Rome, open city
Rome, open city (
Roma, città aperta) is a
1945 Italian film, directed by
Roberto Rossellini and starring
Aldo Fabrizi,
Anna Magnani. The film is set in
Rome during the
Nazi occupation in the 1944.
This film has not been rated by the
MPAA. As it has violence but no graphic sex, it has been rated K-16 in Finland, and acceptable for 15-year-olds and older in England and Sweden.
As Nazi soldiers march around town, Giorgio Manfredi eludes them by jumping around roofs.
A priest, Don Pietro Pellegrini, helps the resistance transmit messages and money. Don Pietro is scheduled to officiate Pina's wedding. Pina is not very religious, but would rather be married by a nationalist priest. Her son, Marcello, and his friends have a role in the resistance. Pina's sister befriends Marina, who betrays the resistance in exchange for drugs, fur coats and other creature comforts. The Gestapo commander in the city, with the help of the Italian police commissioner, captures Giorgio and the priest, and interrogates both violently. Don Pietro is executed.
In August of 1944, just two months after the Allies had forced the Germans to evacuate Rome, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Sergio Amidei began working on the script for the film. The devastation that was the result of the war surrounded them as they wrote the script.
Shooting for the film began in January of 1945. The only two professional actors in the cast were Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani.
Four interior sets were constructed for the most important locations of the film.
Rossellini relied on traditional devices of melodrama, such as identification of the film's central characters and a clear distinction between good and evil characters.
Legend has it that the actual film stock was put together out of many different disparate bits, giving the film its iconic documentary or newsreel style. But when the Cineteca Nazionale restored the print in 1995, "the original negative consisted of just three different types of film: Ferrania C6 for all the outdoor scenes and the more sensitive Agfa Super Pan and Agfa Ultra Rapid for the interiors." The previously inexplicable changes in image brightness and consistency are now blamed on "poor processing (variable development times, insufficient agitation in the developing bath and insufficient fixing)" (Forgacs, 26).
The film opened in Italy in 1945, with the war damage to Rome not yet repaired. The United States premiere followed on February 1946. The American release was censored, resulting in a duration reduced by about a quarter hour. In Argentina, the movie was inexplicably withdrawn in 1947 following an anonymous government order.
*
Palme d'Or al
Cannes Film Festival 1946 (ex-aequo con altri sei film)
*
Nastro d'Argento 1946: "Best Director" (
ex-aequo con
Alessandro Blasetti e
Vittorio De Sica), "Best Scenery", "Best Actress" (ad
Anna Magnani)
*
New York Film Critics 1946: "Best Foreign Film"
*
National Board of Review 1946: "Best Actress" (a
Anna Magnani)
Since early on, this film has been considered a quintessential example of
neorealism in film, so much so that together with
Paisà and
Germania anno zero it is called Rossellini's "Neorealist Trilogy." Robert Burgoyne called it "the perfect exemplar of this mode of cinematic creation [neorealism] whose established critical definition was given by
André Bazin."
*
Cinema of Italy* Robert Burgoyne, "The Imaginary And The Neo-Real," in
Enclitic, 3:1 (Spring, 1979) Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press
* Forgacs, David.
Rome Open City. London: BFI, 2000.
* Virginia Lee Warren, "Delayed Censorship," in the
New York Times, December 7, 1947
*
*
Open City at the
Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films list
*
Roma città aperta, un manifesto del neorealismo
