Open city italian film. Roma, città aperta [Open City] (1945) 2019-01-07
Open city italian film Rating:
5,9/10
1112
reviews
Rome, Open City Blu
The Italian cinema became a desert. Marcello Pagliero is an outspoken communist who runs afoul of the Nazis. It brought together some of the most important talents in Italian film culture including future film director Federico Fellini, who contributed to the screenplay; director Roberto Rossellini; and Anna Magnani, an actress who rose to international prominence playing the flawed but soulful Pina, who embarks on a new life with her fiance beneath the looming specter of Nazi forces occupying Rome. In order to restore the nationalism for his audience, Rossellini reconciled the characters' differences through their common motivation for better lives. That profound development of characters, though may seem too harsh for Germans, occurs to be especially thought provoking and psychological. It offers a template for a postwar renewal of Italy, as well as Italian cinema.
We see this especially in the priest, Don Pietro Aldo Fabrizi , a kind man, wedded to a faith which obviously based on a true Christian humility. It also restored a vital industry to Italy, and presaged many great films that followed it. In retrospect, Rome Open City was a sort of transitional film, combining elements of what would be called Italian neorealism with elements of traditional studio melodrama, but it was new enough to put neorealism on the map. She is also an old friend of Marina, a girlfriend of Giorgio's who has been looking for him, but with whom he is now splitting up. Her symbolic role of Pina representing the despair of the nation is one of the greatest masterpieces one can encounter in the history of cinema. If action is your genre, stay away, but if you can handle a great story well told find a copy of this film.
Once again, there are different stories. The apps are synchronized with your account at Blu-ray. However, during the film's first half, I didn't find this approach entirely successful. Understandably, they have to be cautious but I don't believe I actually saw them 'resisting' anything except via words. It produces a new world in which the main elements have not so many narrative functions as they have their own aesthetic value, related with the eye that is watching them and not with the action they are coming from. Apart from principles of Neo realism,Romma Citta Aperta will be remembered as a visual document proclaiming uselessness of war.
On the one hand there are brave ordinary Italian people fighting against evil Nazi Germany with all their might,on the other hand there are coward Italians shamelessly collaborating with enemies of the nation to humiliate their own innocent brethren. We watch, horrified, as Pina runs after the truck where Francesco is being hauled to prison for a fate that seemed clear to Pina. Rather than live in the poverty in which she was born, she betrays her former lover in exchange for drugs, fur coats, and other creature comforts including a hinted-at relationship with a woman who is completely unscrupulous and cooperates with the Germans by identifying and corrupting Italian women to become traitors. Francesco makes it back into Rome and reconnects with Giorgio. Rather than live in the poverty in which she was born, she betrays her former lover in exchange for drugs, fur coats, and other creature comforts including a hinted-at relationship with a woman who is completely unscrupulous and cooperates with the Germans by identifying and corrupting Italian women to become traitors. Using information pried from Marina, the Gestapo and Italian police capture Giorgio and the priest, along with an Austrian defector, on their way to the monastery.
It was shot almost immediately after the city was liberated from the Germans while the Germans still occupied the streets. There is a clear linear narrative, but it was just a little slow in the first half. And it was the beginning of a new career for Magnani, promoted with this film to the status of icon in the new Italy: a real face, a real woman, a new kind of actress, who would go on to work with Visconti, Renoir, Cukor, Monicelli, Lumet, Pasolini, Fellini. It is in effect, the film that inspired the French New Wave. Always with a passion for the truth. The Gestapo Chief and the collaborator decide that she is now useless to them and arrest her, taking away the fur coat they had given her as a bribe. Another flaw is the poor quality of lighting in the film.
As a counter to the popular mainstream films, some critics felt that Italian cinema should turn to the writers from the turn of the 20th century. As one of the first examples of Italian neo-realism, Open City is a perfect synergy of subject matter and aesthetic and technical choices. The funding from the elderly Roman lady was never enough and the film was crudely shot due to circumstances, and not for stylistic reasons. The experience of defeat and occupation with the daily humiliations, was happily not one that the Americans or British had to undergo. Manfredi, Francesco, Pina played by the magnificent Anna Magnani , and the children all seem to have drunk of the same deep and clear well of faith.
The connection of art expression to reality is not a static condition. He and his friends have a small role in the Resistance planting bombs. Its justly celebrated documentary aesthetic and naturalistic performances, aided by the filmmakers' budgetary restrictions and the ruinous state of the postwar Italian film industry, help the work achieve moments of devastating, near miraculous beauty. There are sequences that are barely visible, as proved by the recent showing on the Sundance channel. In the film, a young man Domenico struggles to make his way in the world of work as he undergoes various exams, tests and interviews while developing a tentative friendship with fellow worker Antonietta Loredana Detto. In the documentary, Neo-Realism, a gentleman thought it depicted Italians poorly. While Roma, Città Aperta shows flashes of the melodramatic sentimentality that would mark much of Rossellini's later work, it still rings true as a chronicle of a city under siege and as the genesis of a powerful new film style whose influences include such later filmmakers, among many others, as John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Spike Lee.
Some of the earliest enthusiasts of Neorealism made the mistake of assuming that the art lay in merely photographing reality outside of the studio. With her insinuating voice, short blond hair, and leather undergarments, Jackie is simultaneously a den mother and a dominatrix, which is precisely what the neurotic Reed wants. Is Gomorrah from 2008 really a neorealist film, as our list suggests? Though the Communist Party made up a good part of the Resistance, it also included Christian Democrats and Socialists. If, on the other hand, one views them as works of tragedy, they are excellent. Nonetheless, the film did sweep the Cannes Film Festival and many others worldwide, and it has a number of touches that redeem its clichés, such as having Don Pietro's glasses be broken so that he can only hear, not see, Manfredi's slow death, or the literal killing of two lambs by the Nazis right before Marina betrays Manfredi, which, in its rendering is far more affecting than in its mere description. Nevertheless he is also a practical man. Rossellini wanted actor Aldo Fabrizi to play the priest in reenactments and contacted his friend to help get in touch with Fabrizi.
The film is broken into multiple episodes that focus on different events. The point is made that even at his age he could play a role in the war. It was later occupied by the Germans. For one, Arata's cinematography, while startling at times, is unsatisfactory at others. Though I strongly recommend this film, there are a few minor quibbles. Both Antonioni and Visconti had worked closely with.
