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Review Reviewed Work(s): 's War Trilogy: Open City by Guiseppe Amato, Ferruccio De Martino, Rod Geiger and Roberto Rossellini; by Roberto Rossellini and Rod Geiger; Germany Year Zero by Roberto Rossellini Review by: Adam Bingham Source: Cinéaste, Vol. 35, No. 4 (FALL 2010), pp. 56-58 Published by: Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41690953 Accessed: 26-03-2019 08:36 UTC

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This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:36:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms variations on and ruptures in the vocabulary Roberto of genre cinema à la Godard. Rather, they evince a raw vitality that almost transcends Rossellini's questions of form, style and artistic predis- position. It was a matter of necessity - of War Trilogy working on short ends of film stock and Rome Open City shooting on city streets wrought with Produced by Guisappe Amato, Ferruccio De destruction and deprivation - because for Martino, Rod Geiger and Roberto Rossellini; Rossellini in particular these films simply directed by Roberto Rossellini; written by had to be made, their subjects demanding to , with the participation of be brought to international attention. ; cinematography by Ubaldo The narrative of Rome Open City is pre- Arata; edited by ; music by cisely framed between the opening shot of Renzo Rossellini; starring , marching German soldiers and its exact , Marcello Pagliaro and Harry mirror image of a group of children (who Feist. DVD, B&W, 103 min., Italian with have been working for the resistance) walk- optional English subtitles, 1945. ing away from the site of an execution. Located between these contrasting pictures Paisan of a dark past and a potentially positive Produced by Roberto Rossellini and Rod future lies what is, in effect, a thriller plot Geiger; directed by Roberto Rossellini; concerning the efforts of the occupying Nazi written by Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, forces to apprehend members of the Italian Rod Geiger, , Klaus Mann, underground, including a priest, and of the Marcello Pagliaro and Roberto Rossellini; web of ties and personal relationships that cinematography by ; edited by both help and threaten the resistance effort. Eraldo Da Roma; music by Renzo Rossellini; This film was, in a sense, Year Zero, as starring Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Roberto Rossellini, circa the prevailing industry had been unequivo- Dotts M. Johnson, Alfonso Bovino, Maria (photo courtesy of Photofest). cally disrupted by the Germans and then Michi, Gar Moore and Achille Siviero. closed down by the Allied forces for its fas- DVD, B&W, 126 min., Italian with cist connections, leaving Rossellini among a optional English subtitles, 1946. of the canonized neorealist lineage and the select few directors (De Sica, Giuseppe De repeated pronouncements of critics such as Santi s, , Mario Camerini) Germany Year Zero Colin McCabe, who has championed Ross- implicitly charged with rebuilding Italian Produced by Roberto Rossellini; directed ellini as the single most influential European cinema from the very bottom. by Roberto Rossellini; written by Roberto filmmaker of all time. In spite of such Like , Rossellini had been Rossellini, Max Colpet and ; acclaim and significance, however, what is a part of this fascist-run commercial cinema, cinematography by Robert Jullard; edited bystill striking about Rome Open City and working on commercial features throughout Eraldo Da Roma; music by Renzo Rossellini; Paisan in particular is how lighdy and unos- the war years. In particular, he directed starring Edmond Meschke, Ernst Pittschau, tentatiously they shoulder their status as humanistic, patriotic, technically accomplished Ingetraud Hinze, Franz-Martin Gröger and groundbreaking, canonical works. These are but largely unambitious and impersonal war Erich Gühne. DVD, B&W, 73 min., Italian not exploratory experiments in form and dramas like The Pilot Returns (1942), The with optional English subtitles, 1948. technique in the mold of Welles, nor playful White Ship (1942, a glorified to the point of A Criterion Collection three-disc box-set release, distributed by Image Entertainment, www.image-entertainment.com.

Although preceded by several notable works that can reasonably stake their claim to having ushered into Italian cinema - most overtly Antonioni's documentary short Gente del po (1943) and Luchino Vis- conti^ proto-noir Ossessione (1942) - Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy remains, along with Vittorio De Sica's (1948), the movement's central, defining point of reference. In his recent documen- tary My , says he learned who he was and where he came from only after watching Rome Open City on television with his family; whilst in one of the accompanying interviews includ- ed by Criterion in this box set, film historian Adriano Aprà enthuses that "it's one of the most perfect films... Rossellini ever made." This trilogy thus comes with consider- able weight and baggage. Indeed, like (1941) or À bout de souffle (1960), these films are difficult to watch today with The pregnant Pina (Anna Magnani) is the fiancée of Francesco, a member of the any real objectivity, away from the twin pillars resistance to the German Occupation, in Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945).

