The Christlike Communist Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero)being tortured by the Nazis in Open City .
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The plot that the team of screenwriters came up with is relatively simple in outline, but at the same time delicately interwoven with many diverse strands. Giorgio Manfredi (Pagliero), one of the heads of the Italian Resistance, enlists the aid of the anti-Fascist priest Don Pietro (Fabrizi) and a partisan printer named Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet) in keeping him hidden from the Germans. The next morning, Francesco's wedding day, he is captured by the Nazis and his pregnant fiancée, Pina (Magnani), is shot down by the Germans when she attempts to interfere. Manfredi is betrayed by his girlfriend Marina (Michi), a dancer and prostitute who has been corrupted by drugs by the Nazi lesbian, Ingrid, and he, Don Pietro, and an Australian deserter the priest has been sheltering, are arrested. The deserter hangs himself, and when Manfredi refuses to talk, he is tortured to death in the presence of Don Pietro; the next morning the priest himself is executed while the young boys of his parish, who have been waging their own war against the Germans, look on.[5] Similarly, the script also manages to stay on the easy level of heroism and cowardice, and these simple notions, the staple of Hollwood Westerns, are never for a moment seriously interrogated. Thus, near the end of the film, when Manfredi the partisan, Don Pietro the priest, and the Austrian deserter find themselves in the same cell, the deserter acts cowardly, later even killing himself, and his cowardice is seen as a moral failure on his part. Manfredi claims that "we're not heroes," but every other element of this film conspires to contradict his assertion. (Though Rossellini does perhaps display a bit of self-awareness when he has the Nazi Bergmann say a bit later, "You Italians, whatever party you belong to, are all addicted to rhetoric."[7] But however we might want to chastise Rossellini for his embrace of conventional narrative in this film—if we do—it is clear that he does it very well indeed. There is no slack, no narrative fat. All of the characters are tightly intertwined for maximum efficiency, and the result is a complex and thickly populated fresco. Exposition is accomplished instantly, in bold, swift strokes, and we are plunged into the narrative at a gallop from the first minute of the film. As many critics have noticed, comic and tragic moods alternate throughout the film in an invigorating and emotionally involving way, each providing a counterpoint to the other. Individual scenes are also exquisitely accomplished. Thus,
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the sequence in which Pina is shot down as she runs after the truck carrying her fiancé Francesco is one of the most brilliantly affecting moments in all film. Pushed up against the wall with the other women, she seems out of harm's way, so her suicidal outburst is even more shocking when it comes. On one hand, the power of this moment seems to come from the placement of the camera inside the truck as it moves away. Pina runs after it, and when she is cut down, her movement forward in tandem with the camera's movement forward is abruptly halted and the distance between the camera in the truck and her dead body, lying in the middle of the street in a lump, multiplies at a dizzying rate. But the effect of this sequence is also achieved by an awareness of dramatic balance, for it immediately follows one of the most humorous moments in the film, mentioned earlier by Amidei, when the priest has to knock the grandfather over the head with a frying pan in order to keep him from attracting the attention of the Fascists. We instantly move, then, to Pina's death sequence, all of which lasts no more than a few seconds, and the emotional and dramatic buildup of which is astounding to watch
.[8] Leo Braudy, in the introduction to his anthology Focus on Shoot the Piano Player , insightfully links this purposeful alternation of tone with later examples in Truffaut's film and Joseph Heller's tragicomic novel Catch 22 . An early French reviewer, Jean Desternes, likened the use of comic counterpoint to enhance the film's horror to earlier uses in Shakespeare
.[9]NAZI CORRUPTION IN ITS PHLOSOPHY
Nor is the teacher the only Nazi influence on Edmund, for these pernicious ideas have penetrated the entire society. Thus, the landlord Rademaker early in the film calls Edmund's father a "useless old man" and an "old mummy," who he threatens to "put . . . away if he doesn't kick the bucket soon" (pp. 361, 360). Later he asks Edmund "When's [your father] going to drop dead and give us a little peace?" (p. 415).
Similarly Edmund's cowardly brother Karlheinz keeps insisting that life is hopeless and that he should commit suicide. Nazi philosophy has also been responsible for the corruption of the natural bonds found within the family as we learn in a passing comment of Enning's: "Remember, Edmund, your father once handed in a forged certificate so you wouldn't have to join the Hitler Jugend, but you told me right away it was forged, because you knew what your duty was. (He touches Edmund's cheek .) And I ought to have reported him to the Party . . . and the reason I didn't was because I'm fond of you" (p. 386).
