Rome, open city

Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta in Italian) is a 1945 Italian film directed by Roberto Rossellini. with Bicycle Thief, is considered the masterpiece of Italian neorealism.

Plot

The action takes place in Rome, during the Nazi occupation, between 1943 and 1944. It is inspired by the true story of the priest and partisan Giuseppe Morosini, tortured and shot in 1944 by the Nazis for helping the resistance.

In the Rome of 1943 and 1944, the stories of various people associated with the Resistance are intertwined. During the occupation, Father Pietro protects the partisans and, among others, gives asylum to a communist engineer: Manfredi. Pina, a woman from the village, is dating a typographer who fights in the resistance. When the police arrest him, Ella Pina desperately runs after the truck that is taking him away, but she is killed by a burst of machine gun fire before her son's eyes. Soon after, Father Pietro and the engineer - the latter betrayed by his drug-addicted ex-lover - are also arrested. Manfredi dies from the atrocious torture that the Germans inflict on him to make him reveal the name of his resistance comrades. Father Pietro suffers the same fate: he is shot in the presence of the children of the parish, among whom is Pina's orphaned son.

Production

Rossellini began working on the script in August 1944, just two months after the end of the German occupation, with the collaboration of Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei. According to his own words, he was moved by a strong need to narrate recent events, and he literally went to the streets looking for stories (the plot is partly based on real events). Filming began in January 1945, both in studios and on location in the devastated city, the latter being something that would characterize neorealism. The use of extra-professional actors would also be characteristic: of the actors in Rome, an Open City, only Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi were from the profession.

Rome, Open City filming began in a precarious situation and conditions. Rossellini used 35mm negatives from some photographers, many scenes had to be illuminated with yellowish light bulbs. Also, sound could not be recorded at the time of recording, so the film was shot without sound, like a silent film. and later all the sound and voices were added in dubbing studios. Sets were used, which would mark later neorealist cinema. Much was recorded in real exteriors and little study, a decision that deepens and shows the idea that the story is the people.

Scenario

Post-war Italian filmmakers had a great appreciation for the Italian capital, Rome, and often used it as their setting and protagonist. An example of this is Rome, open city.

The city has a great presence and importance throughout the film and it tells us how people lived in the Italian capital at that historical moment of great importance both at a political and social level through the observation and representation of ordinary life. We look at the situation in which Rome found itself between 1943 and 1944 during the occupation of Nazi Germany. In a large part of the film we see the devastated streets of Rome and many emblematic places of the city such as the Church of the Trinitá dei Monti in Piazza di Spagna or the dome of the Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican in the final scene.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack is an original metal orchestra score. It is composed by Renzo Rossellini. It includes 4 wind cuts: the “Main Theme” (melody of shrill trumpets and insistent bass tubas), the “Ending Theme” (sombre, funereal and desolating), the “Theme of Death” (brief description of death by cardiac arrest) and the “Theme of Liberation” (hope combined with joy and pain). It also adds 2 fragments of piano music, by Schubert, and accompanying passages of Cuban, Anglo-American and jazz music.

Reception

On its release, the film was censored in Italy. In the United States it was cut, its duration was reduced by a quarter of an hour. In Argentina it was removed from billboards without explanation by an anonymous government order in 1947. In western Germany it was banned from 1951 to 1960.

Target

This film was born in response to that need to show the Italy of the time, with all the hunger, injustice and poverty of Italians. There we find the social commitment, for which the objective of showing a false reality told until then is abandoned.

The main objective of the film, belonging to Italian neorealism, was to show, denounce and create awareness about what was experienced, without having to manipulate history. Rossellini tried to show life in the cinema, but following a narrative structure to differentiate it from documentary cinema. Rossellini explains it with his words: “Giving its exact value to anything means knowing its authentic and universal meaning. There are still those who consider realism as something external, as an exit to the outside, as a contemplation of rags and suffering. Realism, to me, is nothing more than the art form of the truth. When the truth is reconstructed, the expression is obtained. If it is a shoddy truth, its falsity is noticed and expression is not achieved”.

Therefore, the objective of the film is to show the historical panorama, since what they expose is the complex situation of Italy in those years. We observe that he moves away from the methods of the Hollywood film industries, because he wanted to show the collective feeling of Italian society, which needed to see the reality of his time on the big screen. He also distances himself from previous Italian cinema, from that blatantly propaganda style or romantic comedies with a happy ending, which until then had been imposed by fascist Italy, since it wanted to show reality, those more authentic and humane social conditions.

This film is used in Italy as a means to capture reality, since it shows all those problems and the suffering that the Italian people went through, the working people, which has a great importance in the film, since we observe their daily experiences with the same importance that the heroic deeds of the protagonist of an American blockbuster could have. I mean, this movie cares about those normal individuals, Italian citizens who are going through such a bad situation in the country. This made the public identify more with them than with American cinema or fascist propaganda.

Cast

• Aldo Fabrizi: Don Pietro Pellegrini.
• Anna Magnani: Pina.
• Marcello Pagliero: Giorgio Manfredi, alias Luigi Ferraris.
• Vito Annicchiarico: Marcello, son of Pina.
• Nando Bruno: Agostino, the sacristan.
• Harry Feist: Major Bergmann.
• Giovanna Galletti: Ingrid.
• Francesco Grandjacquet: Francesco.
• Eduardo Passarelli: the police sergeant in the neighborhood.
• Maria Michi: Marina Mari.
• Carla Rovere: Lauretta, sister of Pina.
• Carlo Sindici: Police Commissioner.
• Joop van Hulzen: Captain Hartmann.
• Ákos Tolnay: the Austrian deserter.

Awards

New York Film Critics Circle Awards

• Palma de Oro at the Festival de Cannes