56 CINEASTE, Fall 2010

This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:36:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms her partner and his associates is always shown alongside the domestic chores that keep a semblance of normality in her life amidst the increasing chaos in the city out- side. Magnani's career-transforming and persona-defining performance adds immea- surably here (this was the key stepping stone between her early work and her most iconic role as Pasolini's Mamma Roma almost two decades later). Like Ricci's wife in Bicycle Thieves (1948), this character is a stable, pragmatic, levelheaded rock for those around her, and the actress' natural warmth, humor and humility gradually assume cen- ter stage and the chief, empathetic point of human contact. Made immediately in the wake of Rome Open Cityvnth international investment and a much bigger budget, Paisan builds on the style and central theme of its predecessor in a number of ways. Despite Bordwell and Thompson's curious claim in Film History that it is the most documentarylike film of the trilogy, it in fact overtly anticipates what would become arguably the defining aspect of Rossellini's modernist cinema of the Partisans in the Po Valley episode of Rossellini's Palean (1946) (photo courtesy of Photofest). ensuing decade in films such as Stromboli (1950), Europa 51 (1952), and Voyage to propagandistic account of naval life) and Thankfully, alongside this generic frame- Italy (1954): namely, the layering of a fictive, The Man with the Cross (1943). From the work and conservative piety is an unforced, ostensibly melodramatic, central story upon opening scene of Rome Open City, depicting rigorously unsentimental gutter-eye view of a discursive foundation that emphasizes the a German raid on a flat from which a prom- the hardships suffered in the immediate notion of a creative intervention in and inent resistance fighter has just escaped, it is postwar period, with a contrapuntal empha- interrogation of reality, of realism on screen, clear that a practiced commercial sensibility sis on the almost banal, quotidian aspects of rather than just a representation of the real. is at work. Indeed, two of the film's key mere survival that support and sustain the The narrative is comprised of six distinct, actors, Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, ostensibly more heroic efforts of the resis- largely novelettish episodes between were by 1945 established comedy performers, tance. Pina, for example, is first introduced and the Americans who are liberating the while the other key roles of the resistance gathering bread following the looting of a country from the Germans. Almost all are hero Giorgio and his girlfriend Marina are bakery, and thereafter the help she offers to connected by a newsreel account of the star roles that one could easily imagine hav- ing been played by, say, Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, or Italy's own and . Similarly, the chief antagonists in the film - the Nazis Major Bergmann and his assistant Ingrid - are overtly villainous figures in the Holly- wood mold of Claude Rains. They remain largely ensconced in their headquarters, cut off from the reality outside and with the for- mer in particular directing operations and looming over the city like a veritable Dr. Mabuse made Italian incarnate. Both Bergmann and Ingrid in fact figure in an uncomfortably reactionary discourse on Rossellims part in Rome Open City, one that has tended to be skirted over in those numerous accounts of the film that have stressed its révo- lu tio nary humanism and social relevance. They are both more or less explicitly codified as homosexual, an association of sexual oth- erness (deviance) with literal evil that stands beside Maria Michi's selfish vamp on the one hand and Anna Magnarus mother-and- wife-to-be on the other in a dichotomous tri- angle that, along with the heroic figure of the priest, becomes synonymous with dogmatic religious, conservative values and sermoniz- ing that leaves an unpleasant residue on an Karl-Heinz Koehler (Franz Martin Grûger, left), a German soldier in hiding, and his younger otherwise hardheaded and bighearted film. brother Edmund (Edmund Meschke) in Germany Yaar Zero (1948) (photo courtesy of Photofest). CINEASTE, Fall 2010 57

