Roberto Rossellini
Roma città aperta

The unifying core of that complex and varied cinematic experience known as Neorealism can be identified in the need, felt by directors and intellectuals immediately after the war, to break through the paper-mache of fascist rhetoric to come into contact with reality as it is.

"Roma città aperta", the first masterpiece and the first symbolic film of Neorealism, bears within its images this immediate and almost insuppressible need. Sincerity is the value that Rossellini, driven by a moral impetus more than an artistic one, finally feels the need to introduce into the futile and stereotyped universe of Italian cinema.

As is well known, "Roma città aperta" was filmed with makeshift means and in difficult conditions, in a city still bearing the devastating signs of the Nazi occupation. Among those who collaborated on the screenplay were Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini. The starting point, based on the real story of the partisan priest Don Luigi Morosini, was progressively expanded to include a plurality of stories that ended up composing a choral portrait of the city under occupation. The protagonists of the fresco are Pina (Anna Magnani), a working-class woman engaged to the printer Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet); Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), a communist engineer wanted by the Nazis; Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), the parish priest who protects and aids the partisans. Against the network of resistors moves Major Bergmann (Harry Feist) of the Gestapo, helped by Manfredi's former lover, Marina (Maria Michi).

The Italian reception was largely cold, at least until - in 1946 - Rossellini's work won the Cannes Film Festival, earning enthusiastic opinions worldwide, with Hollywood leading ("The history of cinema divides into two eras: one before and one after Roma città aperta," said Otto Preminger). The lucky Neorealist season had just begun. Visconti and De Sica had already made significant contributions, but nothing that could match the revolutionary scope of Rossellini’s masterpiece, its clear and marked rejection - as it seemed then - of all prevailing cinematic stereotypes.

In reality, Rossellini - who acted more on instinct than on a conscious cultural elaboration - had not yet fully developed those premises of realism that later works (including those by Rossellini himself) would bring to more complete consequences.

If one of the canons typically attributed to Neorealism consists of rejecting professional actors in favor of “street-cast” amateurs, "Roma città aperta" does not give up the (absolutely exceptional) performances of two popular stars like Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi. The same structure of the film appears quite indebted to classical narrative forms such as Verist melodrama and even farce and variety show (Fabrizi's frying pan blow to the old man who refuses to pretend to be dead!), as well as being quite traditional are the emphatic soundtrack by Renzo Rossellini, the Manichean division of characters, the rhetorical and literary style of certain dialogues.

Despite this, Rossellini revolutionized cinema by injecting it with reality as no one else - neither the French nor the Soviets nor the Americans - had ever dared to do. Without judging, simply observing. For the first time, the miserable and squalid situation of the working classes, the degradation wrought by war and German occupation, the ugliness and abjections of life in general, everything that fascism for years had tried to keep hidden behind the facade of its muscular and grandiloquent rhetoric, appear in front of the camera.

To unify the composite and multiform magma of a film which, let us not forget, is still in part a transitional work, there is a lucid and coherent underlying conception. Often the reality captured by Rossellini assumes tint of atrocious cruelty, which takes one’s breath away, yet his gaze remains full of pity and understanding for the suffering people. This Christian-Stoic approach is especially evident in the scenes of death, which are among the high points of the film and Italian cinema: that of Pina, shot down in the street by soldiers, has entered the collective imagination; that of Don Pietro, executed by the Gestapo before the children of the parish, is if possible even more beautiful and heartrending.

Relentless but compassionate, Rossellini looks reality in the face as it is, without embellishing its horrors but also without giving up hope. "Roma città aperta" is pervaded by a dark sense of tragedy, yet it is not a pessimistic film: it is illuminated by the sincere and Christian solidarity of the resilient people; the heroic courage of those who, like Manfredi and Don Pietro, sacrifice themselves for freedom; the trust placed in children who, perhaps, will build a better future.

The invitation to sincerity and the implicit message of hope may have been the most precious legacy that "Roma città aperta" bequeathed to the nascent Neorealist movement, and to Italian cinema at large.