This contrast between natural affection and artificial Nazi values, already supercharged in the context of sexual perversion, is reinforced gesturally when Edmund visits his father in the hospital after seeing Enning. There, the father caresses Edmund's arms in the same way that Enning has, and kisses him, as if to stress that the greatest evil is the warping of that which is most natural and innocent. We are also meant to see Edmund's situation universalized. Thus, at one point while they are waiting in line, one woman tells another of a boy who is "only ten, and he makes more money on the black market than the whole family put together" (p. 377).In the deprivation caused by the war, Rossellini implies, humankind's natural inclination toward coralità is threatened. When the situation is further complicated by the infection of nazism, it becomes even less likely, and in this
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[Full Size] see above picture
Nazism as corruption, again: Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) watches as his father(Ernst Pittschau) drinks the poisoned milk he has preparedfor him in Germany, Year Zero (1947).
film any possibility of group solidarity is utterly destroyed. Eva at one point tries to convince her depressed brother Karlheinz to have hope—as we have seen, a key commodity for Rossellini—but later, and more convincingly, she asserts, "I don't believe in being helped by other people. Everybody has to help themselves these days" (p. 370). Edmund is continually rebuffed, for no apparent reason, by the other children he comes in contact with, and when he turns for community to a roving band of young thieves, their leader tricks him by selling him a fake bar of soap made from a block of wood. What surfaces is an existentialist vision of individual alienation, an emphasis Rossellini will maintain through the desolate period of the Bergman films, with the exception of the luminous coralità of the microcosmic society of Francesco . COLLABORATORS HAVE OUR SYMPATHY
The Nazis' obvious hatred of the Italians is itself thematized, and conveniently serves as one more example of Nazi evil. The occupation of Rome by the Germans has given Rossellini, the quintessential outraged Roman, a clear-cut, one-to-one replacement for the Communist villains of L'uomo dalla croce , and Italian guilt never has to be addressed. At the end of Open City , when Don Pietro is to be executed, the Italian firing squad, respecting the cloth—unlike the barbarian Nazis—wavers and ends up shooting harmlessly into the ground. By a curious reversal, cowardice and bumbling inefficiency become moral values, and it is the Nazi officer who finally has to kill the priest. Throughout the film the Italian collaborators, portrayed as having managed to retain their deepest human values in spite of everything, themselves come to be seen as much the Nazis' victims as any other group, and therefore have our sympathy. COMMUNISTS UNITED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Clearly, the most important—and most complicated—theme of Open City concerns the nature of the partnership formed (if not in historical actuality, at least in Rossellini's mind) to combat Nazi corruption, that between the communists and the Catholic church. This was no mean trick for Rossellini, considering that his previous picture had posed them as natural, bitter enemies. But he does manage, in a remarkable balancing act, to portray them both favorably, primarily because of the handy presence of a common enemy whose horribleness everyone could agree on. For one thing, the director is acknowledging the historical fact that no matter what one personally felt concerning its politics, in effect, the Communist party was the Resistance. The flavor of Rossellini's accommodation can be gathered in the initial meeting between atheist Manfredi and believer Pina:
MANFREDI: So you're having a church wedding. . . .
PINA: Yes. Actually, Francesco didn't want to, but I told him: better for Don Pietro to marry us, at least he's on the right side, rather than go to City Hall and be married by a Fascist. Don't you think so?
MANFREDI: In a way, you're right.
PINA: Yes; the truth is that I . . . really believe in God (p. 32).
NEW RATIONALE FOR ACCEPTING THE COMMUNISTS
Bergmann's obsessive questioning of the priest at the end of the film provides the chance to offer a new rationale for accepting the Communists. Bergmann shouts that Manfredi is "a subversive, an atheist, an enemy of yours!" and Don Pietro calmly, if rather vaguely, replies: "I am a Catholic priest and I believe that a man who fights for justice and liberty walks in the pathways of the Lord—and the pathways of the Lord are infinite" (p. 130). Hardly a ringing endorsement, as not a few Marxist critics have pointed out, but in terms of the emotion projected at that moment on the screen, certainly convincing.
CATHOLIC/ CHRISTIAN TERMS STANDARDS OF THE FILM
Nevertheless, while the Catholic and Communist are, ostensibly, on the same footing, at least in terms of their moral rectitude, the entire film is seen in Catholic, or Christian, terms.
