空港城市AirCity

影片很精彩。二次大战结束前一年，墨索里尼垮台，希特勒占领了意大利，以陶里亚蒂为首的意大利共产党联合各阶级的爱国人士组成民族解放阵线与德国占领者展开了艰苦卓绝的斗争。影片就以这样一个大环境塑造了众多形象鲜明的人物。民族解放阵线领导成员工程师曼菲蒂立场坚定，意志坚强；工人弗朗西斯科品格高尚，有情有义；神父不顾个人，一切以耶苏为榜样；当过工人的碧娜爱憎分明；这些人物令人可敬。即使一些小人物也是各有特色：神父手下的修士,房东老太和她的老女仆,那个意大利人警察，都善良诚实，令人可信。即使反面人物也不落俗套，那盖世太保头子外表斯文，内心恶毒；其女干将刁钻心狠，不择手段；那意大利人警察局长是个奴性十足的坏蛋，这些人物都令人可憎。而影片歌颂谁,谴责谁,同情谁,鄙薄谁，都以独到的艺术手法描写得清清楚楚。影片最精彩的一场戏是曼菲蒂和那德国鬼子面对面斗争的那一段。德国鬼子先还貌似客气，然步步进逼，而曼菲蒂义正词严，丝毫不退，那大义凛然的气势就压倒了德国鬼子。神父见到曼菲蒂被拷打得浑身是血，已不成人样时，他流下了眼泪，当曼菲蒂断了气，他用手温柔地给阖上眼睛。他用不高的声调对那盖世太保说：“我诅咒你。”这时的他，真像是耶苏，从而，那帮德国鬼子惊怕得后退了三步。影片的这一段，最感人。 今年是反法西斯战争胜利七十周年，重看这部电影，很有意义。

《罗马，不设防的城市》 意大利新现实主义，罗西里尼在1945年拍摄的，有意思的是，罗西里尼原来拍过宣传意大利法西斯军队的片子《白色的船》但是他还是在一系列原因促使下成为了意大利新现实主义的导演。

一系列原因： 一是，也是二战，墨索里尼，法西斯头子，加入轴心国对外扩张，但是他的人民也是受害者，大战结束之后，各种社会问题：失业，贫穷、犯罪等。意大利的电影工作者在此背景下拍摄了反法西斯战争的片子。（不得不感叹电影人的社会责任感和社会良知）

二是，墨索里尼为了巩固法西斯政权，十分重视意大利电影业，他们拍的片子都是宣扬法西斯军队宣传片和一味宣传资产阶级生活方式的庸俗喜剧片和艳情情节剧，但是他的人民都在经历战争以及战后痛苦，没有人愿意听这种谎言，他们渴求反映他们苦难、贫穷、斗争的影片。因此，他们也反对好莱坞电影，感受到好莱坞电影美学的虚假性，与一切虚假为敌，比如强调贫困现实而不是好莱坞梦幻魅力。表现普通的世俗的人而不是好莱坞美丽的让人想入非非的绅士淑女，so… 那他们是怎么实践的呢？ 1还我普通人 影片的主人公都是普通工人、农民、小市民，内容也是他们的生活（当然和描绘上流社会风流生活不同）印象深刻的是柴伐梯尼认为，迫于各种压力而停止拍摄描写贫穷的影片，那他就是在道德上犯了罪。因为他拒绝了解和熟悉贫穷。而当他拒绝熟悉贫穷的情况的时候，不管是出于有意还是无意，他就是在逃避现实。

2把摄像机看到大街上 尽可能从生活本身去发掘冲突，缩短演出和生活之间的距离，尽可能的减少加工。因此，摄像机都在外景，多用中景和远景，长镜头的使用，实拍避免了戏剧光的使用。其实还有一部分原因是因为他们的摄影棚，工业基础都被摧毁了。but，实景拍摄不是一个技术限制，而是一种写实主义追求的必要元素。

