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, wh

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eed living separately because that is a mandate imposed on them by their leadership, fearful of fraternization and collaboration on any scale. Scene after scene creates an ironic contrast between the idea of Rome as an open city and the reality of different kinds of closure. The people mass in the streets before shops trying to buy food, and yet those shops are closed, with nothing to sell. The streets are open, but the buildings are truly closed, with no provisions and little hope of a changed situation in the near future. In the scenes between Bergmann and the Police Commissioner, the relationship between the two defines clearly the relationship between the Nazis and the Italian people. Bergmann, as in the opening scene as he demonstrates the map, is supercilious and speaks as master to pupil. The camera generally shoots slightly upward in his direction and slightly down toward the Police Commissioner, who as an Italian is considered an inferior by the overbearing Nazis even though they are supposed to be allies. There is a metaphoric effect in the look of the film itself, a look that was quite different when the film was released in 1945 from anything that had been seen before. The camera makes rome a truly open city

Category: Film - R