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Roberto Rossellini's Open City

Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1945) is a film about Rome during the period of the German occupation, and the conditions under which the film was shot are well-known and mirror the situation in the film itself. Rome at the time was a just-opened city in that the Germans had just left, and the effects of the Nazi occupation were clearly still felt and contributed to the metaphoric meanings attached to the film. Much of the sense of the title is ironic, in that Rome was not yet an open city at all in the time frame of the film, though that was the condition wished by the people and newly experienced by the filmmakers, who had themselves prayed for that release from the enclosure of the Nazi occupation.

The period of the occupation is evoked as a time of great difficulty and trouble, and the term "open city" then had a different meaning in that the police wore armbands proclaiming Rome an open city, meaning it was not to be a military target based on the international rules of war. While the police proclaimed the city open, it was actually a city tightly enclosed by martial law under the Germans. The penalty for nearly every infraction was death, giving the city the aura of an enclosed grave much of the time. The idea of "openness" is thus sometimes a literal meaning, sometimes a metaphoric meaning, and sometimes an ironic meaning in that the actuality belies any openness at all. The contrary nature of the title is evident in the American release version of the film, which begins with an explanation of the problems facing the filmmakers when they made the film, including having to shoot without proper equipment, behind locked doors, and out of sight of the remaining Nazis until the Germans were finally gone from the city. Certainly, this description does not imply openness at all, but it does imply an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to create an openness through their art.

In the opening scene, as the Italian partisa...

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Roberto Rossellini's Open City. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:37, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681128.html