"Between Past and Future": ROME, OPEN CITY Studies

Updated November 19, 2011

Frame grab from Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Projected on the war torn landscape for a weary people, Rome Open City poetically serves the goals of unification and restoration. In many respects, this film both conforms to and promotes an ideal image of a courageous, Resistant and unified population – from communist intellectuals, to catholic priests, to working class women and their children. Open City maintains the comfortable melodramatic schema of Rossellini’s earlier Fascist-era films in which the forces of good (the Italian people) struggle triumphantly against the forces of evil embodied in the Nazi general Bergmann and his deviant cronies. The director’s fondness for his people culminates in an apologetic portrayal of Italian fascists as either wretched or unwilling collaborators. However, in the end, Open City’s epic scope effectively precludes the possibility of another film like it: all the “fathers” (Manfredi, Pina, Don Pietro) are dead and the child soldiers are abandoned to the city, suspended “between past and future”. The conclusion, the partisan priest’s execution, witnessed by the children of his parish, forewarns of the fragmentation, destitution, and moral poverty to come. With his last words, “non è difficile morire bene, è difficile vivere bene” (it’s not difficult to die well, it’s difficult to live well”), Don Pietro intimates the struggles ahead. [Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009  97-98] 

Another teaching week beckons, and Film Studies For Free's author looks forward to pondering, for the umpteenth, pedagogical time, that intensely strange film Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945).

There are some excellent resources on this film, and on related issues of (neo)realism, that are openly accessible online. So, andiamo felicemente with one of FSFF's regular studies of a single film.

• John Bleasdale, 'The Unrealistic Rossellini', Film Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 34, 2002 
• Gian Piero Brunetta, 'Introduction', The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
• Peter Brunette, 'Rossellini and Cinematic Realism', Cinema Journa1, 25, No. 1, Fall 1985
• Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, 'Open City, Rossellini and neorealism: Sixty years on', Screening the Past, 20, 2006 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale',  Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002
• Ora Gelley, 'Europa '51: The Face of the Star in Neorealism's Urban Landscape', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Sidney Gottlieb, 'Introduction: Open City: Reappropriating the Old, Making Way for the New', in Gottlieb (ed.), Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 
• A. S. Hamrah, '[Interview with Tag Gallagher] From Italy to Iran', Hermenaut, October 20, 2000
• Marcia Landy, 'Introduction', Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 
• Adrian Martin, 'Always a window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini', Screening the Past, March 2000
• Adrian Martin, 'What is Modern Cinema?', 16:9, September 2010
• Daniel Morgan, 'Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, 32 (2006) 
• Brent J. Piepergerdes, 'Re-envisioning the Nation: Film Neorealism and the Postwar Italian Condition', ACME, 2007
• Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009 
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta) By David Forgacs, London: BFI Publishing, 2000; Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, Edited by David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: BFI Publishing, 2001', Scope, November 2002
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Celluloide, Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996', Scope, 2000
• Hugo Salas, 'Roberto Rossellini', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Erica Sheen, 'Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete', Film Studies, Vol. 7, Winter 2005
• New Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, 'The Film of Tomorrow will be an Act of War [on ROME OPEN CITY and its legacy]', Idiom Magazine, October 17, 2011 
• Martin Walsh, 'Rome, Open City, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV: Re-evaluating Rossellini', from Jump Cut, no. 15, 1977
• Jonathan David York, 'Open Spaces, Liminal Places: the Deployment of the Sacred in Open City', JCRT, 10.3, Summer 2010

Michael P. Rogin, 'Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellini's Beautiful Revolution', in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Jaimey Fisher, 'On the Ruins of Masculinity: The Figure of the Child in Italian Nerealism and the German Rubble Film', in Italian neorealism and global cinema, eds. Laura E. Ruberto, Kristi M. Wilson (Wayne State University Press, 2007)