JICMS 6 (3) pp.

301–313 Intellect Limited 2018

Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies

Volume 6 Number 3
© 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jicms.6.3.301_1

David Forgacs
New York University

Rome, Open City: Before and

after Neorealism

Abstract Keywords
The article reconstructs how Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Neorealism
Open City) (1945) film looked to its earliest reviewers and critics in 1945–47, before anti-fascism
it became identified as the founding film of Neorealism, and how it has come to look resistance
since the 1970s, since the critical paradigm centred on the concept of Neorealism semiotics
started to come apart. By focusing attention on how the film was received before the torture
rise and after the fall of that paradigm, we can see how the category of Neorealism hybrid
served to isolate and privilege one particular set of aesthetic properties and inter-
pretive-evaluative categories (raw, authentic, quasi-documentary) while deflecting
attention from others (melodrama, spectacle of violence). It also directed attention
away from the film’s political functions, notably that of rehabilitating Italy and
Italians after two decades of fascism. These functions were perceived in some (not
all) of the early reviews, both American and Italian, but they have become more
visible to recent viewers and critics.

The view of Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (Rossellini, 1945) as the found-
ing film of Neorealism became so firmly implanted in standard histories of the
cinema that, still today, it requires some effort to pull it out of that particu-
lar version of film history and see it differently. In this article, I reconstruct
two moments in the critical tradition where it has looked different. The first is
the very early reception, before the neorealist orthodoxy became established.
The second is after that orthodoxy started to fall apart. I end by examining

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two aspects of the film that the classification of it as neorealist tended to

submerge but that have been brought to the surface in this second period: the
importance of the torture sequence and the film’s politics.

The invention of Neorealism

Stefania Parigi has noted that although Rome, Open City was ‘unanimously
considered as founding a new tendency’, that tendency was not initially
known as Neorealism. ‘It is not till the spring of 1948 that this term enters the
cultural debate and starts to indicate, retrospectively, a phenomenon whose
phase of expansion is however already over, in the view of its protagonists’
(Parigi 2014: 49).This argument connects with one that I put forward nearly
30 years ago (Forgacs 1989: 51–66), namely that, in the field of cinema, the
term ‘Neorealism’ flourished in critical discourse some time after the first
wave of films that it was used to refer to and it went on being used for much
longer, also as an evaluative term to indicate and defend the best tendency
of Italian cinema and Italian culture, not only for non-Italian critics such as
André Bazin, who was its staunchest champion, but also for Italians such as
Cesare Zavattini, Carlo Lizzani and Luigi Chiarini. Yet that defence was always
tendentious. The term ‘Neorealism’ became a weapon in a ‘battle of ideas’, as it
was called (Chiarini 1954), which was fought simultaneously on several fronts:
politically, to defend a certain idea of Italy after the Resistance against the
post-reconstruction hegemony of the centre-right; aesthetically and critically,
to uphold the values of a cinema of commitment (impegno) against a cinema
of escapism (evasione); morally, to argue for a humane and humanist cinema;
and, within the film industry, to defend a good authentic low-budget Italian
directors’ cinema from the bad profit-driven cinema of emerging producers
such as Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, and of Hollywood studio direc-
tors, such as Mervyn LeRoy, William Wyler or Jean Neguelsco, who came to
Italy to take advantage of its well-equipped sound stages, photogenic loca-
tions and lower-cost crews. Framing all this was a fierce resistance to the
cultural policies of the Christian Democrat-led government, which offered
insufficient protections and incentives to the domestic film industry, particu-
larly to films that were not likely to make significant profits.
Stefania Parigi has also reminded us that the application of the term
‘Neorealism’ to a group of Italian films, and some of the key aspects of the
critical discourse around these films, were of French origin and that Italian
critics and filmmakers, partly out of cultural protectionism or xenophobia,
initially resisted importing the term, or at least they put it in quotation marks,
or spoke of the ‘so-called’ neorealist tendency. Chiarini wrote in Bianco e Nero
in March 1948 about ‘what foreign critics have defined as the ‘Italian neore-
alistic school’ (Chiarini 1948: 3, quoted in Parigi 2003: 82). In June 1948, Félix
Morlion, the Dominican friar who was to be Rossellini’s spiritual consultant
on Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli) (1950) and Francesco giullare di Dio
(Francis, God’s Jester) (1950), wrote in the same periodical, referring to inter-
national critics and in particular to Catholic critics: ‘since we invented the
term “neorealistic school of cinema” it should be our job to point out what
we consider substantial in the artistic tendency we are defending’ (Morlion
1948:21, quoted in Parigi 2003: 83).
Already in the spring of 1947 Bazin was writing, in an article on Farrebique –
Georges Rouquier’s‘observational’film, shot in 1944–45 in a peasant community
in Aveyron – about

