6— Open City (1945)
1. Faldini and Fofi, L'avventurosa storia , p. 90. An entertaining book by Ugo Pirro, Celluloide (Milan: Rizzoli, 1983) tells the story of the beginning of neorealism in enormous detail, including the filming of Open City . The problem is that the account is heavily fictionalized, with invented conversations and so on, and in the absence of a single note, source, or reference to an interview, the book cannot be taken as a definitive account of the period. [BACK]
2. Faldini and Fofi, L'avventurosa storia , p. 94. [BACK]
3. Fabrizi has given an utterly different, completely unconvincing version of the genesis of this film. According to him, the idea of the full-length film was his, and he suggested adding the story of the children and the woman killed by the Nazis; the enlarged plot was then given to Rossellini, who Fabrizi introduced to Fellini. (See Angelo Solmi, Federico Fellini [London: Merlin Press, 1963], pp. 76-78, for a discussion of both accounts.) [BACK]
4. Money posed a continual problem. De Sica tells an amusing story that gives a rather more realistic picture of how works of "genius" are made:
It's not as if one day we were all sitting around a table on the Via Veneto, Rossellini, Visconti, I, and the others, and said, "Hey, let's start neorealism." We hardly even knew each other. One day I was told that Rossellini had started working on a film again: "A film on a priest," I was told, and that was it. Another day I saw him and Amidei sitting on the entrance steps of an apartment building in Via Bissolati. I asked them what they were doing. They shrugged their shoulders and said, "We're looking for some money. We don't have enough dough to finish the film." "What film?" "The story of a priest, you know, Don Morosini, the one that the Germans shot" (Faldini and Fofi, L'avventurosa storia , p. 90).
A small amount of money did come, eventually, from an unsteady stream of entrepreneurs and first-time producers, who contributed whatever small change they could and then went their way. Several years later Rossellini was to tell a reporter for Variety that it had cost 11 million lire ($19,000) to make the film, complaining that it should only have cost 6 million ($10,400) ( Variety , November 3, 1948). Rossellini himself sold nearly everything he and his estranged wife owned to finance the filming (he ended up losing about $600), which was done in a makeshift studio in the Via degli Avignonesi small enough, according to Fellini, to be filled with the smoke from ten cigarettes. The only scenes shot in this "studio" were those in the Nazi headquarters (meant to replicate the infamous S.S. center on the Via Tasso), Don Pietro's room, and Marina's apartment. (During the filming of the sequence in Marina's apartment, the actress apparently went to open the door because the script required her to listen in on Manfredi, only to find that the door had been painted on). One other reason for making the film here was that they could tap into the electricity that the Allied forces were providing for the newspaper Il Messagero . Since the electricity came on only at night, it was then that the principle interior shooting was done. All the other scenes were shot on actual streets.
According to Omar Garrison in the New York Post (February 1, 1950), Rossellini had hidden a stolen camera in his apartment on the Piazza di Spagna and had secretly begun shooting sequences of the Germans changing the guard, one day accidentally finding himself filming the roundup of hostages. There is no other evidence, however, to suggest that Garrison's account is in any way correct. Similarly, the often-repeated story that Rossellini filmed the actual departure of the German troops from Rome is more a testimony to the convincing power of his mise-en-scène than to the truth. (In one interview, however, Rossellini does insist that filming began on January 19, 1944, that is, five months before the Germans left, but other testimony has it that this date actually marks the beginning of the preproduction planning of the film. It is true, nevertheless, that Rossellini was able to use real German prisoners of war in the film.) Another exaggeration is George Sadoul's statement, not supported by any elaboration or listing of sources, that the scenario for the film was "almost literally dictated" to Rossellini and Amidei by one of the heads of the Resistance. ( Histoire du cinéma mondial des origines à nos jours , 9th ed. [Paris: Flammarion, 1972], p. 329).
