Rome, Open City: Neorealism Wasn't Built in a Day

By George Kaltsounakis

Anyone with a superficial grasp of that revolutionary advance in cinematic conventions known as Italian neorealism would no doubt be perplexed by the disparity between the term’s purported stylistics and the aesthetics of Rossellini’s landmark, Rome, Open City (1945), the flagship of the “movement” (a group with no clear leader or manifesto). Film historians, however, have generally come to acknowledge that the perception of Rossellini’s film as prototype is mostly a matter of convenience. Like Visconti’s Ossessione (1942) and De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946), Open City was merely another step away from the rigidity of traditional narrative cinema toward a new stylistic asymptote born out of frustration with artistic stagnation. But even more problematic than situating the film as neorealist is the prospect of attaining a viable definition of the term, given that the major filmmakers most closely associated with it (the three mentioned above, and to a much lesser extent, Fellini) had competing definitions of neorealism, and an aesthetic approach that quickly challenged, outgrew, or completely reinvented its amorphous parameters. The variant, though overlapping conceptions of this inherently hazy term first coined by Italian critic Umberto Barbaro in 1943 (in reference to French cinema of the 30s!) seem to apply only partially and ill-fittingly to any one film.

The purest form of neorealism was advocated by Cesare Zavattini and concisely summarized by one of its most passionate champions, André Bazin, who wrote that “The dream of Zavattini is just to make a ninety-minute film of the life of a man to whom nothing happens.” An important thinker and writer who rarely directed, Zavattini argued for the equation of real time and screen time, that drama could and should be found in the most mundane, quotidian subject matter, and that montage should not be used to manufacture a false sense of temporality. In this regard and in theory, Rossellini was eminently neorealist, as he too disavowed the use of montage as anachronistic (in practice, however, there are instances of montage in Open City that would make D.W. Griffith proud). Ironically, Rossellini, a wealthy Roman who began his career in cinema in 1938 as a writer, first made creative inroads on neorealism’s aspiration of verisimilitude in a trilogy of wartime propaganda films made for Mussolini’s Fascist government, in which he would begin to experiment with the deft intercutting of drama and documentary.

Open City of course displays many of the characteristics most often associated with neorealism, namely “gritty” footage reminiscent of the era’s newsreels that imparts a feel of documentary realism, the use of locations as opposed to constructed sets in an effort to eschew excessive artifice of any kind, employment of non-professional actors (including children), political commitment, and historical veracity. However, what is striking about Open City to modern eyes is the extent to which its reliance on the tried and true traits of narrative cinema eclipses these innovations. It is interesting to compare Open City to Visconti’s formidable La Terra Trema (1948) or De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), which, though both made only three years later, are so much closer to the aesthetic spirit of the neorealist ethos (as is Rossellini’s own Paisàn [1946] for that matter). Despite its crucial engagement with contemporary social and political reality, Open City doesn’t convince as a wholly authentic rendering of a specific time and place because of its frequent adherence to an aesthetic whose obsolescence it hastened through its own radical stylistic and historically specific aspects. Made partly in reaction to the Italian “white telephone” dramas, facile Hollywood imports, and apolitical genre films, it is very much a bridge between its period’s dominant modes of storytelling and the future of cinema, a bridge conceived as much out of necessity as design.

The salient points of the film’s production history are the stuff of legend. Rossellini could only obtain permission from the Allied authorities to make a documentary, and shot the film with scant financial backing barely two months after the German army vacated Rome, utilizing bits of cheap film stock he bought from photographers. It was filmed without synch sound and daily rushes, and the actors had to dub their dialogue after it was edited. From these humble and constrictive origins, Rossellini fashioned a film that helped chart a new course for narrative cinema. The plot revolves around the members of the Italian resistance in Nazi-occupied Rome: Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), a priest; Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), a Communist engineer and key figure in the underground; and Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet) and Pina (Anna Magnani, trumping the hallowed neorealist prescription of non-professional actors), two ordinary people fighting for the cause and a semblance of normality under the inhuman circumstances of war.

Rossellini’s eye for the urban landscape is still impressive today, and one can imagine how jarring it must have been at the time—Open City was the highest-grossing domestic release of 1945, a fate sadly not even remotely shared with most other neorealist films in the ensuing years—to watch a film that is, sporadically, so free from studio artifice, so rough-hewn and dramatic at the same time. These traits, however, remains at odds with its theatricality and other “regressive” qualities: its frequent melodramatic notes, quite Christian concepts of moral authority, characters that often represent Manichaean stereotypes of good and evil, and the idealization of heroic virtues. A spectacular synthesis of all these features occurs when Don Pietro furiously inveighs against the Nazis after they’ve tortured and killed Manfredi; his murderers literally recoil from the irate padre as if his faith and the justice of his cause had been made manifest before them, as if in fear of the impending wrath of God Himself. An exemplary instance of crackling dramatic propaganda, this scene also invokes quasi-divine approval for its hagiographic affirmation of Italy’s wartime resistance.

Still, Open City retains startling complexity, a sense of humour, and boundless irony. Witness the scene early on involving the sexton who takes a stolen pastry from a woman while himself refusing to engage in looting—the woman snatches the pastry back and tells him, “Then you’ll get pastries in heaven!” This episode quite comically decries the hypocrisy of defending one’s cowardice with misplaced religious beliefs. Then there’s the effeminate, sadistic German major and his vampiric lesbian accomplice, two extreme types in themselves, balanced by the drunken German officer who, on a philosophical tirade, scornfully rejects the Nazi philosophy of racial hygiene but nevertheless mercilessly executes Don Pietro the following day when his soldiers won’t.

These ironies and contradictions, over and above the film’s formal ingenuity and neorealist advances, make for an extraordinary work of cinema. With centenary plans afoot to strike new prints of Rossellini’s films and an upcoming retrospective at Cinematheque Ontario, the time is ripe for a reappraisal of the moving, momentous, and eternal Open City, and its vanguard role in the neorealist pantheon.

The author is indebted to Peter Bondanella’s Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present.

Rome, Open City

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