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The realist revolution that the cinema needed, a revolution that has 1. For a summary of other
Italian criticisms of the
broken out all of a sudden just now in Italy, and from which Italian torture sequence see
filmmakers have been able in less than two years to draw lessons so Parigi 2010: 48–49.
perfect that we shudder to think they may already have reined in their
academicism.
(Bazin 1947: 680)

He went on, in January 1948, to set out the characteristics of what he called
‘the Italian school of the Liberation’ (Bazin 1948: 58–83). He did not use the
term ‘Neorealism’ in either of these articles but Antonio Pietrangeli did, just a
few months later, in a special issue of a French film journal devoted to Italian
cinema, where he referred to ‘the post-war school baptised as neo-realist’
(Pietrangeli 1948: 12).

Before Neorealism
The ‘baptism’ of the ‘neorealist school’ took place, therefore, sometime
between 1947 and early 1948. Rome, Open City had been released in Italy in
October 1945 and in France in 1946, and the way it appeared to critics before
1947 has already started to be reconstructed. Parigi devotes part of her chapter
on it in her book on Neorealism (2014: 51–53) to the early reviews, of which
some compilations have been published (Aprà 1994; Roncoroni 2006).
Charles Leavitt has shown how the terms ‘cronaca’ (chronicle) and ‘narrativa’
(narrative), and the tension between them, were central to early critical
discourse on the film (Leavitt 2013). Karl Schoonover in Brutal Vision (2013)
has looked closely at the early American reception. Michele Guerra (2015) has
examined the Italian reception, paying particular attention to humanism as
a critical category. I shall focus here on just one aspect of the early reception
that I find particularly significant, namely the fact that several reviewers saw
the film as falling into two distinct halves, stylistically, and that they generally
preferred the first to the second.
The two halves corresponded to the two parts (tempi) of the film as it was
originally projected in Italian cinemas, with the primo tempo/first half ending
with the scene where the partisans liberate Francesco and the other men
rounded up by the Germans and the secondo tempo/second half starting with
the scene in the restaurant with Giorgio Manfredi, Francesco and Marina. This
break, it is worth noting, does not divide the film into halves of equal length,
since the secondo tempo is shorter than the first, 46 minutes as opposed to 58.
Among the many early reviews that comment on this split, I will quote the
one by Carlo Lizzani, since he was to go on to work as Rossellini’s assistant
on Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero) (1948), to champion Rossellini’s
work and Neorealism in his later critical writing (for instance Il cinema italiano,
first published in 1953) and to direct, many years later (in 1996), the film
version of Celluloide (Celluloid), Ugo Pirro’s 1983 book about the making of
Rome, Open City:

Many people have said the first half is better than the second. I agree
the first half is much richer than the second in characters and settings
and it also flows better as cinema. I agree that the part in Via Tasso lays it
on a bit thick, when a more profound artist would have used just a few
brushstrokes.
(Lizzani 1945: 112)1

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It was not only Italian critics who made this critical distinction between
parts of the film. Some foreign critics did too. For instance, Archer Winsten,
reviewing it in the New York Post, also expressed a preference for the first half:

