Roma Città Aperta (1945)

Before viewing “Roma Città Aperta” I watched Martin Scorsese, narrating “My Voyage to Italy,” laud this exemplar of neo-realism to the heavens. Over and over, he marvelled at the way it presented a piece of real life. Cut to more sophisticated takes on the film – of course these harp on the film’s melodramatic aspects.

Furthermore the film is criticized for being a long bit of propaganda, a tribute to Stalin and the Catholic Church.

The film has also been compared to “The Birth of a Nation,” except that the group ludicrously caricatured is the Nazis, not slaves. The reviewers chastise the film’s cheerful application of every sorry old homosexual stereotype in the book. The mincing Bergmann, the campy but sinister lesbian Ingrid. The Nazis in general are portrayed as a godless hegemony of homosexuals, according to this reading. One reviewer sternly points out that the German watchword, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, shows that the film is gratuitously conservative. No, the Nazis were not really homosexuals, he argues, as if the argument is important.

The first two criticisms must be grouped. Of course the film is propagandistic. It was hardly created to offer a “slice” of everyday life in occupied Rome – not that any work of “realism” is ever offered without an agenda, simply to offer a picture of the real world. Such an intent would be doomed to failure, even if anyway were unsophisticated to have such an intent. The stunning thing about the comparison between Scorsese’s take and that of the more recent supposedly serious film critics is that they are equally convinced that “realism” is a style that should be employed exclusively within a film, independent of any other style. But why on earth would a neo-realistic film not also be melodramatic? Neo-realism in this context is, after all, a style. It is not an ideology. Melodrama is a style. Any decent artist systematically mixes styles. The assumption can only be that neo-realism is somehow genuinely “realistic,” an authentic ideology, and that adding “unrealistic” elements to it somehow damages it. Certainly realism can be an ideology, but it isn't here - this is a film that creates memories, a film of propaganda. It is not the exposition of a theory.

The argument that the homosexual allusions are unworthy ignores the joke. The Nazis were the most excessive imaginable variety of tough guys – the ultimate gay bashers. Remember, they did send gays to concentration camps. Who could resist taunting them as sad repressed versions of their deep anxieties? The mockery has nothing to say about gays and certainly nothing about gay stereotypes. It has a lot to say about Nazi ideas of homosexuality. No, of course the Nazis were not more or less inclined to homosexuality than any group of people. No one thinks that they were, least of all Rossellini. The point is to turn their insult back on them.

A strange to thing to enter into a film so alien from our mentality of unbridled consumerism , but, on second thought, not so strange. Because that society as it is given to us is filled with a constant excitement that far surpasses our current level – there is enough buzz to satisfy even people who spend the day surfing political blogs. War, one hears, is in fact generally long stretches of mind-numbing boredom with rare rare flashes of mortal danger. And yet the war we get here is heavy with meaning and heroism. Living through it is represented as interesting as reading breaking news reports all day long. But this of course is what a movie does – it condenses, and it attributes meaning. It does not really create knowledge, or, if it does, it is a very particular type of knowledge, a knowledge of what it means to have meaning in one’s life.

For modern viewers who have no need to redeem the Italians, the Catholic Church, or Stalin, the common criticisms of the film are simply trite. Does someone really think that the film is a realistic portrayal of life during the German occupation? I’m not sure why the point would even need to be made. What we do get from the film is a front row seat at a demonstration of meaning in the making – we witness the memory of the resistance as it is being created. We are accomplices. We enter into that suspension of disbelief, we cry, we let ourselves be entirely duped, watch while we are duped, and, in the process, we begin to understand why people need to create memories. This is the very essence of neo-realism. This is similar to the impulse that motors reality tv, which is of course no more realistic than any other tv show. But we are fully engaged in our own duping. We watch ourselves crying in a mirror, loving the sight of our own tears in the reflection, and, filled with self-pity, cry all the harder.