Country: Italy
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Duration: 1 hour and 45 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription) and Kanopy (free w/library card)
What It Elicits: Wartime resistance, thoughts on verisimilitude, faith-in-purpose
Realizing her fiancé has been captured in a Gestapo raid of their building and loaded onto the back of an idling truck on the street, Pisa (played by the magisterial Anna Magnani) darts out of the interior courtyard of her apartment onto the street, running toward her lover. A camera fixed to the vehicle begins to move away from her as she runs towards the truck, her body receding from view as it speeds up and, finally, meets its fate. It remains one of the most memorable shots (and scenes) in film and ends the first part of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City: the perfect distillation of fortitude and agony in the face of uncomprehending brutality. Before Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) became the standard university film course exemplar of Italian neo-realist cinema, Roberto Rossellini made Rome, Open City. Conceptually, neo-realism (just like “realism”) remains a troubled term. After all, any representation of “reality” mediated through an artistic form not only calls attention to its own construction but eschews at its own peril Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” namely the observation that objects in the external world conform to cognition, instead of the reverse. Thankfully, this is not a Substack on Kant, but on film. And in film, neo-realism tends to refer to a set of post-war Italian films engaged with traditionally under-represented persons (read: working class) and a certain aspirational verisimilitude achieved through the use of non-professional actors and a desire to forgo studio sets and artificial lighting in favor of on-location shots.
Whether this constitutes a view more proximate to “reality” remains an open question—no one has ever accused Rossellini of forgoing melodrama, after all—but in their reaction against an earlier set of films which (probably unfairly) were lambasted as overly artificial and unengaged with social issues, the Italian neo-realists made some incredible films and made an indelible impression on subsequent directors. Rome, Open City takes place in the waning days of German control of Italy in 1944, depicting the fracturing underground resistance (both communist and Catholic) against occupying forces. An homage to the bravery of the Italian resistance, Rossellini shot the film in early 1945, after Rome had been liberated but before allied troops had captured the rest of the Italian peninsula. Throughout production, electricity remained spotty, studios weren’t available, and a local wool merchant provided emergency financing. Necessity emerged the mother of a series of inventions to be theoretically structured and justified at a later date. Given the context and his film’s subject, Rossellini could turn a camera onto the environment and people he found. In so doing, he created one of the most magisterial, humane, and beautiful films ever made.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Luchino Visconti — Ossessione (1943)
Roberto Rossellini — Paisan (1946)