商品簡介
Otto Preminger said the history of the cinema was divided into two eras: one before and one after Rome Open City (Roima citta aperta). Made in 1945, the film is based on events that took place in Rome just one year before, during the Nazi occupation. It made a huge impact on its release, launched the international reputation of its director, Roberto Rossellini, and came to be seen as the founding work of Italian neo-realism.
David Forgacs re-examines the film and its place in Rossellini's career. He reconstructs its production history, its relationship to the events that inspired it and the time in which it was made. He argues that the traditional critical labelling of Rome Open City as the original work of neo-realism fails to capture the film's hybrid and contradictory character. Part documentary record, part patriotic myth, Rome Open City is at once an extraordinarily powerful commemoration of wartime experience and a rhetorical reworking of that experience, using stereotypes and moral polarisations. It is also a unique cinematic depiction of an occupied city.
作者簡介
David Forgacs is Professor of Italian at University College London.
