1
Rome Open City
Roberto Rossellini( 1946 )
From web /
The Magic of the Movies--Open City (Roma, città aperta)
Open City [Roma, città aperta] (1946)
By Alex Christen (
The title of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta [Rome, Open City] is really a masterpiece of a title. An ‘open city’ is one that is immune from attack because it has been declared demilitarized. Of course, Rome in World War II was not in any estimation "immune from attack," and was in fact dramatically under attack both from the forces of fascism and German occupation. Also, the connotations of "open city" extend beyond its formal definition. It expresses ideas of Rome as an open city in terms of being unsuspectingly invaded by new ideologies that it may not at first have understood. It also implies that Rome was better as a closed city, self-contained and left to its own devices and values. It’s almost as good a title as Philadelphia, the reigning king of titles.
Roma, città aperta is an exploration of the effects of war on real people. In this sense, it is really very good at creating real people in believable situations and allowing the audience to sympathize with them completely. However, and this is the great weakness of all propaganda from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to the works of Leni Riefenstahl and Frank Capra and of all melodrama from Henry King’s Tol’able David to John Singleton’s Higher
Learning, Roma, città aperta paints its villains in such broad strokes that even the realistic portraits become flawed in opposition to them. In defense of Riefenstahl and Capra, at least their propaganda was clearly propaganda. Whatever effects that propaganda may have had during specific historical periods, at least it didn’t ever try to present itself as anything else. In contrast, The Birth of a Nation and Roma, città aperta try to present themselves almost as historical accounts presented in realistic ways, while they are in fact beating the drum for particular patriotisms and causes in ways that undermine both their emotional impact and their dramatic integrity. The comparison of Roma, città aperta to The Birth of a Nation at first may seem easy: both films are about nations trying to recover from wars that changed them forever, both use the framework of family structures to bring into relief the horrors of the forces they saw as opposed to or unmindful of the importance of such relationships, and both caricature the opposition horribly in misguided attempts to gain sympathy for their protagonists. In the case of The Birth of a Nation, the caricatured party was the newly freed slaves and those who took advantage of them to further their own ends, harming the old ways of family harmony that supposedly prevailed in the South previously. In Roma, città aperta, the caricatures are the Nazis. It may be debatable whether any Nazi can ever be unfairly caricature
d as evil, given the history of that movement, but the evil is not the problem in Roma, città aperta. Instead, the Nazis are not simply portrayed as evil, torturers, needlessly cruel, but as almost congenitally so. And that congenital evil apparently stems from their anti-family, more-than-vaguely portrayed homosexuality. This film makes unfortunate, dated conclusions about homosexuality, as The Birth of a Nation did about race. Henry Feist’s Bergmann and Giovanna Galletti’s Ingrid represent a sort of soulless, godless homosexual hegemony that many pseudo-historians have actually attributed to the Nazis. This is especially true
when they are contrasted with the neighborhood we sympathize with, which really does come to represent effectively the valuable things about family and community that are found in Rome and throughout the world (even in Germany).
Bergmann struts, prances and lisps, and Ingrid tempts the young actress with the same kind of "lesbian hypnotism" discussed in the documentary The Celluloid Closet. The film is a bit ahead of its time: Hollywood films were still
portraying homosexuals as a joke. Despite the supposed characteristic of neorealism of refusing to pass facile moral judgments, this film seems to fail on that score. One wonders how Rossellini ever brought himself to love Ingrid
Bergman. The half-thought-out treatment of the Nazis ultimately distracts from the points the film makes about heroism, innocence, and simple ordinary life.
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz (
Filmed in the harsh conditions of 1945 Rome, when Italy was just liberated from the German occupation, where a movie such as "Open City" was not a priority in the postwar period. All the country's money was needed to rebuilt its infra structure, as movies seemed a frivolous activity at the time. Rossellini used poor film stock leftover from the fascists and filmed despite all the technical deficiencies he ran into. He came up with a gritty, authentic looking film, a grim story of survival and the fight for freedom. This was a breakthrough film for the director, whose neorealist style, using a Hollywood type of narrative and a documentary style approach to filming, caught the dire mood of the Resistance Movement and the ordinary people who fought the fascists. It is a melodramatic story about good versus evil. The poor, suffering, hardworking people being the good ones; and, those who sold their soul for money, luxury, vice, betrayal, or false ideals, being the evil ones. It also showed how the Resistance fighters were members of the Communist party and were atheists while their sometime partners, the Catholic church, were their opposite but still sided with them due to the horrible suffering the people faced.
Awards such as the New York Film Critics Circle and Best Film in Cannes in 1946, came to this film. It awakened an international audience to the knowledge that Italian cinema was alive and well and Roberto Rossellini was a director to be reckoned with, along with De Sica, who just filmed "Shoe Shine" in the neorealist style, also, to international acclaim.
