What's so real about neorealism?
Rome Open City, the aesthetics of truth, and the truth as myth.
I’m in the Catskills this week, and despite Fordham being on “spring” break, I just spent an hour digging through a snow drift in hopes of recovering a wedding ring that flew off my finger as I chased down a pug who was having too much winter fun to respond to her name. (As of now, this symbol of undying love has yet to be found, but I’m hopeful a bucket of salt will help me finish the job when the wind dies down.) Anyway, as beautiful as the mountains look draped in white, the numbness in my fingers has me looking forward to this summer’s research trip to Rome, during which I can swap my complaints over the temperature having too few degrees for complaints over it having too many.
In this spirit, I’ve been doing some reading about the film that’s typically regarded as the big bang of Italian neorealism, and of Italian cinema more broadly: 1945’s Rome Open City. Set during Germany’s occupation of its nominal ally after the country soured on Mussolini in 1943, Roberto Rossellini’s interlocking chronicles of resistance to Nazism were in the works even as the war was still raging. The story started coming together in August 1944, just two months after the Germans abandoned Rome, and shooting started the following July, three months before Germany’s surrender to the Allies and seven before the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war in the Pacific.
As you might imagine, the circumstances were not ideally suited to filmmaking. Cinecettà, the country’s major production complex, was damaged by Allied bombs and the buildings left standing were requisitioned to house people displaced by the conflict. The funding networks were so scrambled that—in an image that recalls the pawning of dowry bedsheets in that other seminal neorealist film Bicycle Thieves—Rossellini claimed that he sold his own bed to raise money. Electricity was hard to come by in liberated Rome, forcing the crew to talk the US army into letting them siphon power from the Stars and Stripes office.
The result was a film that had a different claim to reality than your typical Hollywood movie, or, for that matter, the fascist-era telefoni bianchi comedies about bourgeois Italians talking on their fancy white phones. Both the narratives and the settings of Rome Open City would’ve been all too recognizable to the home audience. When the boy rebel Romoletto and his phalanx of child insurgents watch the execution of Resistance-aligned priest Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), the tragedy unfolds in the same field where the real-life clergyman Don Morosini was murdered for similar offenses. And when they shuffle off into what we hope is a less tumultuous future, that really is the bombed out Roman cityscape in front of them.
A similar verisimilitude surrounds the death of Pina as she’s senselessly gunned down while chasing after the truck onto which the occupiers had forced her fiancé. The image, which scholar Peter Bondanella had called “perhaps the most famous shot in the history of the Italian cinema,” was drawn from the true story of Maria Teresa Gullace, who, like Pina, was pregnant when a German soldier shot and killed her. Also like Pina, Gullace was reportedly reaching toward her imprisoned lover at the moment she was murdered, albeit through a barracks window rather than in pursuit of a truck. For actress Anna Magnani, shooting the scene thrust her into the recent past. “I suddenly saw things again,” she told an interviewer years later. “I plunged back into the time when they were taking away the young people all over Rome. Kids.”
The sequence also makes stylistic choices that its contemporary audience would be primed to interpret as real. In my Films of Moral Struggle class, I start the semester with a reading from Greg M. Smith’s What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss that separates two distinct stylistic approaches that we might categorize as “realistic.” The first—Smith’s “dramatic look” of realism—is the most common. Here, the craft of filmmaking—the editing, cinematography, sound design, etc.—is meant to remain invisible so that the audience can feel that it’s eavesdropping on the characters. The second approach, and the one that’s more relevant to Rome Open City, he calls realism’s “documentary look.” As the name suggests, movies that use this template draw on the style of documentary film to establish a link to the real world. In our own time, this usually means shaky handheld cameras, seemingly haphazard framing, and talking head interviews. The documentary look relies on our own familiarity with the conventions of non-fiction movies, often to add an extra layer of humor (ex. What We Do in the Shadows) or horror (The Blair Witch Project).
The thing about this approach is that it assumes an audience that’s fluent in a cinematic grammar that changes based on your time and place. An audience of Romans in 1945 wouldn’t catch the touches that give The Office its mockumentary shape, nor are we primed to pick up on all the aesthetic cues that would evoke wartime newsreels to midcentury viewers. Some such choices are still legible to us. As David Forgacs points out in his indispensable BFI Film Classics volume on Rome Open City, the main source for my post today, Rossellini called himself a “careless technician” and once wrote, “Beautiful shots! That is the one thing that makes me sick!” The filmmaker was perhaps overstating the case, but it’s true that there’s a visual looseness here that conveys the sense of improvisation that films with the documentary look aspire to even today.
But there are also “realistic” choices that would slip by most of us 21st-century film fans. To again cite Forgacs, while the use of multiple cameras was rare in feature films, “It was, however, common in newsreels (and later in television coverage) of action events.” The cuts that show us Pina at different angles as she chases after the truck would, then, read to a viewer in 1945 as “real” in a way that, say, vertically-aligned smartphone footage would to us today. What seems “honest” or “true” at any point in history isn’t just a matter of what corresponds with the facts. It’s about what can convincingly convey the aesthetics of truth in the context of a given culture. This is why a dipshit who knows his way around Final Cut Pro could convince your grandma that the COVID-19 pandemic was a conspiracy between Bill Gates, John Oliver, and the CDC, and, for that matter, why a dipshit at a news desk managed to convince your dad that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because of (what else?!) “wokeness.”
Even as the narrative of Rome Open City hews closely to the literal truth of Italy’s experience under occupation, Forgacs points out the mythologizing effect of choices made by Rossellini and his co-writers (one of whom was a 24-year-old Federico Fellini). He says of the film:
It would provide a patriotic myth to ease the transition from Fascism to the post-war state, substituting pride for the national liberation movement for the collective shame of having lived, without openly resisting, for twenty years under a political system that had ultimately proved so brutal and brought such damage upon the country.
Though it rarely strays far from the facts, it does put a certain spin on them. There were indeed parish priests like Don Pietro who put their lives on the line for the Resistance, but the Catholic Church as an institution was complicit with the fascists, viewing them as a bulwark against the godlessness of Bolshevism. The one betrayal of an Italian by an Italian portrayed onscreen was the result of the foolishness and confusion of a woman (shocker), not the kind of clear-eyed backstabbing that sowed the seeds for the resa di conti, a “settling of accounts” in the form of as many as 15,000 retaliatory killings of collaborators in the post-war years. Even the plot’s precise historical moment—the early months of 1944—represented a high point of national unity that would begin to crumble that March as the Resistance splintered over of the question of whether to continue fighting or to sit tight and wait for Allied liberation. Set the action a few months later, and you’d be less likely to see a communist militant like the film’s Manfredi striking up a friendship with a priest like Don Pietro.
Especially given the film’s iconic status in the neorealist movement and it’s release date just a month after the end of World War II, it’s natural to interpret Rome Open City as an impartial document of the circumstances on the ground. Of course, no such document exists. Rossellini shows an admirable fidelity to real events, and he doesn’t shy away from bracing depictions of violence. (Manfredi’s torture is still hard to watch almost eight decades later.) But his movie still frames the past to meet the needs of his present, namely the need for Italy to come together and rebuild after decades of fascism and years of war. Recognizing this in no way diminishes the achievement of Rome Open City, but it does help us to understand it.