When the picture moves from contemplation of the Italians, who are
brought to life with startling clarity, to the Germans, it suffers a marked
transition from documentary quality to the characteristic and melodra-
matic conceptions of the fiction movie. This is a point your reviewer
failed to note at a first reviewing, but after it had been mentioned by
the Dutch documentary film maker, John Ferno, it had to be conceded.
It is most noticeable in the mannered performance of the Gestapo chief,
Harry Feist, and it is not hard to see in the dark diabolism of his evil
agent, Giovanna Galletti. As movie performers they deserve hearty
applause. But when measured against the solider achievements of the
others, their posturings smack of studied movie-making rather than
impromptu reality caught by an accidentally present camera.
(Winsten 1946)

The idea that there were in effect two films in one was repeated by a large
number of early commentators, who, like Winsten, nearly all preferred the first
half: choral, documentaristic, fast-paced, mostly shot in real locations, both
outdoors and indoors, to the second half, shot (with the exception of the scene
of the arrest, Don Pietro’s execution and the final shot of the boys walking
down Via Trionfale) in studio sets, melodramatic, overacted, centred on a small
group of characters. In effect, if we were to apply the term that had not yet
entered into circulation to describe the film, these critics were saying that only
the first half was neorealist, the second was not.
However, there is perhaps something strange, to audiences now, about these
descriptions of the two halves. If one thinks about the first half, realism is not
the aspect that stands out the most, at least for later audiences. We can concede
the point about the fast pace of the narrative, the rapid switches of scene, and
the choral element: the women sacking the bakery, the boys in Romoletto’s
gang, the families gathered in Pina’s apartment, the women helping the men
escape or lined up outside the building. But documentary realism? Chronicle?
The first half is full of stock comic characters and gags: the football landing
on Don Pietro’s head, the business with the two statuettes, the boys getting
clipped around the ear for being out after curfew, the dialogue of Agostino the
sacristan and the brigadiere, the old man Biagio and the frying pan. One of the
big changes from the first to the second parts, in fact, is the total disappearance
of any levity, any comedy, and the transition to a bleaker and darker mood,
marked by a transition to mainly interior shooting in studio sets.
One other point to make about this early reception of the film is that
several critics, in recognizing its importance and originality, grouped it with
various other, non-Italian, films. This is not surprising. It could only be ‘nation-
alized’, so to speak, seen as the founding film of a new Italian school or move-
ment, after some of those other Italian films had appeared, not just Rossellini’s
Paisà (Paisan) (1946) and Germany Year Zero, but also the films by Vittorio De
Sica, Pietro Germi, Aberto Lattuada, Carlo Lizzani, Luchino Visconti and Luigi
Zampa. Before this happened, Rome, Open City was characteristically grouped
together with various tendencies in international cinema.
Thus, for instance, Georges Sadoul grouped it with two other films about
the Resistance and anti-fascism released in 1945: La Bataille du Rail (The Battle

