"Life is another matter"
Fact and Fantasy in 'Rome, Open City'
“Substantially, then, the question today is, instead of turning imaginary situations into 'reality' and trying to make them look 'true,' to make things as they are, almost by themselves, create their own special significance. Life is not what is invented in 'stories';
life is another matter.”—Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema”
There is perhaps no name more closely associated with the brief, highly singular and energetic period of film production that proceeded from the end of World War II (and fascism) in Italy known as neorealism than director Roberto Rossellini’s. Three films that Rossellini directed between the liberation of Rome in 1944 and the beginning of his collaboration with wife Ingrid Bergman in 1949—Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946), and Germany, Year Zero (1948)—constitute for many the skeleton upon which all the major works of postwar neorealism would append themselves. Rossellini provided in these films much of the major material from which definitions of neorealism could later be honed and debated. One of the major voices who participated in this process of communal definition was Cesare Zavattini, a major force in the creative production of neorealist films in his own right, scripting for Vittorio De Sica over the course of a long and rich artistic collaboration such influential films as Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952). Here, I want to argue that the central claim made in his definitive 1953 treatise on the state of the form, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” that “the artist’s task is not to make people moved or indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect…on the real things, exactly as they are” is in fact directly contradicted in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, which affirms with flamboyant formal gusto the countervailing assertion made by French critic André Bazin in “An Aesthetic of Reality,” that “realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.”
It is ironic that Rome, Open City, Rossellini’s unflinching chronicle of life in Rome under Nazi occupation has been regarded as a, if not the high watermark of Italian neorealism. Though most scholars now date the style’s origins from the release of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione in 1942, there was in contemporary critical estimation an understandable hesitation to maintain a continuity between the new, radically anti-war films, and those augured under the auspices of Mussolini’s fascist propaganda machine. Much of the personnel from Vittorio Mussolini’s days heading up production at Cinecittà, after all, went on to form the vanguard of neorealism. But as Bazin puts it, there was a tendency to see neorealism as “something spontaneously generated, issuing like a swarm of bees from the decaying corpses of fascism and the war.”
This context does nothing to rob Rome, Open City of its legendary power as a revolutionary piece of art, which plays just as potently 70 years later. But it does help to make sense of Jean-Luc Godard’s claim that “all roads lead to Rome, Open City,” and Hugo Salas’ remark that because of the film, 1945 came to be known as “Neorealism Year Zero.” Indeed, the irony of Rome, Open City’s canonical status as the most emblematic neorealist film comes not just from the fact that the seeds of the antifascist’s style’s characteristics and conventions were planted during fascism, but from the realization one has while watching the film that, actually, nearly every “rule” that has been theorized about neorealism’s cinematic conventions is broken in its most representative film.
Zavattini published “Some Ideas on the Cinema” in 1953, the year after most critics and scholars would come to date the death of neorealism. It is nevertheless the most concise summation of the style’s formal (technique, composition) and narrative (story, themes, politics) agendas that we have—authored, no less, by one of its own important practitioners. In it, Zavattini breaks down the formal particularities of neorealist films that distinguish them from the pre-war Italian output and “mawkish” (Bazin’s word) Hollywood style that provided so many mid-century European radicals with a template to break. Neorealist films first of all reject the plot construction in which “one situation produces another situation, and another, and another,” each scene “thought out and immediately related to the next.” This approach to sequencing betrays a “mistrust of reality.” By contrast, neorealists choose to “remain” in single scenes, in monkish devotion to the meditative slowness of true reality, soaking up all its “echoes and reverberations.” Thematically, “neorealism can and must face poverty,” as it represents “one of the most vital realities of our time.” In a budgetary sense, neorealism “can be expressed cheaply, and it can dispense with capitalist resources on the present scale.” “Invented characters” are no good; “real characters,” as in non-professional actors and portrayals based on real historical figures, “people in whose life I can directly participate,” in other words, are “morally stronger.”
It is on the subject of story that Zavattini reserves his most bitter recriminations of non-realistic cinema. It is also in this field that Rossellini most forcefully breaks with Zavattini, and in doing so, achieves his most passionate reconstitution of the hardscrabble elements of real human life. Cinema before neorealism, according to Zavattini, could never resist the “natural, unavoidable necessity to insert a ‘story’ in the reality to make it exciting and ‘spectacular.’” The “intervention of fantasy and artifice” into the space of reality acts like a corrosive upon its threads, corrupting the sacred essence of humanity that reality, if presented without manipulation abridgment, would confer to its spectators.
