22— Era Notte a Roma (1960)
1. Sergio Amidei, the principal screenwriter, has said that he first got the idea for the film as an answer to the insults of General Montgomery, who had claimed that most Italians turned in escaped Allied prisoners rather than run the risk of hiding them. (Quoted in Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 154.) [BACK]
2. "Jane Scrivener," Inside Rome With the Germans , p. 85. [BACK]
3. The Russian is a new character in Rossellini's gallery, or almost new for, in fact, we saw Russian in L'uomo dalla croce (1943). In the earlier film, the Russian is a cynical ideologue, a senza Dio (godless one) who Rossellini portrays as negatively as the corrupt Nazis of Open City . After this film, the Russian simply disappears for seventeen years, to be reborn as the amiable, warm sergeant played by Serge Bondarchuk, the Soviet director. (According to Renzo Renzi, he was the first Russian since World War II to participate in a film made in the West.) As everyone at the time and since has recognized, the sergeant is a clear nod by Rossellini toward hopes for the continuance of détente after so many years of cold war. (In fact, Rossellini and Giovanni Ralli were awarded prizes at the Czech film festival in Karlovy Vary that same year for their work on the film.) It is precisely on these grounds that leftist critics such as Adelio Ferrero have attacked the film as "abstractly pacifist and basically mystifying," and thus a stupid attempt to inject sixties ideas about détente back into the Resistance period (Adelio Ferrero and Guido Oldrini, Da Roma città aperta alla ragazza di Bube [Milan: Edizioni di "Cinema Nuovo," 1965], p. 68). [BACK]
4. This voice-over does not appear in the screenplay published in the "Dal soggetto al film" series ( Era notte a Roma di Roberto Rossellini , ed. Renzo Renzi [Bologna: Capelli, 1960]), but was present in versions of the film that I saw both in the United States and in Europe. In the four versions of the film I have seen, each had different scenes missing. The published screenplay has both gaps and additional scenes that I have seen in none of the film versions. The time usually given in Italian sources is 120 minutes; Guarner gives 120 minutes in his filmography, but in his text says it lasts 145 minutes. The versions I have seen have run between 120 and 140 minutes. In this situation, the fixing of a definitive version is obviously impossible.
In this connection, it should be pointed out—and marveled at—how much English (and Russian) is left in the version of this film shown in Italy. Since subtitles are quite rare in that country, this means, as we saw earlier with Paisan , that contemporary Italians must fight the barriers of language as valiantly as the film's characters. Aprà and Berengo-Gardin report in their "Documentazione" that the Italian version of the film has more Italian in it, and while this seems correct, many moments important in terms of both dramatic emotion and narrative understanding pass completely in English. [BACK]
5. New York Times , December 19, 1959. The idea of the film as the Resistance and Rome as seen from the point of view of foreigners is often stressed in interviews given by various people connected with the film. Brunello Rondi says that they had initially considered calling the film "The Anniversary," since, as originally planned, it was a return fifteen years later for "the Englishman who tells the story in the first person." According to Rondi, the whole film was to be understood as told by Pemberton, but Rossellini decided to remove the narrated beginning. In the finished film some narration remains, but the identity of the voice is confusing. Though the voice never identifies itself as one of the protagonists, Rondi clearly suggests that it is Pemberton's voice ( Era notte a Roma , ed. Renzi, pp. 68-71). Similarly, Jean-André Fieschi automatically assumes that the voice is Pemberton's ("Dov'è Rossellini?" Cahiers du cinéma , no. 131 [May 1962], 21). The problem is that the voice is clearly American , a fact that nonnative speakers might miss, but which can probably be ascribed to simple carelessness on Rossellini's part.
In any case, in this film the shift to a subjectively based depiction of reality is problematic and only partial, refused even the ground of its own doubt, for during the footage of the Anzio landing, another voice "objectively" narrates the events, speaking perhaps as the "voice of history." The point seems to be that the largest outlines of the great movements of human beings can perhaps be objectively stated, but any closer examination, if it is to be carried out with sincerity, inevitably entails a subjective relativization of these events. [BACK]
6. When asked about this character in 1970, Rossellini told his interviewers, "This was someone I knew in real life. I had to hide from him for months. He was crippled, and that gave me some insight into his psychology, which gave rise to the character in the film" ("A Panorama of History," 97). Rossellini's easy conflation of physical, psychological, and moral deformities leads one to think that these bits of stylized characterization were based more on prejudice and sloppy thinking than on aesthetic grounds. [BACK]
7. In the Spanish interview, Rossellini describes his increasing use of the zoom as a reaction to the excessive motion of hand-held cameras. "My system has two interlocking motors, and one of them acts as a counterweight to stop the lens oscillating as it moves, so that you don't get a zoom effect. This gives me great mobility—for example, I can zoom from an angle of 25 degrees to one of 150 degrees, and this opens up enormous possibilities." He also speaks of how well the set must be organized in advance in order to take advantage of the zoom as it follows the characters in all of their movements. "I was tending to do this even before: in Europa '51 there were many very difficult moving sequences, which had to be shot with the camera on a dolly following the actors around the whole time. In Hitchcock's films the moving shots are very important and he has to have special sets built that the actors can appear and disappear in, which is extremely complicated. But the travelling lens simplifies all this enormously" ("A Panorama of History," pp. 103-4). [BACK]
8. This may be because Rossellini did not yet feel at ease with the zoom, nor had he yet worked out the proper relation between the zoom and the cut, and was thus falling back on the most conventional editing patterns he knew. John Belton, in an excellent article on the dynamics of the zoom, entitled "The Bionic Eye: Zoom Aesthetics" ( Cinéaste , 11, no. 1, 20-27) refers to an article by Joseph V. Mascelli published in 1957 in American Cinematographer , in which Mascelli describes how to disguise the zoom as a tracking shot by using a lot of doorways for the lens to "move" past. Given the plethora of doorways in Era notte a Roma , Rossellini may also, at this point at least, have been trying to disguise his new technique. [BACK]
9. Era notte a Roma , ed. Renzi, pp. 39-40. [BACK]