Roma, città aperta (1945)
Rome Open City is a film by Roberto Rossellini. This film really was the start of the Italian Neorealist film movement. For the New Year I have set out to study this movement and thought it fitting to begin with Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Technically this is the third neorealist film, directors Mario Camerini and Giuseppe De Santi released neorealist films in the same year just months before Rossellini, depending on what you consider to be the start of the movement. For an overview on Neorealism please see this post.
To begin, this film is the first film of Rossellini’s War trilogy. The other two are Paisa and Germany Year Zero coming out in 46’ and 48’ respectively. As a collective they work well, showing with this film the German Occupation of Rome, Paisa, the allied advance through Italy, and Germany Year Zero, shows Berlin after the war seen through the eyes of 12 year old German boy. It paints a complete picture, where it begins we see Germans as ruthless and by the last film we see the universal suffering of everyday people.
With that, the story as I have said is about the last year of the German occupation of Rome, which was declared an open city. Resistance is high and the film begins with a important resistance member jumping rooftops to elude the Nazis. At the same time a priest is introduced in the film who assists the resistance mostly by being a go between passing on messages and money. A soon to be married bride is introduced whose husband though not religious wants to be married by the aforementioned priest. The bride has been married before and has young children who too assist the resistance. As the wedding day gets closer, the preist and the member of the resistance are discovered and a Nazi raid on the bride to be`s house, all result in tragedy.
Most immediate point of the film is its timing. Coming out in 1945, the film would come out the same year that the war it depicted ended. Its immediacy shows the world the conditions of Italy during the war for the average citizen and all of the decay and destruction brought on by the war years. No film had shown such authenticity and realness. With this there is much heroism ascribed to the film and the conditions in which it was made. Though proven to be slightly exaggerated, Rosselini in an interview on the film decades later commented on just locating film to shoot Rome Open City in 45’:
“There was no film stock to be found. I remember going to buy film from street photographers…, you know, who took photographers with their Leicas…, and tail-ends of film. Poor Arata, who was the cameraman, worked miracles for me, because we made use of everything, positive film, internegative, anything, in fact.”
This is significant because from this it is easy to see and understand perfectly how natural the aesthetics of the neorealism came about in that it was entirely out of necessity. The only preconceived condition for neorealism is even more heroic because of the ethical initiative taken on by the neorealists themselevs. The films had one point in mind and that was to say that the people are important. Anything else that characterizes neorealism stems from this…