3影片结构 打破线性因果关系和情节假定性，隔断银幕幻觉认同心理。简单的说（不是我说的，是美国的一位导演是谁不晓得）美电影：飞机飞过，机关炮向它开火，飞机坠毁。意大利：飞机飞过，飞机飞过，飞机飞过，飞机飞过………还有就是拒绝给主人公命运指点出路，他们认为生活是不间断的实际生活中的矛盾不会随着影片结束而结束（突然想起来安徒生童话：从此王子和公主过上了美好的生活，实话讲我小时候超爱，现在也很向往[二哈]）因此，明显的指出出路有很大的人为性，与其创作原则相违背。

演员方面，大量启用非职业演员。体现在这部电影当中，“把摄影机看到大街上”实际发生场景就是在这里。塑造了传教士，工人妻子等一系列普通人形象，而且女主平娜是音乐咖啡厅的安娜玛尼阿妮，在表现女主的死时，并没有过多切分场景（一般一个女主死亡，那绝对是，全境，中近景，特写，大特写，身边人眼泪大特写，一滴眼泪划过脸庞大特写，抒发各自“离别感言”and so on，but这个景着实没想到，女主因为丈夫被法西斯军队抓到车上掳走，冲出人群去追车，然后士兵开枪，女主倒地，有人赶来，结束。没有特写，just一个大全景连个正面都没有，不到一分钟，没有任何台词，没有女主倒地慢动作，没有女主中枪脸部特写，没有人抱住女主尸体号啕大哭，整个场景处理的相当冷静，以一种冷静实录的方式表现。以至于让我以为女主没死神父又把女主救了……）

即使没有扣人心弦的情节和戏剧化的渲染，（依旧把我看哭了[跪了]）主题表现力和震撼力很强，而且，影响力深远（不然我就不会这么想写点什东西）1977年6月3日罗西里尼在罗马去世。

新现实主义这个流派一直被认为处在古典电影和现代电影之间。

关于古典电影也是一个有争议的问题：古典电影和现代电影的分界。我认为有两个层次的分析方式：第一个是从影片本身来讨论，影像、叙事和表意的关系。影像是否一定要通过叙事才能达到表意的层次？如果是这样的话，那么电影基本是古典的。如果影像、叙事和表意层面形成了不同的维度互相触发的关系，比如影像不通过叙事，自己就升华为影片的表意，或者跟叙事发生复杂的纽结来表意，这就在一定意义上突破了古典电影的维度，进入现代电影的领域。

《罗马，不设防的城市》原则上来说不能认为是这样的电影，但是它在影像方面以风格的方式宣告了新时代的开始。

罗西里尼一直在说什么是新现实主义？第一点是试图以人的原本状态还原人，第二点是离开制片厂的僵化方法，不断创造。他离开了摄影棚和制片厂，街头巷尾的访谈中找到了作品的结构，只不过他作品完成后还是非常情节剧化的。

有人曾经总结，新现实主义电影要展现的，就是在各种压力下不断形成并继续形成的存在本身。具体到各个导演和电影人，在认知方面就有很多差别，意大利新现实主义流派异彩纷呈。我们经常一元化表述历史，但是新现实主义电影的魅力，恰恰就在于它们其实是很有复杂性的。

电影《罗马，不设防的城市》是由罗伯托·罗西里尼执导，该片根据塞吉欧·阿米迪的同名小说改编。讲述的是在二战结束前夕，意大利地下反抗组织领袖、工程师曼菲蒂遭到德军追缉。危急中，曼菲蒂逃往朋友弗朗西斯科家中暂避，在弗朗西斯科的未婚妻碧娜的帮助下，曼菲蒂见到了唐·彼得罗神父，并请神父将一笔巨款交给游击队。弗兰西斯科为了掩护曼菲蒂而被捕，碧娜也中弹身亡。然而绝处逢生的曼菲蒂被女友告密，曼菲蒂和神父被捕入狱。纳粹故意在神父面前严刑拷打曼菲蒂，两人最终在敌人的酷刑和枪弹下英勇牺牲。

