Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy (The Criterion Collection) (DVD)

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In the spirit of Wittgenstein, it´s important to note that the category of "neo-realism" has no single defining quality but rather a series of shared family resemblances which are present in varying combinations and in varying degrees in different films. Some of these common traits: the use of non-professional actors, location shooting, working-class characters, and a concern with everyday living conditions for these characters. As the term implies, these are films that profess to deal with "reality" rather than the wish-fulfillment of the dream factories of Hollywood and many other national cinemas.

As many critics have noted, "Rome, Open City" (1946), one of the cornerstone films of neo-realism, shares few of these qualities. For starters, director Roberto Rossellini chose not just professional actors for most of the film´s key roles, but cast two stars then identified for their comedy work: Aldo Fabrizi (still a relative newcomer but already known for light-hearted fare) and Anna Magnani, already a star and, not coincidentally, Rossellini´s latest love interest. Furthermore, many of the film´s major scenes were actually shot in studios, particularly those featuring the fey and venomous German officer Major Bergman (Harry Feist) and his butch assistant Ingrid (Giavanna Galletti.) Rossellini´s use of characters named Ingrid and Bergman can only be deemed one of the great coincidences in cinema history. Either that or a great pickup line.

But the reason "Rome, Open City," set during the Nazi occupation of Rome, proved so game-changing is that, despite major stars and the preponderance of studio shots, it is the "real" scenes that linger in the mind. Images that endure: grimy, poorly-lit stairwells, bombed-out buildings, a riot at a bakery, people scrambling across crumbling bridges to beat early evening curfew. And above all, one of the most famous scenes in movie history, that of Anna Magnani racing after a truck holding her captured fiancé only to be gunned down in the street, an act made even more brutal by the fact that Rossellini never shows these shots, only cutting them in on the soundtrack as Magnani collapses, a star abruptly cut down in the middle of the film, fifteen years before Hitchcock pulled off a similar shower shocker.

Moments like these constitute only a small part of a film that otherwise, at least seen today, looks like a relatively conventional studio melodrama, but these moments are so powerful that it´s easy to understand the effusive rhetoric the film has inspired. Serge Daney, writing much later, called it "the beginning of modern cinema." Andre Bazin, who saw cinema´s real power as rooted in its mechanical (photographic) ability to capture reality, waxed rhapsodic about Rossellini on multiple occasions because of his ability (along with other neo-realists) to produce films that looked more like reportage than fictional creations. For Godard: "All roads lead to ´Rome, Open City´."

"Paisan" (1946), Rossellini´s follow-up, qualifies as more "classically" neo-realist (as neo-realism came to be defined retroactively) with its almost entirely non-professional or virtually unknown actors chosen primarily for their appearances. The film follows the Allied invasion of occupied Italy from Sicily up North as the liberators are greeted with understandably mixed emotions by the populace. This is a film shot in the ruins of a war-ravaged country, ruins created by Allied bombing, where homeless children hustle to make a living and the war stubbornly refuses to end on schedule, often just too late for many of the characters.

The film is broken into six segments, most of which feature potential relationships between the Americans and the locals, relationships that will not come to fruition because of the immediate demands of war and, just as importantly, because of the almost impenetrable barriers of language and culture. Love, friendship and camaraderie take root but don´t blossom, though hope remains that conditions will be more fertile in just a few months. This hope is expressed, albeit very tentatively, in one scene where culture clash produces a sense of wonder instead of providing an impediment. When three army chaplains enter a monastery, they are amazed at the idea of a five-hundred year old building and one that people even live in! The structure pre-dates America yet: "It doesn´t show its age." Events take a more depressing turn when the monks are shocked to find out that one of the chaplains is (gasp) a Protestant and the other is (double gasp) a Jew, but that brief moment of genuine awe and respect endures. Hope is at least a possibility even after the grim ending of the film´s final sequence.

Hope is a much sparser commodity in "Germany Year Zero" (1948) set in the rubble of post-war Berlin. A defeated people huddle together to share meager resources that are woefully insufficient to sustain even the depleted populace (one mostly free of males aged 18-45 or so.) Though war has ended, ideology endures. Carpet bombing can´t bury a generation of poisonous lies, and the film´s 11-year old protagonist Edmund is a product of this system. Raised on Nazi propaganda and encouraged by the few predatory adults who pay any attention to him, he believes it is moral to let the weak die to make a better world for the strong (i.e. the lucky) which brings him to a terrifying decision regarding his invalid father.

Like "Paisan," "Germany Year Zero" has the authenticity generated by location shooting. As Edmund weaves through the city´s shattered streets and decrepit courtyards, it´s hard not to think about how much fun this all might be for a boy with a different temperament. What a fine game it would be to chase your friends through twisted back alleyways and abandoned buildings no longer guarded by territorial adults who now have other more immediate duties to occupy their thoughts. But Edmund bears the self-imposed duty of defending not just his family but the regime he has grown up in, a belief system that needs to die (though such a thing is never truly possible) before the country can begin anew – in year zero. So there´s no joy in Edmund´s unsupervised wanderings, just mounting burdens that 11-year shoulders and an 11-year old mind aren´t built to carry.

Adding to the immediacy of "Rome, Open City," perhaps as much as any aesthetic choice, was the fact that it began filming in early 1945 when the war was still raging in much of Italy and was screened in the months immediately after the Nazi capitulation. Talk about the ultimate "torn from the headlines" movie. That Rossellini was only able to shoot the film during this lean time by scraping together mismatched film stocks of varying quality only adds to the legend of the film. While some audiences were discomforted, the film wound up being a big box office hit as well as a critical one, a testament to the populist appeal of neo-realist cinema.

After WW2 it was no longer sufficient to use cinema solely to create escapist fare. Hollywood candy floss would always play a vital role, the dominant role in fact, but the 20th century art form of cinema had to deal with the realities of everyday life after global annihilation had barely been averted (and at the hands of a regime that used cinema to chilling effect.) Nor was it enough to simply tackle "tough subjects" in the socially earnest but studio-artificial Hollywood tradition. The apparatus of the cinema itself needed to leave the studios and meet the world rather than simply re-create it. And it is this moral imperative at the heart of neo-realism that has been echoed in virtually every film movement that has followed: cinema verite, the French New Wave, New German Cinema, and so on.

If "Rome, Open City" wasn´t actually the beginning of modern cinema, it was a beginning, one of the films that, along with "Paisan" and "Germany Year Zero" and other neo-realist films, transformed the ways in which future generations of filmmakers would think about the relationship between cinema and the real world. The last sixty plus years of world cinema would not have looked the same without Rossellini´s pioneering work.