The story of how the film finally found its way to the United States, with such great success, is fascinating. It seems that on the floor above the makeshift studio of the Via degli Avignonesi was a bordello, heavily frequented during the hours of shooting, unfortunately, and especially popular with the newly arrived American troops. A continuous stream of lust-minded young men would stumble into the filming area, drawn by the bright lights, thinking that they had found what they had been looking for. Fellini tells a wonderful story about how a drunken American sergeant named Rod Geiger stumbled in the studio one evening while looking for a girl, fell flat on his face, and commenced bleeding profusely from the nose. When he had recovered sufficiently to ask what was going on, he insisted that he was a big American film producer and wanted to buy the film. In fact, he did precisely that, finally paying twenty thousand dollars for the rights. He took the few copies to the United States, sold the rights to a real distributor, and the film went on to enjoy an enormous success at the World Theater in Manhattan, where it ran uninterrupted for over a year. [BACK]
5. In later years Sergio Amidei, clearly the principle motivating force behind the initial screenplay, became somewhat bitter, as screenwriters are wont to do, because he was largely excluded from the encomia heaped upon the director. As he tells it—and independent evidence often supports him—many of the characters and the episodes of the film were taken directly from his own life. Much more politically committed than the rest of the production team, he had, in fact, once escaped the Germans by going over the rooftops of the surrounding apartment houses, just as Manfredi does in the beginning of the film. Cesar Negarville, an important Resistance leader on whom the character of Manfredi is said to have been principally based, actually had a room in Amidei's apartment, put there by Amidei's landlady, who appears in the opening shots of the film. Maria Michi, Amidei's girlfriend at the time, had also actually once called Amidei while a German raid was in progress, just as happens in the film. Amidei further maintained that the episode in which Pina is shot down by the Germans as she chases after her captured fiancé, Francesco, was taken from a real event that had occurred on the Piazza Adriana that he had learned about in Unità , the underground Communist newspaper. The actual iconography of Pina's moving, desperate gesture, though, interestingly enough, came from an altogether less elevated source. According to Amidei, Magnani was arguing furiously one day with her boyfriend of the moment: to save himself, he jumped on the back of a film production truck that was just then pulling away, and the company was treated to the sight of Magnani running after him, violently hurling the worst insults in his direction. It seemed such an effective piece of drama that Amidei wrote it into the script. (See Amidei's " Open City Revisited," New York Times [February 16, 1947, sec. 2, p. 5].) What Amidei neglects to mention is that, according to Patrizia Carrano, Magnani's biographer, he wanted to trip her with a wire to make the scene more convincing, but Rossellini refused. ( La Magnani: Il romanzo di una vita [Milan: Rizzoli, 1982], p. 98.)
Many of the film's details were suggested by the real life of Father Giuseppe Morosini. "Jane Scrivener" tells us, for example, that he was betrayed to the gestapo, who found arms and a transmitter he had collected for the men he was hiding. The pope tried to save him, to no avail, but he was allowed to say mass on the morning of his execution. Her account of his last moments is very close to what happens in the film:
Before being blindfolded he kissed his crucifix, blessed the platoon of soldiers who were to shoot him, and publicly forgave the man who had betrayed him. Possibly because the executioners were overcome by his quiet heroism, he was not killed by their volley, and fell to the ground, wounded but conscious. He begged for the Sacrament of Extreme Unction . . . , after which the commanding officer shot him at the base of the skull with a revolver ( Inside Rome With the Germans [New York: Macmillan, 1945], p. 152).
Even Don Pietro's last lines—"It's not difficult to die, it's difficult to live"—are, according to Giuseppe Ferrara, who quotes from Salvatore Morosini's book on his brother Don Morosini, the real priest's final words ( Il nuovo cinema italiano , p. 106. Ferrara also suggests that the Nazi Bergmann was a composite of Kappler, the head of the S.S. on the Via Tasso, and Dolman, the German commander of Rome during the occupation.) [BACK]
6. Faldini and Fofi, L'avventurosa storia , p. 95. Another aspect of the film's "conventionality" is that characters often seem to be filling preconceived roles derived from the stage and vaudeville. Thus Rossellini uses a kind of character shorthand to fix a "type," as in his treatment of Don Pietro. He is presented as a buffoon right from the beginning—when he is hit with the soccer ball—and the effective, if somewhat cute, piece of comic business with the statue of San Rocco and the naked Venus seems instantly to fix him for us as a whimsical, and in many ways frightfully innocent, man, enhancing the incongruity of the fact that he is about to enter a clandestine printing shop. All of this is well done; the only point to be made is that this kind of character typing (Manfredi as the heroic partisan, Pina as the poor but honest romana , Marina as the corrupt prostitute) so dear to the nineteenth-century novel, the popular stage, and Hollywood melodrama, is something that Rossellini will for the most part avoid in his later work. [BACK]
7. The War Trilogy of Roberto Rossellini (New York: Grossman, 1973), p. 126. (All further references to the script will be included in the body of the text.) [BACK]
8. Magnani's account of her feelings about this scene are revealing:
During the roundup, when I walked through the front door, suddenly I saw everything all over again, and I was taken back to the time when they took away the young men. Boys. Because these were real people standing against the walls. The Germans were real Germans from a P.O.W. camp. Suddenly, I wasn't me any more. I was the character. And Rossellini had prepared the street in an incredible way. Do you know the women were white when they heard the Nazis talking among themselves? This made me understand the anxiety I projected on the screen. Terrible. Who would have expected an emotion like that? That's how Rossellini worked. And, at least with me, let me say it again, the system worked (Faldini and Fofi, L'avventurosa storia , p. 95).