电影《罗马，不设防的城市》纪实美学的特点主要有以下几个方面：第一，记录性。电影的本质就是物质现实的复原，电影的基本特性其实就是电影的照相本性和纪录功能，特别擅长于纪录和复现具体的客观现实。《罗马，不设防的城市》中把镜头对准了生活在社会低层的普通人，反映了他们的痛苦和不幸，例如：在影片中呈现的哄抢面包事件，人民吃不饱饭，并且作为神职人员的神父也被迫参与了哄抢；五点实施宵禁，限制人们的出行；肆意横行闯入民宅，随便对人严刑拷打以及开枪杀人；令人惊叹的是在影片的尾声，一群孩子隔着铁丝网看见神父被行刑的一幕，可想而知这是一群小小的反抗者。第二，实景拍摄和长镜头的运用。“把摄影机扛到大街上去”这是意大利新现实主义提出的口号。例如：首先在影片中采用实景镜头拍摄了罗马街头的阴沉灰暗，教堂光线的暗淡，各种各样的房屋都是破旧不堪，；其次在影片中也出现了大量的长镜头，平娜在和印刷工弗兰西斯科结婚的前一天晚上，坐在门前的楼道里谈话，非常真实而又细腻的表现出平娜所代表的普通群众对于战争的厌恶和对生活的焦虑，而弗兰西斯科却截然相反，他坚定的话语表现出和他一样捍卫民族胜利的英勇斗志。最后，影片中的皮娜和神父其实都是非职业演员，用以这样的方式，反而更加体现了影片的真实性和和逼真性。第三，蒙太奇手法的运用。普多夫金称：“将若干片段构成场面，将部分场面构成段落，将若干段落构成一部片子的方法就叫做蒙太奇。”例如：在德军包围公寓时，神父得知玛多里手里还藏着炸弹想自杀，他借助警察的巧妙掩护得以进入公寓，在这时导演运用仰拍镜头，随着背景音乐的响起，紧张的跟随神父的脚步爬上楼梯，而玛多里坚持自杀不肯开门，神父不得不爬上门打开，抢下炸弹和手枪；紧接着就在这时德军又借机说自己是半个医生闯入公寓寻找神父的下落，神父急匆匆下楼的镜头与德军矫健步伐的镜头交替出现，使得我的心里和其他观众一样更加紧张起来，终于神父进入了祖父的房间也藏好了枪和炸弹，但祖父却一直不配合争辩，而德军也在不断的搜捕…….门打开的一刹那，祖父安静的躺着，神父也在做祷告。交替蒙太奇的运用使得观众把自己带入主人公，制造了紧张的氛围，有一种身临其境的感觉。第四，细节的幽默处理。例如：神父到雕塑店去接头的时候，看到耶稣的雕塑不雅观地盯着一个裸体雕像素，神父就将裸体雕像扭转了方向，可是造型就成了耶稣盯着雕像的屁股，神父又很不好意思的将耶稣的雕像扭转了方向，经过神父的“艺术加工”变成了背对背，这个细节的处理符合神父的神父，也增加了影片的幽默化。第五，结构形式（不适用闪回等方式）。第六，地方方言的运用。

电影《罗马，不设防的城市》表现的是在二战结束期间的真实性和逼真性，体现了影片故事内容的真实和逼真，也体现了非职业演员的真实和逼真，更体现了“把摄影机扛到大街上”拍摄过程的真实和逼真，导演罗西里尼切切实实的反映社会生活的创作原则和纪实美学风格。

本文是Peter Bondanella所著书籍《The Films of Roberto Rossellini》的第三章“Roma citta aperta and the Birth of Italian Neorealism”。我因为电影课而接触这篇文章，整体上里面有很多个人喜欢的内容，所以想记下来。但因为不知记到哪去，所以暂时放在豆瓣。找到合适的地方了再移走。