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 Rome, Open City

of the Rails), René Clément’s film about French railway workers who sabotage
German troop transport trains, and Die letzte Chance (The Last Chance) (1945),
the Swiss film directed by Leopold Lindtberg about two escaped prisoners of
war caught up in the chaotic post-armistice situation in northern Italy (Sadoul
[1946] 1994), in Aprà 1994: 140). At the first Cannes Film Festival, held in 1946,
it won the Grand Prix jointly with three other antifascist war dramas from other
countries – Die letzte Chance, the Soviet Velikij perelom (The Turning Point) (Ermler,
1945) and the Danish De røde enge (The Red Meadows) (Ipsen and Lauritzen,
1945) – and with seven non-war-themed films, including David Lean’s Brief
Encounter (1945), from Noel Coward’s script. In addition, La Bataille du Rail won
the International Jury Prize and René Clément won Best Director. There was a
fairly clear politics to this clutch of prizes and their distribution over five different
nationalities: French, Swiss, Italian, Danish and Russian. James Agee, summing
up what he judged to be the best films he had seen in 1946, put Rome, Open
City alongside Western Approaches (released in the United States with the title
The Raiders), a British dramatized documentary about merchant seamen and the
Allied navies made in 1944 by Pat Jackson for the Crown Film Unit, remarkable
among other things for being shot in colour under the direction of Jack Cardiff.
The point that I want to make about all this is that, before Rome, Open City
was assimilated to Italian Neorealism, which was simultaneously an aesthetic,
a moral and a political category, it was a more open and indeterminate kind of
film text, one that could be seen as radically divided within itself, and one that
could be grouped with various other films of different nationalities with which it
had what might seem to us now to be only very loose family resemblances. If it
is difficult for us to see Rome, Open City in this way now it is partly because we
have lost the context of those other films. It is not that we cannot find and watch
them if we want to, but they are not so immediately present to us as they were to
early audiences and we have a very different cinematic context, which of course
now includes all the films that were made after Rome, Open City, by Rossellini
and by everyone else. However, if we put Rome, Open City alongside some other
films that those who worked on it would have known well, we can begin to see
other kinds of family resemblance. For example, although it may well be true,
as Sergio Amidei claimed, that the scene of Manfredi escaping over the roofs
by Piazza di Spagna was based on his own escape in the same place during
the German occupation – the scene was, after all, shot in the building where
he lived, where his escape had taken place – the scene does bear a resemblance
also to Jean Gabin’s escape, together with his comrades, over the roofs of the
casbah in Algiers in Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937). It may also be true, as Amidei
also claimed, that he got the idea of Pina chasing the truck taking Francesco
away from seeing Anna Magnani running angrily after her lover Massimo Serato
as he drove away, but there is also, as Tag Gallagher has pointed out, a family
resemblance with the scene in The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925) where Renée Adorée
runs after the truck that is taking John Gilbert away to go and fight in the Great
War, even though that scene did not end with the woman’s death.

After Neorealism
I can deal more briefly with what happened on the other side of the neorealist
orthodoxy, since it is more familiar. It is what many film scholars of my gener-
ation either grew up with or grew into as we started to get to know the film.
For me, one of the most influential texts I read in the late 1970s was Mario
Cannella’s long article, published in Screen in 1973, but originally published in

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Italian a few years earlier (Cannella 1973, 1966). It was essentially a critique of
the way in which the idea of Neorealism, and the associated values of liberal
humanism, had been made to subserve an ideology of popular front interclass
unity and to forestall a more revolutionary reading of the Resistance and its
links with the labour movement.
At the same time, there was a tendency among critics who worked with
semiotics and psychoanalysis, or who drew inspiration from the anti-illusionism
of Bertolt Brecht and the critical writings and films of Dziga Vertov and cham-
pioned avant-garde filmmaking practices, to unpick the whole project of
cinematic realism, and this included Neorealism, as ideological, as a reinforce-
ment of conventional notions of the real, as part of what Noël Burch called the
institutional mode of representation, or what Lacanian critics called a suturing
of the viewing subject into the film text. However, it was also in France, in
the 1980s and the 1990s, that the idea of Neorealism as making a distinc-
tive break between two eras of cinema was forcefully restated. There are
three examples of this. The first is Gilles Deleuze, who wrote in 1983 that
after 1945 innovation in cinema moves outside the United States, which had
invented the action-image but where, at any rate in Hollywood, it had by then
become worn into a cliché in its various genres – western, noir, comedy –
whereas Europe had more freedom to invent new kinds of cinema. ‘It is in
Italy that the great crisis of the action image was produced. The periodization
is roughly as follows: Italy around 1948, France around 1958, Germany around
1968’ (Deleuze 1983: 284). For Deleuze the break from the action image or
movement image to the time image occurs in particular with those Italian
films that introduce ‘pure optical-sonorous situations’. However, it is worth
noting that he does not explicitly include Rome, Open City among the films
by Rossellini that do this. Instead he cites Paisan (1946), Germany Year Zero
(1948), Stromboli (1950) and Europa ’51 (Europe ’51) (1952).
The second French position on this (actually Swiss, but rooted in French
cinephile culture going back to the 1950s) is that of Godard in his Histoire(s)
du cinéma. Godard’s thesis is that Italy produced, starting with Rome, Open
City, a unique cinema of resistance against Hollywood. And he really meant
unique. One of the key differences between Godard and those French critics
contemporary with the initial release of the film is that he rejected the idea of
family resemblances between Italian films and the films of other nationalities
made around the same time, a point that comes across clearly through the
polemical excesses of the rest of his evocation of Rossellini’s film:

Not that there weren’t films of the resistance, left and right, here and
there, but the only film, in the cinematic sense, which resisted the occu-
pation of the cinema by America, a certain uniform way of making
cinema, was an Italian film. This was not by chance. Italy was the coun-
try that fought the least, which suffered a lot but which betrayed twice,
and which therefore suffered from no longer having an identity. And if it
found that identity again with Rome, Open City it was because that film
was made by people without a uniform. It was the only time.

The Russians made films about martyrs, the Americans made advertis-
ing films, the British made what they have always made in the cinema:
nothing. The Germans had no cinema, no more cinema. And the French
made Sylvie et le fantôme [Claude Autant-Lara, 1945]. The Poles made two
films of expiation – Passenger [Andrzej Munk and Witold Lesiewicz, 1963]

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 Rome, Open City

and The Last Stage [Wanda Jakubowska, 1948] – and a film of memory,
Kanal [Andrzej Wajda, 1956]. And then they ended up welcoming
Spielberg when ‘never that again’ became ‘always that’.

Whereas with Rome, Open City Italy simply regained the right of a nation
to look itself in the face. And then came the stunning crop of great
Italian cinema. But there was nevertheless something strange about this.
How was it that Italian cinema could become so great when everyone,
from Rossellini to Visconti to Antonioni to Fellini, did not record sound
with the image?

Only one answer: the language of Ovid, Virgil, Dante and Leopardi had
passed into images.
(Godard, 1988)

The third French position (but in fact the earliest in chronological order) is that
of Serge Daney, who wrote ‘modern cinema was born with the torture scene
of Rome, Open City in front of a third person’ (Daney 1983: 174–75). Daney
located the radical break made by Rome, Open City not in the exterior sequence
of Pina running after the truck or the other bits of location shooting, but in the
interior scene of the torture and Don Pietro witnessing it, and specifically in
the way it placed the spectator inside the frame, the space of the film.
It is worth adding that Rossellini himself, in later interviews, dissociated
Rome, Open City from his own subsequent work. In a discussion with James
Blue and students at Rice University, Houston, in January 1973 he said that
the moral stance of his cinema was at that stage still ‘polluted’ by sentimen-
talism and seduction and he gave as an example the scene with the children
whistling as Don Pietro is executed (Aprà 1995: 28). In a 1977 interview with
Stefano Roncoroni, he described the film as ‘very ambiguous in aesthetic terms
[...] an unthinking kind of cinema’ (Rossellini 1987: 18). By then he had passed
through several different styles of filmmaking, including that of Stromboli
and Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy) (1954), with their looser scenarios
and the creation on set of emotional tension within and between actors, and
that of the television films, with their long takes, alternation between long
passages of dialogue and observational filming. All of these were based on a
more ‘thinking’ approach to film, one less tied to the conventions of an earlier
cinema than Rome, Open City had been.

Torture and spectators

Classical cinema, for Daney, typically gave the spectator various ‘ways out’ of
a scene: ‘Openings to let them breathe, plot resolutions to reassure them. It
knew how to push spectators out of the scene of the film, only to make them
return to enjoy the happy ending of false exits’. In modern cinema, by contrast,

The gaze no longer gets lost between an obstacle and depth but
is bounced back by the screen like a ball by a wall. […] I would call
‘modern’ the cinema that ‘took on’ this non-depth of the image, which
claimed it as its own and thought of making it – with humour or fury –
a war machine against the illusionism of classical cinema, against the
alienation of industrial series, against Hollywood.
(Daney 1983: 172)

