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Prudence, Resistance and Charity in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City

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Prudence, Resistance and Charity in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City Prudence, Resistance and Charity in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City Michael S. Kochin Department of Political Science Tel Aviv University [email protected] With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a complex plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City founded the movement known as "Italian Neo-Realism," whose echoes in serious film continue to this day. Yet in addition to its cinematic genius, the film offers an effective presentation of the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance, no matter how edifying or true, that Italy and Europe can be rebuilt, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian commands to "love your enemies" and to "forgive those who trespass against us." By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece I examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found. 1 Roberto Rossellini's 1945 Rome, Open City is a film about Nazi oppression and Italian resistance. The film teaches that resistance to oppression is noble, and frequently humanly irrepressible, although often childish and futile. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance, no matter how edifying or true, that Italy and Europe can be rebuilt, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to "love your enemies." Rossellini shows how one can acknowledge the human weakness that makes us not just resist, but hate the sinner, while at the same time acknowledging this hate as a passion the Christian teaching calls upon men and women to overcome. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece I propose to examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found. The film was recognized as Christian, perhaps most acutely by the Marxist critics who condemned it.1 Yet the film's teaching for the Europe of Year Zero, 1945, was so at odds with its own time and our own, it is hardly understood even today, more than six decades after its release. Roberto Rossellini was a Roman playboy and a product of the Fascist regime's efforts to beat Hollywood at its own game. Mussolini's Italy created the first modern film school in the West, the Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico, headed by his son, Vittorio, and instituted the first system of protection and taxation to support a local film industry, thereby providing the model for postwar cultural policies in Western Europe (and Canada and Israel, for that matter). The great question about the postwar Italian cinema is whether it is part of antifascism, or part of the legacy of fascism. 2 Certainly Rossellini, like Renoir and Eisenstein, was politically quite flexible, but over an even bigger range. 3 His first war trilogy was made under (and supported the politics of) the Fascist regime. His first film, La nave bianca (The White Fleet ) shows the Italian navy functioning as efficiently as battleship Potemkin after the mutiny, and I am told has large debts to Eisenstein. His second film, Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns ), displays the Italian war effort in Greece, and Rossellini's third 2 film, L'uomo dalla croce (The Man with a Cross ) presents the war in Russia as a literal crusade against international Bolshevism, and in centering around a martyr-priest killed by Italy's godless enemies anticipates the plot of Rome, Open City (Liehm 1984, 46; Bondanella 2004, 56-58). But it is his 1945 Rome Open City (Roma, città aperta , also known in English as Open City ) that was the first Italian film of the sound era to achieve genuine international recognition. The film was a box office and critical smash in Italy, the United States, and France, where it received the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1946. It is the film that launched the movement that would become known as "Italian neorealism" -- where the defining features of neorealism are an encounter with contemporary social or political problems, the use of non- actors and ensemble cast, and, technically speaking, long takes rather than visible montage or invisible editing. 4 Rome, Open City is generally regarded as one of the most influential films in the history of cinema. The film uses contemporary events, location shots, scenes from ordinary life ranging from two girls carrying a giant water jug, to a toddler sitting on a potty, and a complex plot that mixes slapstick comedy, tragedy, and passion play. For purposes of this paper, I wish to attend not only to the film's cinematic genius, but principally to its teaching on politics: indeed, it may have been the most effective presentation of the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics in the 20th century. 5 The problem the film sets for itself is no less than to refound European civilization after the war. What is the situation left by the war? It is well set out by Hartmann, the only German officer in the film who is also a gentleman, in a speech responding to his Gestapo superior Bergmann's claim that the Germans are a master race: Wir bringen es nicht weiter als morden, morden, morden! Ganz Europa haben wir mit Leichen übersäht, und aus diesen Kriegen wächst unaufhaltsam 3 der Hass, Hass, überall Hass! Wir werde vom Hass wertilgt ohne Hoffnung.... Alle werden wir sterben, sterben ohne Hoffnung. We bring nothing but death, death, death! We have filled all Europe with corpses. And from these wars spring hate, hate, everywhere hate. We will be wiped out by this hatred, there is no hope for us!.... We will all die, die without hope (Rossellini 1985, 89). 6 Hartmann is worldly, and his speech about hate reflects the world's wisdom -- he is also the instrument of worldly wisdom in that he is the one who actually kills the martyr-priest Don Pietro with a coup-de-grace pistol shot to the head when the Italian firing squad under Hartmann's command deliberately muffs the job. One might think that Hartmann's hopelessness is only for Germans, but that would be too easy a solution and is denied by the film. If the Germans are exterminated by the hate of their victims and enemies, which is perhaps no less than they deserve, then even the avengers will drown in their own righteous wrath, Rossellini warns us. In the face of this problem, the task is to find a way to live, and, as Don Pietro puts it in his last speech to a human being, the task is not to die well, but to live well. To live well for many in Europe after 1945, to live well despite your past as one of the "Tedeschi" or "Fascisti," as (German) Nazi or (Italian) Nazi collaborator, or, for that matter, as Stalinist or Stalinist collaborator. Like many great works, Rome Open City has a reduplicating plot, or rather, its plot lies in the enmeshing of multiple doubles. At one level the plot appears to be the tale of three couples: two Italian, Pina and Francesco, Marina and Manfredi; and one German who destroys their hopes, the Gestapo colonel Bergmann and his lesbian sidekick Ingrid. 7 Pina (Anna Magnani) is the widow of a pilot, mother of one son, Marcello, and pregnant and due to be married to her lover, the underground printer Francesco. It is the story of this family, about to be joined in marriage but instead shattered by the Gestapo murder of 4 Pina, that frames the movie. Yet Pina and Francesco are in a way only the above-stairs echo of a more significant -- or seemingly more significant -- couple, the actress Marina (Maria Michi), and her lover, the Communist and resistance leader known by his nom-de-guerre of "Giorgio Manfredi." 8 Marina, actress and whore, betrays Manfredi to the Gestapo -- we will encounter the same actress in a similar role in the first sequel to Rome Open City , Rossellini's 1946 Paisà , in an episode set months after the liberation of Rome. 9 Manfredi is the film's "McGuffin," he is whom all seek, the resistance leader pursued by the Gestapo and their puppets in the police of Rome, whom Don Pietro risks his life futilely to preserve. He is the seeming key, the man on whom the future ostensibly depends: as Francesco says, Manfredi can explain, where he cannot, why the "winter" of Nazi occupation will eventuate in a "spring" of a better future: Pina: But when will it end? Sometimes I just can't go on. This winter it seems like it'll never end! Francesco: It'll end, Pina, and spring will come back, and it'll be more beautiful than ever, because we'll be free. We have to believe it, we have to want it! See, I know these things, I feel them, but I can't explain it. Manfredi'd be able to, he's been to university, he's traveled. He can talk so well. But I think that's the way it is, that we shouldn't be afraid now or in the future. Because we're in the right, the right's on our side. 10 One can see why as late as the 1990's Angela Dalle Vacche could still be fooled by the apparent plot: "Manfredi in Open City ," she writes, "embodies the nation as a whole, not just the working class" (Dalle Vacche 1992, 182-183). The enigma of the film is to understand why Manfredi (and his like) are not the salvation of Italy or Europe, despite his manifest heroism, why the efforts to protect him, to save him, are ultimately meaningless, why their failure is meaningless, and what the film offers in their place as meaningful.
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