9. Leo Braudy, Focus on Shoot the Piano Player (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 4; Jean Desternes, Revue du cinéma , no. 3 (December 1946), p. 65. [BACK]
10. Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 227. Giuseppe Ferrara has somewhat impressionistically described another technical aspect of the film—its lighting—which, while certainly conventional, is nevertheless accomplished with consummate skill, especially given the home-movie myth that encumbers most discussion of this film. Though the lighting is described by Amidei as thoroughly unexciting, Ferrara notes the complex thematic ways in which Rossellini uses it. For example, much of the film takes place in cramped interiors, outer darkness, or deep shadows, since this is where, according to Ferrara, "the human struggle itself takes place." When we first see the "natural" figure of Pina early in the film, daylight enters the apartment to warm and highlight her features. The corrupt Marina, on the other hand, is seen only by means of harsh, bright, artificial lighting in one scene after another. In the gestapo headquarters of the Via Tasso, the light is dense and stagnant, symbolic of the sick and dying atmosphere it fills. At the film's most hopeless moment—not the final murders, of course, because they in their own way speak of transcendence, but, rather, in the cell where Manfredi, the priest, and the Austrian deserter are kept—we can barely make out the figures or even the walls in the oppressive darkness. (Ferrara, Il nuovo cinema italiano , p. 111.) [BACK]
11. Quoted in Lo splendore del vero: Quarant'anni di cinema di Roberto Rossellini, 1936-1976 , ed. Giuliana Callegari and Nuccio Lodato (Pavia: Amministrazione provinciale, 1977), p. 42. [BACK]
12. Armando Borrelli, Neorealismo e marxismo (Avellino: Edizioni di Cinemasud, 1966), pp. 81-84. [BACK]
13. Mario Cannella, "Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of Neo-Realism," Screen , 13, no. 4 (Winter 1973-74), 22-23. [BACK]
14. Mino Argentieri, "Storia e spiritualismo," 37. [BACK]
15. Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 49. Interestingly, the initial reaction of one of America's greatest film reviewers, James Agee, was surprisingly like that of Baldelli. Writing in the April 13, 1946, issue of the Nation , Agee said that, while he was not sure, he thought that the coalition between the Church and the party depicted in Open City was not to be believed and that the Italians were "being sold something of a bill of goods." His worry, perfectly in character for the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , was that the common people could very easily be sold out for the benefit of the two institutions, at the expense of their own freedom. [BACK]
16. Others have discussed the sexual subtext of this film from alternative points of view, but with unconvincing results. Thus, the historian Pierre Sorlin, for example, comparing Open City with Vergano's The Sun Rises Again , finds a dark allegory of sexual punishment at work in the two films. Noting that a woman is also killed in Vergano's film, he insists:
There is no narrative necessity for the two women to be shot. Look at them, lying on the ground: both are photographed from above, with the feet in foreground, the head in the background, the skirt tucked up, the thighs conspicuous. The shots were carefully arranged, and chance played no part in the exposure of two half-naked [sic!] women. In both films, Pina and Matelda were guilty of sexual transgression, Pina for being pregnant without being married, Matelda for having lovers. . . . The series of victims is well arranged, in ascending order: war-fighting-men have to die. Why is there a war? Because somewhere there is guilt. Offence: sex; punishment: the death of the "bad women."
(Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History [London: Oxford University Press, 1980], pp. 201-2; quoted in BFI Dossier Number 8: Roberto Rossellini , (London: BFI, 1981), p. 10.) The editors of the British Film Institute dossier further compound Sorlin's distortion in their simple-minded summary of the film from this point of view, when they insist, "In this set of equations underpinning the textual economy of Rome Open City , straight sex (heterosexuality) is punishable by death while homosexuality is associated with fascism. Under these circumstances, it appears almost logical that the only solution possible is catholicism and priesthood" (p. 10). Even were Sorlin's terms granted, of course, Pina is being punished for sex before marriage, thus the neat reductio ad absurdum equation the editors offer neglects the alternative of "wholesome" sexuality in marriage. [BACK]
17. Ben Lawton makes an interesting, if not altogether convincing, case in this direction, seeing the crippled boy leader of the band, Romoletto, as "little Rome," and thus a founder of a new Rome, like Romulus. Only this time, he is crippled, both emotionally and physically ("Italian Neorealism: A Mirror Construction of Reality," Film Criticism , 3, no. 2 [Winter 1979], 14). [BACK]
18. Carlo Lizzani, Film d'oggi (November 3, 1945). It is certainly true that Lizzani expressed reservations about what he regarded as the amateurishness of the scenes in the gestapo headquarters, but it is a serious distortion to try to make out his review as negative, as some have. [BACK]
19. Alberto Moravia, La nuova Europa (September 30, 1945), 8. [BACK]
20. Alessandro Blasetti, Cinema italiano oggi (Rome: Carlo Bestetti, 1950), p. 48. [BACK]
21. Mario Gromo, Film visti (Rome: Edizioni Bianco e Nero, 1957), p. 7. [BACK]
22. Desternes review, Revue du cinéma , 66. Henri Agel will later say of Open City that it is here, where reality shows itself bloody and torn, that "we discover the secret meaning of things." ( Le Cinéma a-t-il une âme? [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1952], p. 50.) [BACK]
23. Georges Sadoul, Les Lettres françaises (November 15, 1946). Making his own preference for realism very clear, he insists that he would give all of Cocteau's La Belle et la bête for the single shot of the floating dead partisan in the opening of the last episode of Paisan . [BACK]
24. John McCarten, New Yorker (March 2, 1946), 81. [BACK]
25. Life (March 4, 1946), 111. [BACK]
26. James Agee, Nation (March 23, 1946), 354. [BACK]
27. Jurij Lotman, The Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), p. 67. [BACK]
28. Lotman, p. 69. Georges Sadoul said something similar, using a different frame of reference, many years ago in connection with Paisan: "Rossellini's method excluded neither research nor elaboration. Paisan was the most expensive Italian film made in 1946. Its poverty was only apparent, and it would be ridiculous to explain the birth of neorealism by the hardships that reigned in the country at that time. The distrust of beautiful 'photography' was in fact a supreme refinement, the creation of a new style, soon to be imitated everywhere" ( Histoire du cinéma mondial , p. 330). [BACK]
29. Interview with Fereydoun Hoveyda and Jacques Rivette, Cahiers du cinéma , no. 94 (April 1959), 6. [BACK]
30. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), vol. 2, p. 27. [BACK]
31. Ibid., p. 100. [BACK]
32. Ibid. [BACK]
33. Ibid., p. 60. [BACK]
34. Quoted in Linda Nochlin, Realism (New York: Penguin, 1971), p. 14. This kind of essentialist language is not limited to phenomenologists or Hegelians, of course. Thus, Giuseppe Ferrara considers the Po sequence of Paisan the peak of neorealism because: "Flaherty, Murnau, and Renoir, even though they had understood man and nature, are here leapt over with a single jump, in a savage aggression on the object, a vital incision into things, detailed to the limits of the bearable, when every mythology is broken apart and reality reveals itself to our eyes, which then penetrate it to its roots" (Ferrara, Il nuovo cinema italiano , p. 138). [BACK]
35. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "What Is Phenomenology?" in European Literary Theory and Practice , ed. Vernon W. Gras (New York: Dell Publishing, 1973), p. 80. [BACK]
36. Harold Brown, Perception, Theory, and Commitment (Chicago: Precedent Publishers, 1977), pp. 81-82. [BACK]
37. Quoted in Realism and the Cinema , ed. Christopher Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 177. [BACK]
38. Lotman, p. 65. [BACK]
39. Bazin, What Is Cinema? , vol. 2, p. 97. [BACK]
40. Ibid., p. 101. [BACK]
41. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 203. [BACK]
42. Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 2, p. 27. [BACK]
43. The overwhelming impression of reality in the film was such that Maria Michi reported being threatened with a knife because she collaborated with the Germans. In fact, one reads reports rather often of the same sort of basic confusion of realism and reality occurring in the minds of present-day, supposedly visually sophisticated, television viewers. One actress has even told the story of how she was watching herself on television one night. Her character was about to get out of the car, and an aggressor was waiting for her. Just at that moment the telephone rang; it was the actress's cousin, calling to warn her not to get out of the car. [BACK]
44. Pio Baldelli commits himself so thoroughly to a realist Rossellini that he complains peevishly about "unrealistic" elements that have been noticed, as far as I can determine, by no one else. Thus, he objects to the fact that the children could not realistically have been present at the priest's execution, that the parents surely would not have let them out, that the soldiers surely would have seen the children or heard them whistling, and so on. (Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 38.) [BACK]