以下加粗部分表示对个人而言是重点或者挺有趣/insightful。

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In spite of the many precursors film historians have cited as antecedents of Italian neorealism during the fascist period, and especially during the early 1940s, the birth of Italian neorealism is historically and emotionally linked forever with the astounding international success of Rossellini's portrayal of life in Nazi-occupied Rome between the fall of the fascist regime in September 1943 and its liberation in June of the following year. Unlike the fate of almost all other neorealist films, which seldom had a respectable showing at the box office and were rarely smash hits, Roma citta aperta was the largest grossing film in Italy during the year it first appeared, and critical reactions in France and the United States, as well as box-office successes there, were equally positive. In addition, the fact that Paisa was screened abroad almost simultaneously with Roma citta aperta helped to create a consciousness among film critics that something new was brewing in Italy (neorealism) and that this new aesthetic phenomenon was largely the creation of an obscure Italian director named Roberto Rossellini.

The film's plot, put together by a team of scriptwriters that included Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Sergio Amidei, is deceptively simple. A Marxist partisan leader named Giorgio Manfredi who is being hidden from the Germans by a printer named Francesco enlists the assistance of a partisan priest, Don Pietro. The next day, just before Francesco is to be married to his pregnant fiancee, Pina, she is gunned down by the Germans when they arrest Francesco. Manfredi is the object of an intense manhunt by the Ger- man Gestapo, led by an evil and effeminate Nazi, Major Bergmann. The major is assisted by his lesbian agent, Ingrid, who uses drugs to obtain information about Manfredi from Marina, a dancer and Manfredi's old girlfriend. The somewhat incredible link between such different figures as Manfredi, Marina, Francesco, and Pina is effected by the fortuitous script invention that depicts Marina as a close friend of Pina's sister. Manfredi, Don Pietro, and an Austrian deserter from the battlefield of Monte Cassino whom the priest has been hiding are all captured by Bergmann after Ingrid induces Marina to betray them in return for drugs and furs. The deserter hangs himself; Manfredi refuses to talk under torture, while Don Pietro looks on in dismay, and dies from the brutal treatment he has received; the next morning, the priest faces a firing squad while the young boys from his parish witness the event.

For a film, such as Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, or La dolce vita, to transcend its status as a work of art and become a social phenomenon that seems to exemplify the cultural atmosphere of its time, a series of fortuitous circumstances and favorable timing are always required. This is true in the case of Roma citta aperta; the history of the creation of this film reveals a bit of the serendipity that seems to happen only in the movies. However, a popular mythology has grown up around the film that is mis- leading and, in some aspects, false. A good deal of the mythology surround- ing this work is associated with its "realistic" qualities, and as the first important neorealist film, much of what has been written about Italian neorealism has often used the film as a springboard for defining this phe- nomenon in film history, sometimes with quite confusing results.

Conventional wisdom about Roma citta aperta emphasizes the film's technical novelties and practically ignores its relationship to the cinema of the fascist period, in which Rossellini received his training. Thus, the legend arose that Rossellini decided to employ "authentic" locations because Cinecitta's studios either were destroyed by bombings or werefilledto capacity sheltering refugees. In fact, there are important precedents for on-location shooting during the fascist period that have already been discussed, particularly works by De Robertis and Alessandrini that certainly must have influenced Rossellini. Of course, Rossellini himself in his own prewar fascist trilogy often employs authentic locations (especially in La nave bianco). In stressing on-location shooting, early reactions to the film neglected to note that the majority of the film's sequences actually take place in interiors. But even more important, the lack of studios at Cinecitta did not result in the use of "real" interior settings. Rossellini merely constructed four completely conventional interior sets for the most important locations in the film- Don Pietro's sacristy, Gestapo headquarters, the torture room, and the living room where the German officers relax - in a vacant basement of a building on Rome's Via degli Avignonesi. As Federico Fellini has recounted the story, the location of these interiors played a major role in the reception of Italian neorealism abroad, for it was on the same street (number 36) that a cele- brated Roman brothel operated by Signora Tina Trabucchi was located. One night while shooting was taking place, an American soldier named Rod Geiger, presumably exiting from Signora Trabucchi's establishment, staggered drunkenly across the street and tripped over the electric cables supplying current to Rossellini's crew. Steadied by a solicitous Fellini, Geiger watched the production, became fascinated by the film, and eventually convinced Rossellini to sell him the American rights for only twenty thousand dollars. Even Rossellini's discovery by the man who became his first American producer was a serendipitous affair, the stuff of which myths are made.

