silver nitrate notes

Rossellini's Rome Open City and the Film Shot in Rubble

30 aug 2014

Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) began shooting Rome, Open City in January 1945, two months before the Germans retreated from northern Italy and nine months before the war ended. Much of the film was shot in occupied Rome, at a moment when shooting anywhere in the city required the permission of occupying forces, limited access to film stock, and the cooperation of actors who had other things to worry about than a production schedule.

The cinematographer was Ubaldo Arata (1895-1947), a working Italian cinematographer who, like many of his colleagues, had been waiting out the war. Rossellini could not get regular 35mm cinema stock. He bought short ends from other productions and was reported at the time to have bought newsreel stock, which is what gives the film its characteristic grain. The image is rougher than any previous Italian feature, and the roughness is not deliberate in any style-choice sense. It is what the material was.

What the film did, on release in 1945 and in international distribution over the next two years, is invent Italian neorealism as a movement. Rossellini did not plan this. He was trying to finish a film about the Resistance. But the combination of location shooting in a damaged city, non-professional performers mixed with professionals, real-time story-telling, and photography of the visibly austere conditions produced something that a whole generation of European filmmakers took as a programme.

The sequence that survives in every history of cinema is the shooting of Pina (Anna Magnani) in the street as she runs after the truck taking her lover to a concentration camp. Rossellini shot the sequence in a single take with a handheld camera. Arata held the camera. Magnani ran. The German soldiers fired. Magnani fell. What the camera captures is closer to what a newsreel would have captured than to what a 1944 Hollywood studio would have staged. The scene is short. It does not dwell on her death. The film continues.

Rossellini would make Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948) with similar methods and would then drift, as neorealism drifted, into other modes. What he did in the winter of 1944-1945 remains the origin of one of the major movements of twentieth-century cinema.

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sources
[1] Brunette, Peter. Roberto Rossellini. Oxford UP, 1987.
[2] Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. Da Capo, 1998.
[3] Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Continuum, 3rd ed. 2001.
[4] Bazin, André. What Is Cinema?, vol. 2. University of California Press, 1971.