If one has seen Rome, Open City, or any of the films in Rossellini’s war trilogy, one realizes by now that very little of Zavattini’s prescriptions were taken up in the construction of Rossellini’s sweeping, operatic stories. “Reduced to their plots,” Bazin writes, “they are often just moralizing melodramas.” And yet, “on the screen everybody in the film is overwhelmingly real.” Digging further into the constituent formal elements of Rome, Open City, one unearths more artifice, more operatic verve, and more manipulation. The film is segmented unnaturally into two acts, with the action jumping around in time and ping ponging through space between Pina’s (Anna Magnani) apartment building, Don Pietro’s (Aldo Fabrizi) church, and Ingrid’s (Giovanna Galletti) vampiric lair. Thematically, Rome, Open City depicts Zavattini-approved issues of poverty and urban revolt, and economically, the film was produced without the capitalist collusion of Cinecittà, which had been partially destroyed during the war, and then converted into a homeless shelter. But each of the film’s remaining aesthetic components are in their turns anathema to the unadorned, “documentary” style advocated by Zavattini. Heartrending music melts over action scenes like plasticky fondue; the depth of focus pioneered by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1940), championed by neorealism’s proponents takes a backseat to static medium shots, lit-from-within close-ups, and sequences in which the editors’ scissors beribbon the film into scraps. “I am bored to death with heroes,” Zavattini gripes, and yet each pillar of Rome, Open City’s triumvirate of protagonists (Magnani, Fabrizi, and Marcello Pagliero—all trained professionals) are martyred in spectacular displays of visual hagiography, the music soaring and the mise-en-scène cleared out to centralize focus on the main event.
For Bazin, however, Rossellini’s neorealist apostasy wasn’t a contradiction, a failure to meet the strenuous formal and narrative demands of his cohort. In “An Aesthetic of Reality,” Bazin argues that in fact, the “‘art’ of cinema lives off this contradiction,” that the “abstraction and symbolism provided by the present limits of the screen,” the “utilization of the residue of convention” can “magnify or neutralize the effectiveness of the elements of reality that the camera captures.” Put simply, one must harness artifice, magic, and manipulation to achieve the illusion of reality. But it is and always will be, on some level, an illusion. For to point a camera at reality is always to abstract it, extracting it from a context so vast it’s inarticulable and jamming it into a new context, conjured up by the filmmaker, to represent reality.
Rossellini understood that melodrama can and often must be harnessed to create verité, as tragedy is often harnessed to create comedy. The sequence in Act I in which Pina, Giorgio (Pagliero), and Francesco (portrayed by non-professional Francesco Grandjacquet) witness the explosion set off by the local children perfectly encapsulates this notion, pitching “documentary” realism up into the hysterical heights of melodrama, only in order to create conditions for the viewer to maximally engage with the reality in its rawest form. The camera captures Giorgio and Francesco at Pina’s table, catching up and relaying Resistance plans to one another. It is fixed into the corner of the room, occasionally panning to track Francesco’s movements, and cutting to a closer look at each man’s face. There is no music, the light is dim, natural. Pina enters to complain about her son Marcello’s disappearance. The camera switches its focal point to her, yet remains stationed in the far corner. It pans up as the men rise to greet Pina, gathering them into a tableau not unlike a figurative painting. Suddenly a bomb goes off, and the form of the film reconfigures itself. Thundering music swells. The camera swivels to track Pina closing and locking the door. She switches the lights off and the mise-en-scène is plunged into inky, expressionistic blackness. Pina rushes to the window where Giorgio and Francesco stand and a flurry of cuts follows—the trio from behind looking out, seconds of a stagey, faraway explosion, their anxious face framed in the angular lacework of the window bars, and finally, the boys. A cavalcade of tiny shadows descend down a hill, debris surging into the sky behind them, lit by flames. The music breaks out into the film’s hopeful refrain. Rossellini has you by the jugular of your emotions, forcing you into sympathies and identifications without your consent.
It is perhaps manipulative, bourgeois, and morally weak to turn to fantasy in pursuit of the representation of reality, as Zavattini suggested. Or perhaps it is as Bazin more measuredly argued, that the medium of film invariably employs a technology of fantasy, and the best one can do is harness it in order to create an aesthetic of reality. In either case it’s hard to argue that the hybrid melodramatic realist approach Rossellini takes to both form and content in Rome, Open City does not, as Zavattini advocates all neorealist films should strive to do, “make an audience feel the need, the urgency” for solutions to their existential, sociopolitical dilemmas.