The documentary quality of the film's photography has always been one of the benchmarks of traditional definitions of neorealism. Here, conven- tional wisdom has always been closer to the mark. To be sure, the grainy character of the film(as well as the few brief segments of actual documentary footage inserted by the editor into the fictional story) certainly reminded viewers who saw the film when it was first released of the kinds of pictures they associated with the newsreels. The scarcity of film stock forced Ros- sellini to buy 3 5-millimeter film in bits and pieces on the black market, causing him to use stock of different quality and provenance. In addition, the variance in the lighting was often striking; Rome was still suffering from the deprivations of the war, and the electric current experienced drastic and unexpected fluctuations. But even in this regard, the facile association of the film's photographic style with realism cannot always be sustained. Perhaps it is more accurate to state that in 1945, such a photographic style seemed realistic because audiences associated black-and-white film photog- raphy with "real" events. Today, however, most audiences associate realism with live television broadcasts in color. Few contemporary audiences will be struck by the realism of the photography in the Rossellini film. On the contrary, the perspective of almost half a century reveals clear expressionistic elements in some of the photography and the lighting in crucial sequences, such as the torture scene. The definition of the so-called photographic realism in Roma citta aperta thus depends in some measure on our personal experience and knowledge of cinematic history. Much the same may be said of the post-synchronization of its sound track. Because of a lack of funds, Rossellini was obliged to shoot without direct sound (developing silent footage cost some sixty lire per meter, whereas developing synchronized footage cost hundreds of lire more). Another result of the financial situation was Rossellini's avoidance of daily rushes, another cost-cutting measure. Although it is true that the lack of sound during shooting gave the director more freedom of movement with his camera, which many traditional critics see as a factor in the film's heightened realism, dubbed sound in afilmstudio certainly does not create a direct link to the world "out there," which was supposed to be the neorealist's aesthetic goal. Post-synchronization of sound became almost the norm in Italy for several decades as the result of neorealist practice, and it has been only recently that some directors, such as Bernardo Bertolucci, have moved back toward the international commercial market and synchronized sound. It is difficult to maintain that post-synchronization is realistic. In fact, both Pasolini and Fellini, to mention only two Italian directors who have always dubbed their sound tracks, have declared that they do so precisely to avoid any hint of naturalism or realism in their works. However, in dubbing the sound after the shooting, Rossellini was able to heighten the authenticity of the sound track by having his Germans speak German and his Italians speak Italian, something that must surely have struck many American viewers as realistic when Hollywood's com- mercial cinema often handled this problem quite differently - by having foreigners speak either a kind of Oxford English or a heavily accented English to distinguish them from the Americans.

