ABSTRACT
Roma, città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) is undeniably Rossellini’s most “classical” work, as reflected both in its melodramatic story, which pits the uniformly good Italians against the evil and sexually deviant Germans, and an editing structure which constructs a continuous space and time, forcefully linking camera movement and shot changes to narrative action and logical relations of cause and effect. It is significant, however, that the immediate reception of the film, in both Italy and abroad, underemphasized the film’s classical elements, claiming that this film signalled the birth not only of a new Italian cinema, but also of a new, anti-Fascist, postwar national collective. As a result of its identification by critics and audiences of the time as the starting point and centerpiece of Italian neorealism in the postwar era, the film’s legacy has had and continues to have a strong influence on interpretations of Rossellini’s subsequent works. Already with Paisà, released only one year later and continuing the theme of the German occupation, Rossellini’s style underwent a radical transformation, becoming much more episodic and elliptical. In contrast to Rome Open City, where the powerful depiction of the Roman cityscape is a function of the dramatic events witnessed there, in Paisà the exploration of the urban and natural landscape becomes a dominant structuring element in itself.