Idealistic Resistance leader Manfredi (Pagliero) is on the run, his group got word that there is an informer among them. He goes to the apartment of a sympathizer, Francesco (Grandjacquet), who can help the cause through his trade as a printer, as he transfers money into a book for shipment to those Resistance fighters in the field. But since Manfredi can't go himself to carry out this assignment, he asks for help. Francesco's pregnant girlfriend lives next door to him, Pina (Magnani). She lives in poverty with her extended family and her young son Marcello (Vito) and a sister Lauretta (Carla), who is aspiring to be an actress and is ashamed of her impoverished family. The widow Pina is earthy, the quintessence of Italian femininity, plus she's a nurturing mother. She believes in God and is ashamed she became pregnant before getting married, but is happy that she will marry Francesco tomorrow. She returns with a bag full of bakery items, as her neighbors looted the bakery. When asked by Manfredi, she sends her son to get the local priest, Don Pietro (Fabrizi), to come over, who is sympathetic to the Resistance Movement, and he agrees to take the dangerous assignment.
Manfredi has been fooling around with an attractive but insincere actress, Marina (Michi), a friend of Lauretta's. But he finds her thirst for money to be something he can't live with anymore, and tries to get word to her that he wants to breakup.
The Gestapo, under a particularly malevolent Major Bergmann (Feist), raids Pina's building and brings in Francesco for routine questioning on his wedding day. Pina is alarmed by this and runs in the street after him, but gets shot down by the Nazis. When Francesco is released, he joins Manfredi in Marina's luxurious apartment, as they are desperate for a place to stay. She overhears them talking about meeting the priest and turns this information over to the major's cold-hearted assistant Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti), who plies Marina with clothes, theater work, and money. The information proves correct and they capture the priest, Manfredi, and a deserting Austrian soldier (Ákos Tolnay), as the priest supplied them with false I.D. cards to escape the country.
In a very brutal conclusion, Manfredi is tortured to get information out of him; while, the deserter can't take the punishment and hangs himself. The priest is then executed by a firing squad. The film has an immediacy about it, but it also seemed overly melodramatic at times; it relied so much on the premise that by being even braver than the Germans, the Italians, the slave-race, can prove that there was no need for the war since there is no such a race as a master race. That Manfredi dies without talking after being tortured makes his heroics larger than anyone else's and proves that the Italians are every bit as good as the Germans, if not better. Rossellini hoped to examine the Italian soul and show that there were both good and bad people among them, while the Germans have gone so far off the edge of sanity that it is hard to find a good German because of their perverse beliefs.
Through the portrayal of the Gestapo torturer Feist and his sidekick Galletti, the Germans are viewed as perverse homosexuals and godless animals who have lost their sense of what it is to be human. They can only relate to others in an obscene way.
Anna Magnani gives the film credibility through her humanity, as her story is filled with her heartfelt yearnings. The other professional actor to standout, among all the nonprofessionals, was Aldo Fabrizi in the priest role. He elicited a call for humanity, for all people to act as brothers. Though, the film does not seem as relevant as it was when first released and acclaimed as a masterpiece, having lost some of its purity; nevertheless, it still retains its moral high ground and its ability to show the collective will of the people who resisted being oppressed. It is still a work of considerable merit.
======
Acquarello (
Roma: Citte Aperta (Rome: Open City)
Shortly after the liberation of Italy in 1945, Roberto Rossellini took to the war ravaged streets of Rome and filmed a highly unsettling, yet profoundly affirming story of the struggle and defiance of ordinary people in the face of human adversity, and created the indelible image of Open City. Using narrative, documentary styled filmmaking that would come to be known as neorealism, Open City chronicles the plight, not of individual characters, but of the collective soul of the Italian people. An idealistic resistance leader, Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), is pursued by a persistent German officer, Bergmann (Henry Feist), attempting to elicit the names of other members of the underground movement. He goes to the apartment of a lithographer named Francesco (Francesco Grandjaquet) seeking assistance in transferring money to other rebels, and encounters his fiance, Pina (Anna Magnani), a kind, but weary widow who lives in an adjacent apartment. Pina sends her son, Marcello (Vito Annichiarico) to fetch Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) a sympathetic priest who agrees to orchestrate the exchange. In the morning of Francesco and Pina's planned wedding, German soldiers search the apartment building, turning all the residents out into the street, and detain all of the men for routine questioning. Giorgio escapes and contacts a former lover, a self-absorbed actress named Marina (Maria Michi) who betrays him by disclosing his plans to Bergmann's assistant, Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti).