Don Pietro is the moral lens through which we are meant to regard the various forms of iniquity on display. Manfredi, in other words, is not really given any thematically important dialogue, and the heavily dramatic form of the story insists that his encounter with the Nazi, Bergmann, take place not on the level of ideas, but rather on the level of action-film machismo—not is he right, but can he withstand torture? The only character who does get to express the presumably Communist version of things is Francesco, in his wistful and captivating talk about the future as he sits with Pina on the
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stairs in front of his apartment. Here again, however, his desire for freedom and hope in the future are expressed in lovely, but vague and utterly unrealizable terms.NAZI OCCUPATION SEEN IN CHRISTIAN AHISTORICAL TERMSEarly Marxist views, like that of the important film theoretician Umberto Barbaro, held that the film had "such a wise and balanced political evaluation that it undoubtedly merits the applause of all honest men."[
11] Most early critics, both leftists and nonleftists, agreed primarily in seeing the film as above all "historical" in a way that no other Italian film had ever been. But more recent Marxist critics like Pio Baldelli have complained, with some justice, that Rossellini's film actually forgets history. For one thing, the blame for Nazi occupation is seen clearly in Christian—that is, ahistorical—terms. This is evident in the scene between Pina and Don Pietro, when, overloaded by misery, she plaintively asks him,
"Doesn't Christ see us?" The priest replies:
A lot of people ask me that, Pina. . . . Doesn't Christ see us? But are we sure we didn't deserve this plague? Are we sure we've always lived according to the Lord's laws? And nobody thinks of changing their lives, of examining their lives. Then, when the piper has to be paid . . . everybody despairs, everybody asks: Doesn't the Lord see us? Doesn't the Lord pity us? . . . Yes, the Lord will take pity on us. But we have so much to be forgiven, and so we must pray, and forgive much (p. 53).
Similarly, Armando Borrelli complains that in this film Rossellini is only interested in stressing the tragic destiny of his characters, and makes no attempt to see the Resistance as a critique of the past. Nor do we ever learn what they are fighting for , beyond getting rid of the Nazis.[
12]
Yet, as Mario Cannella has pointed out in an important essay translated some years ago in Screen , it is now clear that the Italian Communist party had itself given up all class analysis during this period in favor of a Stalin-inspired anti-fascist "unity" that was thoroughly uncritical and un-Marxist. Interest, in other words, had shifted imperceptibly from protecting the workers to protecting the "fatherland," and any party member who disagreed was disciplined. In Cannella's view, it was this that led to the reestablishment of bourgeois democracy and the defeat of the party.[13] Thus it seems beside the point to blame Rossellini for not portraying the revolutionary potential of the Resistance.
But the Marxists are right when they say that despite appearances, Rossellini is not really interested in history in Open City . As the non-Marxist Mino Argentieri has pointed out, the "historic conjunction" of the Church and the Communist party leads, in Rossellini, to an "ahistorical meaning, a spiritual propensity, the nth degree of the tragedy of existence and life together."[14] Rossellini is not, strictly speaking, historical precisely because he is looking for what, in human beings, transcends history.
CORALITAThe positive side of the film's depiction of the masses concerns Rossellini's much-praised (by Marxist and non-Marxist alike) sense of coralità , that concern for the group above the individual, which we saw in operation in the earlier films. Thus, the warm-hearted working-class jokes and the good-natured kidding begin almost immediately. Pina gives some of the bread she has obtained by staging a riot on the baker's to the policeman whose family is just as hungry as everyone else's. A delightful Renoirean forgiveness pervades the film; human error and petty wrongdoing, seen in the context of the massive brutality of the Nazis, is treated indulgently and largely regarded as an unavoidable product of the times. Thus, the sexton crosses himself before he, too, plunges into the crowd assaulting the bakery, and the embarrassing fact of Pina's prewedding pregnancy is tacitly forgiven by all, including the priest. Again, however, despite Marxist approval, it is clear that this coralità is not motivated in Rossellini's mind by any class solidarity; instead, he sees it in terms of Christian love for one's neighbor.Most conflicting interpretations of the film's basic theme center visually around its final images. As Don Pietro is about to be executed, he hears the young boys whistling as a signal of their support. He is shot, and the last image of the film shows the boys, weary, but supporting each other, trudging down a hill back toward the center of town. The Roman skyline, dominated by the dome of Saint Peter's, forms the background of the shot as the film ends. The sequence is clearly symbolic, but of what? Some have chosen to emphasize the dome, insisting that only in the Church is there hope for the future of Italy. But the dome is seen firmly in its context of the entire city of Rome, just as the Church is an important part of Italian society, but hardly everything. Some have
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chosen to see the ending as utterly pessimistic, full of death and destruction,[17] while others have emphasized the fact that the boys, symbols of Italy's future even though crippled and depressed, are at least supporting one another down the hill.ROME THWE CHIEF PROTAGONISTIn any case, the film appropriately ends with this evocative long shot of Rome, for in many ways, Rome is its chief protagonist, standing synecdochically for the rest of Italy. It is the first word of the film's Italian title, and is before us at all times throughout the film, either directly, as visual background, or indirectly suggested through its particular social relations reenacted in the interiors.