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Daney thus saw the scene in modern cinema as breaking with the conven-
tional mise-en-scène of classical cinema, where something is always suggested
offstage, in off-screen space.
Daney’s way of looking at the torture sequence in Rome, Open City is
suggestive because it draws our attention to the importance of the relay of
looks within it, all taking place within a claustrophobic space from which the
prisoners are not free to exit and we the spectators are compelled to stay in
there with them. He argues that our look is therefore bounced back to us
and we are trapped in there with them. But I think it is worth noting that
Schoonover, who also gives great importance to this scene, and to the two
other deaths in Rome, Open City, makes a different reading of what is going
on. He says that these characters, with whom we have identified morally and
as drivers of the action, suddenly become objectified in front of our eyes as
brutalized bodies, and this means that we adopt a position above them both
of horrified voyeurism and of humanist sympathy. Whichever way one reads
this scene, though, it is fairly clear that the presence of Don Pietro as witness
gives it a very different dynamic from what it would have had if he had not
been present. In fact, his presence in the scene was there from the early treat-
ments for the film, when it still had the working title Storie di ieri (Stories of
Yesterday).
We can make a comparison here with the torture scene in The Red Meadows,
directed by Bodil Ipsen and Lau Lauritzen in the same year. It is intense – the
main character, the resistance fighter Michael Lans, has his fingers crushed
in a press (not shown, but we see his facial reaction) – and yet the torture is
staged as a direct face-to-face encounter between two people, Michael and
the Gestapo officer, Mackensen, and a more conventional kind of drama takes
place: a face off, where the resister thwarts the Nazi’s expectation that he will
break under the pain.
Three other aspects of the torture scenes are worth commenting on.
The first is their graphic nature and the whole question of ‘directness’, of
sensory shocks to the eye and ear, the visual and aural obscene. Schoonover
has remarked on this too. Anyone who has taught the film in a class may
have been struck, as I have been, by the fact that students whose film culture
includes Casino (Scorsese, 1995) Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992), Django
Unchained (Tarantino, 2012) and other examples of graphic screen violence
still find the torture scenes from this old black and white movie hard to watch.
I now always include a warning when I put it on a course list. As for the
original audiences in 1945–47, something of the impact of those scenes can,
again, be reconstructed from the early reviews and by considering what those
audiences were used to seeing, in other words their horizon of expectations.
It was certainly unlike anything that Hollywood had done up to that point or
would do for several years to come. Indeed, these shots were censored from
the print released in the United States. Several Italian critics also felt that they
were excessive. Luigi Comencini wrote a largely negative review in which he
said the torture scenes were quite simply a mistake. The fact that such torture
had taken place in reality, he said, was not a good reason to show it in a film.
On the contrary, to show it was to play to the basest voyeuristic and sadistic
instincts of the audience, to go for easy sensational effects, and it cheapened
the film as a drama (Comencini 1945).
The second aspect that is worth remarking on is the lighting. The inter-
rogation and torture macrosequence as a whole, from when Manfredi enters
Bergmann’s office to the shot of his corpse and Ingrid’s final conversation with

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Bergman, lasts 25 minutes, over half of the secondo tempo and nearly a quarter of
the running time of the whole film (104 minutes), and the scenes in the torture
room are lit differently from the rest of the film. If the anecdotes about Ubaldo
Arata, the film’s director of photographer, complaining that there was not
enough light and that the audience would not be able to see anything, are true,
they would not apply to this sequence, which Arata lit with intense shadows
and strong chiaroscuro, similar in some ways to expressionism or film noir.
Indeed, Arata seems here to have carried over something, in the ­lighting
and staging, from his work on the sequence of Cavarodossi’s torture in
Tosca  (1941), the project based on Puccini’s opera that Jean Renoir started
working on in Rome, but delegated to his assistant Carl Koch, and on which
Luchino Visconti remained as assistant director. There are also echoes in the
lighting of other earlier work that Arata had done, notably the one film that
Max Ophüls made in Italy, La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman) (1934). I am
thinking in particular of the sequence when Leonardo Nanni (Memo Benassi)
and Gaby (Isa Miranda) return to Nanni’s house after their long honeymoon
trip and the butler opens the shutters, casting a shadow in the form of a cross
over the painting of Nanni’s dead first wife, Alma (Tatiana Pavlova).
The third aspect of the torture sequence that is worth remarking on is the
way it works as the moral culmination of the film – more, I think, than the
execution of Don Pietro, which is briefer and is there to close the narrative
and take us back to the boys, the new generation who will carry the examples
of courage and suffering into the post-war world that they are going to help
build. In my monograph on Rome, Open City (2000) I suggested that Sartre’s
discussion of torture in What is Literature? was an important text in shedding
light on the torture sequence:

the supreme irony of torture is that the sufferer, if he breaks down

and talks, applies his will as a man to denying that he is a man, makes
himself the accomplice of his executioners and, by his own movement,
precipitates himself into abjection. [...] But, on the other hand, most of
the resisters, though beaten, burned, blinded, and broken, did not speak.
They broke the circle of Evil and reaffirmed the human for themselves,
for us, and for their very torturers. They did it without witnesses, without
help, without hope, often even without faith.
(Sartre 1948: 218–19)

Politics
We can see more clearly with hindsight how the emphasis on realism/
Neorealism, and thus on the film’s aesthetic properties (raw, real, documentary-
like), which were to dominate reception and critical discourse about it from
1948 to the 1970s, served to deflect attention from its political functions, in the
first place that of rehabilitating Italy, replacing a bad Italy with a good one.
This function was perceived in some of the early reviews, both American and
Italian. James Agee, for instance, in his review in The Nation (13 April 1946),
said that although there were probably in reality plenty of brave priests in Italy
such as Don Pietro and plenty of secular leftists who worked with them and
respected them, to suggest that these two noble individuals were representa-
tive respectively of the whole apparatus of the Catholic Church or of the left
parties was a falsification: ‘in that degree’, he wrote, ‘I am afraid that both the
religious and the leftist audience – and more particularly, the religio-leftists,

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who must be the key mass in Italy – are being sold something of a bill of
goods’ (Agee 2005: 226). However, those reviews rarely saw the film as radi-
cally compromised by these ideological simplifications. Indeed, Agee, after
having made these qualifying remarks, went on to say that he had ‘nothing
but admiration’ for Rome, Open City (2005: 226) and called it ‘one of the most
heartening pictures in years, and one of the best’ (2005: 229). In other words,
these critics just saw its falsifications as putting a bit of doubt around it.
Although Cannella’s article in the 1970s, and other Italian criticism from
the far left in the same period, was dismissive of the popular front ideology of
most neorealist films, in other words of their uncritical portrayal of a unified
resistance, it did not really show how that portrayal was done or what exactly
it elided, apart from the revolutionary demands of rank-and-file communists
and socialists. However, we now have more information than was available
in the 1970s, including more first-hand testimonies, about events in Rome
during the occupation, and above all a more critical historiography has
emerged, particularly since the 1990s, more attuned to how a collective myth
of the Resistance was produced after 1945 and to how the responsibilities
of Italian fascism, and of Italian citizens’ complicity with it, were played
down or ‘repressed’ by various post-war texts, including Rome, Open City. In
other words, we have become more aware than earlier audiences were of the
ideological functions of the film as a text and its falsifications.
Thus, we can see more clearly now how the film works to construct a
certain account of the Resistance in Rome (and by implication in Italy more
generally) and to deflect or elide other possible accounts. These other accounts
could have mentioned, for instance, the deportation of most of Rome’s Jewish
population to Nazi death camps in October 1943 (described in Giacomo
Debenedetti’s 16 ottobre 1943, published in 1945 before Rome, Open City was
screened), the brutality of the Italian fascists in the Salò phase and the fact
that they tortured too – notably Pietro Koch, first at the Pensione Oltremare,
then at the Pensione Jaccarino –, the politically ambivalent role of the Catholic
Church, the often acute political and strategic differences among the different
anti-fascist parties that made up the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale in
Rome and elsewhere, the controversies over the use of terror methods against
the occupying Germans, notably in relation to the bomb attack by Communist
members of the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica in Via Rasella on 23 March 1944,
which killed 32 members of a German police division, and the reprisal massacre
by the SS the next day of 335 Italians at the Fosse Ardeatine. By locating the
action of the Rome, Open City in the winter of 1943–44, after the deportation of
the Jews (October 1943) and before the Fosse Ardeatine reprisal (March 1944),
Rossellini and his co-writers managed to exclude these two episodes from
their narrative of a beleaguered, yet heroic resistance in Rome (see Forgacs
2000 for a fuller account of the film’s selections and elisions of events during
the occupation).
It is interesting in this respect to make a comparison with the docu-
mentary Giorni di gloria (Days of Glory) (De Santis, Serandrei, Pagliero and
Visconti. 1945), since it is exactly contemporary with Rome, Open City. The
two films had their first public screenings, in fact, in the same festival,
the Primo Festival Internazionale del Cinematografo, which was held at the
Teatro Quirino in Rome from 21 September to 7 October 1945. Days of Glory
also has a distinctive rhetorical-political construction: much of it dwells on
the atrocities and violence perpetrated during the occupation – the tortures
and hanging of partisans and, in a long central section, the Fosse Ardeatine
massacre – but at the end it turns towards a vision of the building of a new