Perhaps the most persuasive of the many stylistic elements traditional definitions cite as typical of Italian neorealism is a reliance upon nonprofessional actors. As we have seen in our survey of Italian cinema during the fascist period, however, there was nothing original in this. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that rarely have nonprofessional actors been used so skillfully as they were by Rossellini in Paisa, De Sica in Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948), or Visconti in La terra trema (The Earth Trem- bles, 1948). But this exploitation of nonprofessional actors for particular aesthetic effects is totally absent from Roma citta aperta. The entire cast of the film had extensive experience in the entertainment world. Aldo Fabrizi (Don Pietro) and Anna Magnani (Pina), both of whom were catapulted to international fame with the success of the film, had extensive experience in the entertainment business, not only in the music hall form of avanspettacolo entertainment roughly equivalent to America's vaudeville, but also in film roles together, where the particular chemistry of their artistic personalities had already achieved commercial success in Mario Bonard's comic film Campo de fiori (Campo de' Fiori Square, 1943). Marcello Pagliero (Manfredi) had already directed afilm of his own. Harry Feist (Major Bergmann) was a dancer, as was Maria Michi (Marina), who probably landed her part not because she had been working as an usher at the Barberini Cinema but, instead, because she was scriptwriter Sergio Amidei's mistress. Even minor roles, such as those played by Nando Bruno (the sacristan) and Edoardo Passarelli (the policeman), were filled by actors who came from the variety hall. Rather than basing his film on nonprofessional acting performances, Rossellini relied upon the consummate skills of seasoned professionals, but he cast his troupe in unaccustomed roles, placing figures normally associated with comic roles in situations that would call for tragic or tragicomic actions.

The hybrid system of casting marking Rossellini's production offers an insight into the director's aesthetic intentions, for "hybrid" style might well be taken as the most appropriate description of Rossellini's manner, following the dictionary definition of the term that explains the word with synonyms such as "medley," "mixture," or "combination." Roma citta aperta does not completely abandon or reject traditional cinematic style or generic conventions and replace them with an absolutely original neorealist style or neorealist cinematic conventions of Rossellini's invention. For ex- ample, Rossellini's editing is, as Brunette has pointed out, for the most part " 'classic' - that is, illusionist, meant to be as invisible as the traditional Hollywood variety" because it serves primarily to underscore the narrative line and to increase emotional involvement. There is very little of the montage we associate with Eisenstein and that Rossellini employed so skillfully in La nave bianca, nor are there many extremely long takes, the future direction of Rossellini's cinema, hints of which can be detected in Uuomo dalla croce. Instead, Rossellini introduces a number of novel elements into a conventional context, and their power depends precisely upon the viewer's interpreting them against the backdrop of traditional cinematic practice. Moreover, the ideological and ethical message of the film is more than a hybrid and might best be described as a philosophical compromise wherein views of extremely different political groups are telescoped into the small cast of characters in the film in an uneasy synthesis that would not endure for long in the turbulent world of Italian domestic politics. Perhaps Ros- sellini's greatest achievement in this film was to fuse the narrative structure of his hybrid creation with the ideological compromise in the film's script so that each complemented the other harmoniously, as our discussion of the film will demonstrate.

Rossellini's portrayal of Italian life under German occupation reflects a stark juxtaposition of good (the Resistance forces) and evil (the perverted Nazis and their much less offensive Italian allies) that reminds the viewer of the ideological world of Uuomo dalla croce, where Bolsheviks were identified with barbarism and Italians were defending Western civilization. Now the Nazis replace the Bolsheviks, but unlike that earlier film (where Sergei and Irina were clearly sympathetic figures), the Nazis embody unmitigated evil with no redeeming virtues whatsoever. Rossellini treats the most important German figures as he had depicted Fyodor earlier. It is not enough for him that Bergmann is a moral monster. He is also portrayed as an effeminate homosexual, and his assistant Ingrid is a viper-like lesbian who seduces Marina with drugs and furs to obtain information about Manfredi. The tone of the work is thus far more indebted to Rossellini's message of Christian humanism than to any programmatic attempt at cinematic realism. The positive characters who fight the Nazis are joined by their belief in what Francesco calls an impending "springtime" in Italy and a better tomorrow. Pina, Francesco, Don Pietro, and Manfredi are all united by this faith in a brighter future, while Marina and Pina's sister Lauretta are mesmerized by the superficial values of cafe society and the consumer goods proffered by the Germans with whom they associate. Marina is cor- rupted not because of Ingrid's blandishments but, rather, because she lacks faith in herself and, therefore, is incapable of loving others. Marxists and Christians alike adhere to Rossellini's Christian credo best embodied in Don Pietro's last words before he faces a firing squad: "Oh, it's not hard to die well. It's hard to live well." In fact, as a detailed analysis of the torture sequence reveals, the iconography of Manfredi's death associates him with the crucified Christ.

