The Big Screen (33 page)

Something happened, which may have been a matter of self-discovery or simply that Rossellini found himself suddenly in a situation of chaos where life hung in the balance and his country's future seemed up for grabs. So in the years when Visconti did very little, Rossellini became a driven man, begging, borrowing, or stealing ends of unexposed celluloid (or claiming that), wangling equipment, and devoting it all to
Rome, Open City
(1945). It began as a silent film, just because they had no means of recording sound—all that was dubbed in later. Just two months after the actual liberation of Rome, they began shooting a story of Rome and its resistance under the Germans. Yes, the movie looked rough and awkward sometimes, if only because of the physical difficulties it had faced. It felt “real” in that it told a story of resistance, occupation, torture, and sacrifice soon after the actual events. But if you look coolly at the film, you will observe that Rossellini has a natural facility with the camera. For example, look at the camera movement that links the several rooms at Nazi headquarters so that we feel the shocking adjacency of torture and relaxation; and witness the bravura melodrama of the scene where Anna Magnani is shot down in the street. And why are all the women in the film so attractive?

Magnani is an important figure in this story. Born in Rome (or Alexandria in Egypt—there were rumors) in 1908, she had been working since the early 1930s, in musicals, comedy, and drama. She had been married to the director Goffredo Alessandrini, and a star of the fascist period, making many successful films—including De Sica's
Teresa Venerdì
(1941). To most non-Italians, Magnani was a scorching presence and a newcomer in
Rome, Open City
, but she was an established actress, and by then she was also Rossellini's mistress. He was well aware of her glorious excessiveness: “You feel that she's extremely capable but in certain films it is too much. If you are fed too much cream, after a bit you don't want any more cream.” Still, they were a team. When they ran out of money—as they ran out of everything except imagination—Rossellini and Magnani sold many of their possessions to keep
Open City
moving.

The film opened in Rome in September 1945 and in New York (cut by some fifteen minutes because of violence) in February 1946. The New York Film Critics Circle voted it Best Foreign Film of 1946, and it won a prize at the resumed Cannes Festival in the same year. More to the point, it got a limited release in the United States, and thus it was that a young woman in Los Angeles, passing the time of a bored day, could walk in on the picture and be changed by it. Her name was Ingrid Bergman.

In 1946, Rossellini made
Paisà
, which is the most audacious and journalistic of his early films, and which was surely influenced by his success on
Open City
. The most realistic of its departures is to forsake any overall story and to opt instead for six separate episodes or anecdotes that, when put together, reflect the Italy of the resistance era. In part this film was spurred on by the agency (and funds) of Rod E. Geiger, an American GI who had fought in Italy and was convinced that the world needed to see the true story, and by the assistance of the American writer Alfred Hayes. There were conflicts over where Rossellini found the actors: he said he had just looked around in the countryside and used faces he liked; but it's clear that several of the performers had experience. In the end, this issue is a conundrum: amateur actors can be carried in a film only if they play, if they work on-screen. And professional actors are bearable only if they can make the cream seem like milk.

Paisà
was less successful everywhere, but by the account of anyone who knew Italy, it was far more accurate. It teaches us that the structure of a story is a profound element in perceived reality. It also helps us see that “realism” is a purpose that grows out of our political needs or wishes more than improved accuracy or candor. Like any treatment, filmmaking is selective and reveals only predetermined choices. The widespread view after the war was that movies—the movies of the war years and before—had never bothered to treat the real issues, and that had made war and its distress more likely. But after the war, and in Italy above all, there was a feeling of guilt and responsibility over those facile films. That mood is honorable, but it has not reliably settled any reality test.

As if making a trilogy, Rossellini next turned to
Germania Anno Zero
(1948). It began with a brilliant idea, and if brilliant ideas may be the secret of art, there is no reason to trust the pleas of reality:

If you think about that last claim, it is hardly sweeping or exceptional. It's marketing. What you will never forget if you see the film is the actuality of Berlin in ruins. (Rossellini had little difficulty finding untouched bomb damage, but he also created or dressed some bomb sites.) The tragic predicament of the little boy living alone in these ruins is that of being driven mad in the process, just as he clings to the recorded voice of Hitler. But he does not look mad, because that is an interior condition—until it is dramatized. And talking of acting out, when Rossellini found that Berlin was so cold, he went back to Rome to shoot the interiors!

As usual, Rossellini found his players where he could, and he claimed that many of the scenes were improvised. But the arc of the film was as preset as a star's motion in the heavens. We see the boy deteriorate to the point of suicide, and the artistic result, as harrowing as that of any of the neorealist films, is a fable of absolute destruction. What we see is not really Germany at its year zero, ready to begin again. It is Germany facing the ultimate tragedy of its Nazi commitment. So it is a film about error and pessimism, a small opera from the devastated streets. Rossellini's trilogy is an extraordinary achievement, and it has to be said that the viewer will learn a good deal about Europe circa 1945. But the films are educational works, reports of terror and its large shadow hanging over any human future. The war had ended, but it was not over.

