Rome Open City

With Europe thinking it may be a good idea to replace the social safety net in order to build tanks for peace, lets travel back in time to 1944, to Rome, to get an inkling of what a happy war playground looks like. What made Rome Open City remarkable was not only the fact it was actually shot about 6 months before the war’s end, and not only that it helped define the realist style of filmmaking we see in Curb your enthusiasm, and not only because apart from Anna Magnani it’s mainly non actors improvising with what ever they find on the ground, and not only that it looks the like film was processed in a laundry sink, but more interestingly its a film about italians fighting Nazis. Shooting began in January 1945, the nazis were belly up by then. The yanks are occupying and Mussolini still had 3 months to make merry before he’s corpse was hung upside from a petrol station. Less than a year ealier the fascists and the nazis were still friends, albeit quite strained. The films coming out then had the british, the yanks, the greeks, the commies as the bad guys. Now the heroes are fighting nazis! What does this tell us about alianses and allegiances and the shifts and turns of the elites and prols? Catch-22 was a whole book and movie on this idea. Rosallini worked with Fellini and the world discovered italian cinema. And it’s well under two hours. CINEMATEQUE presents, Rome Open City.