10. Roma, Città Aperta (Rome, Open City - 1945), dir. Roberto Rossellini

[strange_complex]

IMDb page here; Wikipedia page here. Watched at home on a video borrowed from the Edward Boyle library, as practice for my Italian listening exam next Friday.

I picked this up fairly randomly in the Edward Boyle library, on the basis that it had that seductive word - Roma - in the title, and looked from the testimonials on the box as though it was

Comments

[haematoma]

Sounds pretty good...but I don't think I'll be able to get away with watching Baise-Moi again as revision for my French oral :P !

[strange_complex]

Well, as long as the people are speaking French, it can't harm!

[rosamicula]

I studied this film as part of my Italian course at Uni. It seems to have a marked a turning point in both the Italian cinema and the way Italians began to view themselves after the war. It is, indeed, a damn fine film.

[strange_complex]

Yes, it definitely did a lot for my understanding of Italian history in that period. I was interested by the way the Fascists had become viewed in the same light as the Germans, bundled together as a common enemy, and especially by the point the German commander made about how monarchists and communists might be collaborating together in the resistance movement, but would soon break apart otherwise. The whole thing felt very self-aware, and much more insightful than something like, say Tea with Mussolini (although obviously that isn't trying to do the same thing).

[rosamicula]

Cf your comments about British war films, one of my Italain lecturers said he envied the British because their artists and film-makers could depict the war so simplistically and were much more able to come to terms with it - even to the point of quite open discussion of culpability for aspects like teh Dresden bombings. He even said that, artistically and psychologically, Germany was in a better position than Italy because one simply blame being swept up in a national frenzy and a complete culpability, but Italians, throughout the war, had a level of choice denied the Germans, and the Fascists were thus perceived to be the enemy wthin, the enemy of their own country, when the war was over in a way that they never were at the time. Films like Citta Aperta attempt to build up what de Gaule called 'the myth of the resistance' but do so with many shades more realism than French or British films of the same period

[strange_complex]

Yes, Ladri di Bicicletta is in the library, and kept coming up on the same websites I looked at about Citta Aperta. I didn't pick it up yesterday, as I decided to limit myself to three films, in order to stand a realistic chance of watching them all before the 7-day loan period expires. But I might get it on the next visit.

Tea with Mussolini is indeed perfectly good in its own way - but obviously it is much more British in its perspective. Citta Aperta felt a bit more like being invited in by the Italians to their own viewpoint - and I appreciated that.