Anna Magnani had noticed that she had no role in
Paisà
or
Germany Year Zero
, and she was upset. Rossellini responded: he had a habit of suggesting that his life was a series of messy happenings prompted by one woman or another. So before going to Berlin, he shot, in a studio, Jean Cocteau's short play
The Human Voice
, in which a desperate woman is on the telephone to a lover who is leaving her. On his return from Berlin, he shot
The Miracle
, a short written by the young Federico Fellini, about a peasant woman who is seduced by a handsome wanderer because she believes he is an angel. Those two halves were put together, in shameless celebration of Magnani as a diva, in a film called
L' Amore
(1948), which, in the deepest sense, is about a director's indebted infatuation with an actress. Everything about both halves is invented, but I'm not sure that documentary has ever told us more about the embattled state of being an actress.

As is often the case, such passionate involvement with Magnani had left Rossellini ready for a change.

Vittorio De Sica was born in Naples in 1901, and he was an actor from 1928 onward, in any medium that would have him, from drama to vaudeville. He was always handsome, even in old age, when his ingratiating smile went with silver hair—indeed, as an actor he is the lover in Ophüls's
Madame de…
, and the title figure in Rossellini's
Il Generale della Rovere
. He had been a star ever since playing the chauffeur in Mario Camerini's
Gli Uomini, Che Mascalzoni
(1932). It was in 1940 that he became a director with
Rose Scarlatte
, to be followed by
Teresa Venerdì
, in which he himself played the doctor involved with three different women. In many ways, De Sica was an exponent of a kind of Neapolitan romantic comedy in which men and women couldn't make up their love-bound minds—and that was something he would return to in the 1960s with
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
(1963) and
Marriage Italian Style
(1964). In
Yesterday
, for instance, Sophia Loren plays three women, all of whom demonstrate their ability to trick their men.
Marriage Italian Style
is Loren again (with Marcello Mastroianni), and it is an adaptation of Eduardo de Filippo's play
Filumena
. Both are entertainments of a high order, and as realistic as bubblegum.

But something happened to De Sica and it seems to have been his meeting with the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini in 1935 on
Darò un Millione
, a comedy but also a rueful examination of rich and poor. Zavattini became a Marxist in the 1930s, and he apparently cultivated the friendship with De Sica as a way of putting his ideas across. They collaborated on
Teresa Venerdì
(1941) and then, three years later, made the crucial step of
I Bambini Ci Guardano
, or
The Children Are Watching Us
. Some of the novelty of this film was its discovery of a child as a pivotal character; it is disorder as seen through the eyes of a little boy whose parents are divorcing. At the time it was made, no one really identified it as realist, except for the way in which the child's experience was very tenderly spelled out. This did not escape being sentimental, but in hindsight one can see the development of an attempt at social realism and the emptiness of adult lives (without any reference to wartime).

Then, in 1946, Zavattini and De Sica collaborated again, on
Sciuscià
, or
Shoeshine
. Again, children are the leading figures. We meet two boys, urchins and orphans, who have the dream of owning a horse. This is dramatized early on by a superbly shot and edited scene of riding that entirely overlooks the question of how these impoverished kids managed to get out to the country outside Rome to rent horses for a few hours. Still, it symbolizes the urge in the boys to change and improve their lives—they are bootblacks who serve the American soldiers in the city. Soon enough they get into a life of petty crime and they go to a prison, where the bond between the boys leads to betrayal and death.

Shoeshine
is a devastating experience because it seems absolutely sure of a hellish condition in Italy in 1945–46—this despite the great vitality of the child actors. In many ways it seems to enact some principles laid down by the director Alberto Lattuada as a way of addressing a reality that has occurred in every developing country as it has attempted to make its first films:

That doesn't ring true in every detail. The “immense Christian brotherhood” is not palpable in many postwar films, even if priests have a few honorable roles (notably in
Open City
). And the self-examination omits altogether the mood that was prepared to go along with fascism—shall we say the “conformism” that is so disturbingly uncovered in Bernardo Bertolucci's great film of 1970. But the question of whether the cinema was or could be “unequalled for revealing the basic truths about a nation”—that gripped people in many countries after 1945 and amounted to a pressure toward realism or commitment. Of course, more than fifty years later, we may have reached the conclusion that whatever film can do with basic truths it is not nearly enough. Those realities may be too vast or obstinate to be trapped in the light. So many of them exist in the dark, or in places where cameras are prohibited.

Immediately, De Sica and Zavattini made
Ladri di Biciclette
(
Bicycle Thieves
), which still stands among the most celebrated films ever made. We are in Rome. A man needs a job desperately to support his family. He gets work pasting up posters on the city walls. But the job requires a bicycle so he can get around the city. The family pawns their only bedsheets to obtain a bicycle. He goes to work—it is his task to put up posters for the American movie
Gilda
, with a lush full-figure portrait of Rita Hayworth. To do his work, he leans the bicycle against a wall and it is stolen.