This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:36:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Allied forces' progression through Italy, ment. It is the logical end point, the ultimate from Sicily in the South to the Po Delta in the purge of postwar desolation, and it is fitting Belzec North (both paradigmatic neorealist locales). that Rossellini subsequently moved away Directed by Guillaume Moscovite; They are further linked thematically by a from the city and out to the Amalfi Coast to cinematography by Guillaume Schiffman, study of progressive communication and make The Miracle (1949). Stóphen Massis and Carlo Varini; edited by understanding amongst the Americans and Rossellini thus brings a far more marked Lise Beaulieu. DVD, color, 100 min., in Polish, Italians, and also of the primacy of percep- ambiguity to bear in this particular film, Hebrew, and French with English subtitles, tion and point of view, the often unreconciled something apparent in the way he builds on 2005. Distributed by Menemsha Rims, gulf between what is seen and what is real. the troubling sexual component of Rome www.menemshafilms.com. Beginning with a story that explicitly Open City . The young protagonist, Edmund, foregrounds a mistaken attribution of mur- is accosted and befriended in the street by his Between March and December 1942, on der on the part of the Americans, each old school teacher, a pedophile (indeed someone a trapezoidal stretch of sandy soil measuring vignette points up the extent to which its who appears to live in a coven of pedophilia 862 by 902 feet, a small team of about two characters bring specific suppositions to in a large abandoned house). Rather than a dozen SS euthanasia technocrats, aided by a bear on the stories in which they are simplistically coterminous presentation of corps of vicious Ukrainian and Volks- involved and on the other characters that Nazism and sexual perversity, however, it is deutsche guards, murdered as many as they meet. For instance, the black G.I. who revealed that this teacher kept Edmund out 600,000 Jewish civilians and an uncertain does not recognize the dire poverty in which of the Hitler Youth, while the boy's brother number of Roma "Gypsies." This forlorn the young boy who steals his boots lives, and bed-ridden, slowly dying father (whose plot, located on a short railway spur just off demanding rather naively to see his mother physical ailment is juxtaposed with the the main line between Lublin and Lvov, was and father and believing him to be simply teacher'sa sickness) were ideologically-com- named Belzec, after an obscure Polish forming delinquent. Only with the final, in many mitted Nazis, the former to the extent that village lying just four hundred meters away. ways most powerful and moving, episode he remains frightened to leave the house lest Over the course of six months, trainload (which details partisan conflict with German he be arrested for "fighting to the end." after trainload of emaciated, terrified human forces), does Rossellini dispense with this Edmund himself further underlines this beings from Poland, Germany, Austria, and theme, much as he dispenses with a discur- ambivalence. A neat, fresh-looking blonde- the Soviet Union arrived in cattle cars at sive prologue by moving directly from one haired boy, he balances a potentially sym- Belzec after having been confined by the location to another, one story to another. At bolic innocence of spirit with an Aryan Germans in the ghettos large and small that this point it is as though die film has become a physiognomic ideal that is made clear when served as the first stage of their carefully documentary, with the Italians and Ameri- he becomes susceptible to the survival of the planned "final solution to the Jewish question" cans working in close, productive unison fittest discourse expounded by his teacher. in Europe. Reassured by the SS commandant against a common enemy and the narrative That is, when he finds himself ideologically and his staff that they would be put to work methodology simply following suit and corrupted by words (and this after a speech after a hygienic shower, the victims undressed becoming a concise objective correlative. by Hitler has been heard booming around en masse without incident and then were Building on this final episode of Paisan, the shell of a building on a record player). It harried with bayonets and whips through a Germany Year Zero confuses and conflates is a potent moment, one of this trilogy's narrow, camouflaged channel until reaching the boundaries between documentary and most iconic, and a succinct summation of one of the largest structures in the camp. fiction even further. Its story of a young boy the direct, unadorned artistry that many see Measuring eighty feet long and forty feet and his family struggling to survive in the as one of Rossellini's greatest strengths. 'wide, the building contained six rooms utter devastation of postwar Berlin achieves Extras-wise, a balanced, complementary bearing signs labeled "Bath and Inhalation," a symbiosis between the two forms to the mix of new and archival material gives a but which were actually gas chambers. Into extent that it may be considered both a film useful glimpse of the reaction to these films these rooms, the Nazis forced Jewish workers to about documenting social reality and a doc- over the years since they irrevocably pump exhaust fumes from a large engine umentary about filmmaking within it, about changed the landscape of postwar European motor that asphyxiated all who had been shaping and sculpting fiction from fact. It is cinema. Of the latter, Rossellini himself fig- forced inside. The process took twenty minutes. also the first film in which the mature ures strongly - in a series of introductions to Hastily thrown into huge trenches nearly Rossellini style begins to take shape - long the three films made for French television in twenty feet deep, the corpses were exhumed takes and frequent sequence shots, mobile, 1963, and in a taped conversation from 1970 starting in November 1942 and cremated with discreetly distanced and observational cam- between the director and students at Rice gasoline and wood on open pyres built on erawork, and dedramatized narratives char- University. New material comes in the form railroad ties that burned for days and weeks acterized by digressive development, by ofan useful interviews with, and video essays on end, fouling the air for miles around. By accruement of detail over incident, chronol- by, numerous film scholars, while an added the Spring of 1943, Jewish slave laborers buried ogy over causality. From the opening travel- interview with the Taviani brothers (directors or scattered the ashes along with any bone ling shots around the city - shots that of Padre Padrone [1977] and Night of the fragments that the flames had not consumed. implicitly seem to be searching for a subject Shooting Stars [1982]) adds a moving per- The workers were shipped off to the sister amongst the ruins - Rossellini's restless, eye- sonal valediction to the otherwise analytical death camp of Sobibór to be murdered; the land level, reactive rather than autonomous cam- and anecdotal nature of the special features. was then plowed up and new stands of young era looks forward to Truffauťs in Les quatre A 2001 documentary on Rossellini, and treesa were planted. In 1944, the Germans cents coups (1959) in defining its horizons featurette and commentary specific to Rome installed a Ukrainian family of formers to pre- along with those of its protagonist, in Open a City (the latter by Italian film scholar vent local Poles from prospecting for Jewish sense looking both at and with him simulta- Peter Bondanella taken from the 1995 valuables they mistakenly believed lay neously. In point of fact, given the preva- laserdisc release of the film) add further underneath the surface. All had more or less lence of children in neorealism - not only weight to what is a comprehensive package, been restored to what had been in 1939 before Rome Open City and Paisan but De Sica and and one that fills a significant gap left the byGerman assault on Poland. But for the 's The Children Are Watch- Criterion's hitherto narrow concentration memories of the local villagers and the testi- ing Us (1944) and Shoeshine (1946) - Ger- on Rossellini's later work for cinema and monies of three who escaped from the many Year Zero , with its shattering dénoue- television. One hopes that Stromboli and camp and somehow managed to survive the war, ment, may be taken as one of the works that Europa 51 in particular will follow soon. Belzec would likely have become an entirely for- brought the curtain down on the move- - Adam Bingham gotten chapter in the Nazis' war against the Jews.

58 CINEASTE, Fall 2010

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