than studio sets and used nonprofessional actors and documentary effects. Leprohon emphasizes that this cannot be considered a coherent movement in the sense that it created rules or even theories followed by the filmmakers. Rather, the filmmakers were merely trying to express themselves individually in a way that was "in the air," as it were:
Essentially, neo-realism was a product of political and social circumstances. And it is in this revolutionary aspect of neo-realism that I should like to discuss first of all. Before it existed in its own right, with definite aims and sectarian interests, neo-realism--which was still nameless--was opposed to a state of affairs which increasingly stifled and oppressed the expression of truth--a state of affairs that existed. . . long before the Fascist era.
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
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