The film opens, as well, with vibrant location shots that set us firmly in the midst of the ancient city, and we recognize the antlike Germans we see running about from our bird's-eye perspective as the interlopers they are. We first meet the German officer
Bergmann after the camera pulls back from a map of Rome in his office, suggesting that his contact with the city, and by extension that of the other Germans as well, can only be of an abstract, second-order level.
The point is further underlined when we learn that all of Bergmann's dealings with the city are through photographs of its inhabitants. When the Italian police commissioner asks how Manfredi was tracked down, Bergmann replies: "I met him right here, on this desk. Every afternoon I take a long walk through the streets of Rome, but without stepping out of my office" (p. 13).
Again, the Germans are associated with all that is artificial, second-hand, cut off from the organic life of the people. Rome is eternal, the Nazis are temporary.
The
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condemnation of Open City was far from universal, however. For example, Carlo Lizzani, writing in Film d'oggi in November 1945, shortly after the film's first appearance, exclaimed in the opening line of his review:
"Finally I've seen an Italian film! By this I mean a film which tells a story about us, about the experiences of our country, about facts that concern us." Lizzani also grasped the immense historical importance of the film as well:
An Italian director can offer our cinema those gifts of communication and
a wide and popular persuasiveness which it has been lacking up to this time, even in the works of the best directors, and which alone can guarantee it a national and especially international success. The people today don't want an empty and sloppy cinema,
but neither do they want a cinema for aesthetes. Rossellini's essential merit is to have found the rhythm and the movement best suited to make accessible to the vast public the new contents of which the film is messenger, to relate them to the most diverse sensibilities. . . . I would say that this film could be just the thing to start off our new rebirth.[
18]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
ALBERTO MORAVIA THE NOVELIST
The novelist Alberto Moravia, writing his film column in the September 30, 1945, issue of the anti-Fascist journal La nuova Europa , praised the film's intense realism.[
19] Alessandro Blasetti, by that time a kind of elder statesman of Italian cinema and one of its most respected practitioners, says that after the first press screening of Open City , "I felt the need to go meet Rossellini who was waiting outside with 'indifferent' trepidation and I hugged him for all of us; the gesture was really emotional and grateful."[
20] Rossellini later complained that the film was barely noticed when it came out, but Mario Gromo, the veteran reviewer for the powerful Turin newspaper La Stampa , wrote of it very favorably and suggested later that it was little mentioned (and thus little seen) because of a simple lack of space in the newspapers, pointing out that in 1945, newspapers came out in only two pages. In the introduction to his collected reviews written some years later, Gromo remembers with frustration "the breath I had to spend one evening in November 1945 to be able to devote thirty-six lines to Open City instead of just twenty."[
21]
JAMES AGEE AND TRHE REALISM OF THE FILM
The most dramatic American reaction to the film was surely that of James Agee, at that time the film critic for the Nation . His March 23, 1946, review opened with this remarkable statement: "Recently I saw a moving picture so much worth talking about that I am still unable to review it. . . . I will probably be unable to report on the film in detail for the next three or four weeks."[
26] When Agee did finally feel up to writing about the film for the April 13 issue, he praised its immediacy and its avoidance of the phony populist sentimentality of Works Progress Administration murals. But what struck Agee above all, and critics of all nationalities ever since, was the film's startling realism.
This is a notoriously difficult concept to deal with, of course, but our thinking about Rossellini, especially during this period, is so tied up with it that we must now consider it more abstractly and in some depth.ACTUAL EXTERIORS ANTI HOLLYWOOD
Because most of the filming was done in the midst of actual exteriors, and not those recreated in a studio or on the back lot, the film quite naturally has a look that makes it utterly different from the conventional film of the time; in this sense, then, "realistic" means "different from Hollywood." The anti-Hollywood bias is also evident in the choice of individual actors for their similarity to the mix of people one finds on the street, rather than for their good looks. Thus, makeup, favorable lighting and soft focus are eschewed in favor of something closer to the way we encounter people in real life. But something happens to "real life" when it is translated to the screen, and what we call realism actually consists of a set of expectations that is related to reality, of course, but in conventional rather than natural ways. Thus, for example, it would obviously be more "real," more like real life, for people being photographed to look at the camera, but then, paradoxically, the film would no longer seem realistic to us at all.