310    Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies

 Rome, Open City

and better Italy out of the suffering and struggles of the Resistance. Unlike
Rome, Open City, though, Days of Glory does not evade the issue of the active
complicity of Italian fascists with the occupying Germans. Indeed, it makes
that complicity central to its narrative, showing the trial and execution by
firing squad of Pietro Caruso, the chief of police who collaborated with the
Germans in drawing up lists of victims for the Fosse Ardeatine, the execu-
tions of two other prominent fascists and the first moments of the lynching of
Donato Carretta, the governor of Regina Coeli prison, by an enraged crowd.
Indeed, the film’s depiction both of the violence of the German occupation
and of Italian collusion with it is unremitting.
What conclusions might be drawn from this account of Rome, Open City
before and after Neorealism? First, that if there was a category into which it
was originally slotted it was an international one, that of the resistance film,
rather than a national one, of a cinema of rebirth, which became critically
established only a few years later. Second, that the category Neorealism desig-
nated a shared belief in a certain kind of alternative filmmaking, in opposition
to the cinema associated with fascism, and it was this, together with a few
loose internal characteristics – social setting and subject matter, character,
dialogue – that held it together as a category both for filmmakers who asso-
ciated themselves with it and for critics who advocated for it. Internally,
however, that is to say in terms of the style and the politics of the indi-
vidual films that composed it, it was never a very coherent category. Third,
Rome, Open City really was more hybrid in style than some of the other
films associated with Neorealism, including the two that Rossellini made
immediately after it.

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Suggested citation
Forgacs, D. (2018), ‘Rome, Open City: Before and after Neorealism’, Journal of
Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 6:3, pp. 301–13, doi: 10.1386/jicms.6.3.301_1

Contributor details
David Forgacs holds the Guido and Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò Chair of
Contemporary Italian Studies at New York University. His publications include
Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge
University Press, 2014), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold
War (with Stephen Gundle, Indiana University Press, 2007), Italian Culture in
the Industrial Era (Manchester University Press, 1990) and The Antonio Gramsci
Reader (ed., 2nd ed., New York University Press, 2000). His work on cinema
includes a book on Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta and a co-edited book
on Rossellini (both BFI Publishing, 2000), essays on Michelangelo Antonioni
(2000, 2009, 2011) and Gillo Pontecorvo (2007) and full-length audio commen-
taries for the DVD and Blu-ray discs of Ossessione (with Lesley Caldwell), Il
Gattopardo (with Rossana Capitano), Il deserto rosso and Il conformista.
Contact: Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, 24 West 12th
Street, New York, NY 10011, USA.
E-mail: david.forgacs@nyu.edu

David Forgacs has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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