A Film Canon

Rome, Open City brings both the occupied Italian capital and the bodies of its inhabitants into traumatic topological relief, producing a raw, naked vulnerability encapsulated in Rossellini's proclivities for shooting on location, non-professional actors and (partial) improvisation, and only reinforced by the variable quality of film stock to which he had access. That said, there is a strong melodramatic dimension, producing a series of fairly predictable oppositions, all of which centre on that between lover and informer. Nevertheless, Rossellini raises melodrama to such a pitch as to acknowledge its irrealistic subtext, which, combined with his burgeoning neorealistic vision, envisages surrealism - a reality so real that it ceases to be familiar - as the central characteristic of the occupied experience; a skewing of everything into so many furtive, chaotic point-of-view shots from stairwells, street corners and upper storey windows. Not does this produce the most shocking images of violence and torture since The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, but it projects them onto the cityscape, which is thereby transformed into a single, raw nerve, as well as its Nazi inhabitants, who all take on the abstracted evil of so many rogue surgeons. Hence the curious emptiness of one Nazi's reflections on his party's limitations, offered, as they are, with a rhetorical flourish that partakes of the more general, even homosexual, decadence that is attributed to the Reich, and against which Rossellini's grittiness, which approaches banality (especially in the opening act, which seems almost deliberately slow and disorienting, as if to establish a cushion for subsequent horrors to puncture) is defined.