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). "Things are there. Why manipulate them
?"[29] The underlying assumption, of course, is that when these "things" have been transferred to the screen, they will somehow still be "there." At one point, Bazin even makes the translation process almost quantifiable: "
We shall call realist any system of expression, any narrative procedure which tends to make more reality appear on the screen."[30] His most gnomic statement specifically concerning Rossellini is that he "directs facts"[31] —not, of course, cinematic facts, but the facts that are seen as inhering in external reality (and available to us), rather than as constituted in a system of signification.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.AETHETIC ILLUSION
FILTERING PROCESS MORE REAL MIMETIC THEORY OF ART
Bazin was, of course, always aware that screen reality was only an
"aesthetic illusion." What else could it be? Furthermore, the most epistemologically sophisticated of these directors and critics knew and freely admitted that this raw reality must be "filtered" through the consciousness of the director, because otherwise what one ended up with was an arbitrary surface depiction that barely pierced the skin of the real. But the purpose and result of this authorial intervention, this mediation, in effect, was always to get to a cinematic representation of reality that was somehow more "real" than reality itself.
The appeal is made to a truth that exists beyond, though not so far beyond as to be uncapturable, of course. Associated with this cinematic pursuit of truth is a concomitant theory of essences, of a "truer," "higher" reality, that has always been linked with the notion of aesthetic realism since the advent of the mimetic theory of art35. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "What Is Phenomenology?" in European Literary Theory and Practice , ed. Vernon W. Gras (New York: Dell Publishing, 1973), p. 80.Reality, in other words, is not constituted by an uncomplicated "out there" to which we can have direct, unmediated access.
We cannot help but process everything through our own particular culture, which exists beyond our individual control and not only filters what we experience, but actually produces it. Harold Brown, a philosopher of science, has argued in his book Perception, Theory, and Commitment that, far from perception providing us with pure facts, "the knowledge, beliefs and theories we already hold play a fundamental role in determining what we perceive." In his felicitous, and disarmingly simple phrase, we actually "perceive meanings."[
36]
We continuously make representations to ourselves, mostly as metaphors, as Nietzsche saw, that mediate reality for us.
Jean-Paul Fargier has suggested some of the ideological implications of this fact:
People used to say about statues and portraits, "He looks as though he might open his mouth any minute and say something." or "He looks as though he might burst into movement." But the "as though" gives the game away; despite the appearance, something was lacking , and everybody knew it. Whereas in the cinema, there is no "as though." People say "The leaves are moving." But there are no leaves. The first thing people do is deny the existence of the screen: it opens like a window , it is "transparent." This illusion is the very substance of the specific ideology secreted by the cinema.[37] 37. Quoted in Realism and the Cinema , ed. Christopher Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 177
Seeing a film, then, presupposes first an ongoing, unconscious daily operation that consists of systematizing an inchoate reality and "reading" it in terms of the codes that we both put and find there. This already represented reality is then represented again in film by means of a certain labor on the part of the filmmaker. It does not simply happen "naturally." Much avant-garde cinema in fact deliberately foregrounds the notion of production, thus helping us to see that the reality depicted, as well as the film, is a made, constructed, and thus historical reality
This very sense of wholeness I have been outlining above, which seems to be produced by most films, is seen by Bazin as the distinguishing characteristic of neorealism. In his remarkable essay entitled "In Defense of Rossellini," he approvingly maintains that neorealism's main feature is "its claim that there is a certain 'wholeness' to reality. . . . To put it still another way, neorealism by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one."[39] Bazin praises Rossellini's Europa '51 because in it he "strips the appearances of all that is not essential, in order to get at the totality in its simplicity."[40]
39. Bazin, What Is Cinema? , vol. 2, p. 97.
40. Ibid., p. 101.
One immediate effect of this privileging of the essence of reality over mere appearance and the accompanying insistence on film's ability to re-present this essence on the screen is to place the practice of neorealist filmmaking firmly within the Western metaphysical tradition of presence , most recently and powerfully critiqued by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
For Bazin and the other phenomenological critics, the project is at base a religious one, and the finding of fullness in a cinema that embodies the fullness of reality itself is a way to find (or to constitute) what Derrida has called the transcendental signified, or, in a more familiar formulation, God.
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