Filmed in austere conditions, the technical imperfections of Open City effectively contribute to the film's overall cinema verite appearance. The uneven film stock, salvaged from scrap reels, create a realistic, documentary appearance, blurring the distinction between the created story and the realized drama of post-war turmoil. The inconsistent lighting seems to reflect the frequent brownouts characteristic of fuel shortages and energy rationing. The rawness of Open City elicits a sense of realism to the film, as if experiencing an actual recorded document of a tragic period in history. It is also a testament to humanity's tenacity and perseverance, to the inexorable power of compassion and dignity. In essence, a chronicle of the soul.
______
Celluloide (
A Review by Luca Prono,
University of Nottingham, UK.
Roberto Rossellini's Roma, Città Aperta (1945, Open City aka Rome, Open City) has almost a mythic aura about it. It is one of the founding movies of the neo-realist tradition, it stars Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, then celebrated comedians in their first dramatic roles, it was shot in an adventurous and precarious way using expired celluloid with several producers and distributors joining in and offering support only to withdraw it after a few weeks. It was, the received critical view goes, a daring movie which tried to remember what everyone wanted to forget: the last days of the Fascist regime and the Nazi occupation in Italy. With hindsight, we can say that Roma, Città Aperta celebrates that political alliance between the Catholics led by De Gasperi and the Left led by Togliatti and Nenni which was governing post-WWII Italy at the time when the movie was shot. While that alliance was short-lived, the reputation of the movie has flourished through the decades. No wonder then that its fiftieth anniversary should have been celebrated with a movie about its shooting. From its very title, Carlo Lizzani's Celluloide (1996) enters that process of myth-making that surrounds Roma, Città Aperta. Disappointingly, Celluloide avoids any type of confrontation with the most unpleasant and disturbing aspects of Rossellini's film, such as its problematic sexual politics and homophobia. Celluloide is a proud endorsement of the neo-realist tradition.
A brief summary of Rossellini's film is necessary to follow my argument on Celluloide. Roma, Città Aperta begins with Manfredi, a Communist militant, taking refuge in the house of his fellow comrade Francesco who is about to get married to the good-hearted Pina (Anna Magnani). She is a war-widow with a child from her previous marriage and is already expecting another one from Francesco. Manfredi, who has to remain in hiding, asks the local priest Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) to deliver some money to a group of partisans on the outskirts of Rome. In the meantime, the Head of the Gestapo in Rome (the most effeminate Nazi you've ever seen on screen), Bergman, is actively trying to catch Manfredi. Bergmann's female aid Ingrid, who is of course a lesbian, is given the task of seducing Manfredi's girlfriend Marina (Maria Michi) to whom she supplies morphine. When the block where Pina and her family live is raided by the Nazis, Francesco and Manfredi are caught and Pina is killed while she is running after the lorry that is taking them away (one of the movie's most famous scenes which features prominently on the poster of Lizzani's Celluloide). A group of partisans manage to free Francesco and Manfredi who seek refuge in Marina's flat, but, of course, she betrays them. Manfredi is arrested together with Don Pietro and a deserter Nazi soldier, while Francesco manages to escape. Manfredi dies while the Nazis are torturing him; Don Pietro is executed under the eyes of his parish boys.
Written by Sergio Amidei with the collaboration of the young Federico Fellini, Roma, Città Aperta had a complex genesis. Becoming a model for future neo-realist movies, its plot mixes fiction with historical events, professional actors and people taken from the streets. Pina is modeled after Teresa Gullace, a woman who suffered her same fate. Don Pietro has its historical source in Don Morosini, a priest from one of the poorest areas of Rome who was executed by the Nazis because of his help to the Resistance. Indeed, at one point, Rossellini's film was to be a straightforward documentary on Don Morosini. From the very first scenes, Celluloide echoes the double status of fiction/documentary that characterises Rossellini's movie. The film opens with an external shot of the Italian studios of Cinecittà and we are then taken inside where the actors of Celluloide are trying on costumes and make-up, supervised by the director Carlo Lizzani. They are shown side by side to a picture of the person they are playing. Several noises are heard and the actors Giancarlo Giannini and Massimo Ghini go outside to see what's happening. They witness the arrival of a platoon of Allies among a group of evacuees, a familiar scene in war movies and documentaries. Quite to the point then, black and white documentary footage on this subject is inserted while the opening credits of Celluloide begin to appear on screen. The image then reverts to colour and the camera frames Roberto Rossellini (played by Ghini) walking through the streets of Rome while a platoon of Canadian tanks is entering the city. In these first scenes, Celluloide calls attention to its double status as both fiction and documentary homage to Roma, Città Aperta and the neo-realist tradition as a whole. Celluloide defines itself through the words of the Anna Magnani character on Roma, Città Aperta: "a true but invented story, with true but false actors".