalers. Starring ordinary villagers, many playing variations on themselves, and featuring improvised dialogue in local Sicilian dialect, the film imparted an authenticity unmatched by any other neorealist work.

Nets, barrels, battered stone and heavy gray skies add to the coarse-grained texture, yet Visconti's splendiferous eye is not easily submerged: Ragged women are perched on windswept boulders and suddenly Seurat is evoked, Bellini is heard somehow not incongruously during a communal anchovy-salting gathering.