Rossellini effects a kind of "historical compromise" between Catholicism and Marxism within the partisan ranks, but this should in no way be construed as a falsification of the historical facts. Italian Communists have done their best to picture the anti-Nazi Resistance as a purely communist phenomenon, but the truth is much more complicated, with contributions coming from all segments of Italian society, including perhaps the most significant from members of the royal armed forces and the police, whose actions are usually only grudgingly recognized by both the Catholic and the Marxist elements within the Resistance.

The script for Roma citta aperta incorporates these very real ideological and historical tensions that, in turn, embody authentic forces within the fabric of Italian society. The fact that the script was so crucial to the making of the film also undercuts another of the myths about Italian neorealism and Rossellini's stylistic contribution to it — that of improvisation. There was little about the film that was not argued out and written over and over again, and the slow evolution of the script says a great deal about the ideological perspectives of the various scriptwriters involved. Rossellini's original idea, entitled Storie di ieri (Stories of Yesterday), was to treat the events leading to the execution on 4 April 1944 of Don Giuseppe Morosini, a Catholic priest active in the Resistance. Before speaking to Rossellini about this particular idea, Sergio Amidei, an extremely talented scriptwriter of well-known communist sympathies, had begun another script on the black market. After discussing the two concepts, the two men decided to include Amidei's material in a new episodicfilm about the Nazi occupation of Rome. Subsequently, a Neapolitan journalist named Alberto Consiglio suggested a story about a partisan priest named Don Pappagallo, and after a producer was found, Consiglio (who was never credited for his work) combined his fictitious character with Don Morosini to produce the outline of what finally became Don Pietro. Before the liberation, Amidei had read about another striking incident, the savage machine-gunning of a pregnant woman in Viale Giulio Cesare as she ran after her husband, arrested during one of the German dragnets. This figure evolved into Pina, and Pina's death would become the single most dramatic moment of the film. It was apparently Amidei who insisted upon the addition to the script of a Marxist partisan, Manfredi, to ensure, at least to his satisfaction, that there would be one model hero reflecting his own ideological position. All accounts of the pro- duction of the film unanimously agree that the writer who shaped the figure of the priest in the final script was none other than Federico Fellini, who was a close friend of Aldo Fabrizi. Rossellini first met Fellini when he approached Fellini to ask him to convince his friend Fabrizi to take the role of Don Pietro. Fellini had begun his career as a cartoonist and gag writer with the Roman humor magazine Marc'Aurelio, and after an apprenticeship with the magazine, he had turned (as so many other writers connected with it did) to scriptwriting for the cinema, particularly film comedies. Fabrizi's performance, requiring an almost perfect balance between comic timing and serious tragic dignity, owes a great deal to Fellini's contributions to the script. And it was definitely Fellini's inspiration to insert the frying-pan gag into the action, a slapstick routine typical of his writing for earlier comic films. It was a mark of Rossellini's intelligence that he succeeded in blending the talents of two completely different men within a single screenplay: the apolitical Fellini, who had comic wit and a sure awareness of how to ma- nipulate the audience's emotions, and the leftist intellectual Amidei, who had a sounder understanding of how to set individual incidents within a broader political context. When Rossellini accepted Fellini's comic inter- pretation of Don Pietro and, in the final editing, juxtaposed this sequence of hilarious slapstick comedy from the variety theater with the moment of darkest pathos in the film - the sequence in which Pina is killed - the team of scriptwriters and director succeeded in producing one of the most moving moments in the history of the cinema.

Rossellini never avoids the hints of tension between the two forces within the Resistance that would be locked in a struggle for power in postwar Italy that has continued to this day. Manfredi, for example, expresses mild dis- approval of Pina's religious marriage, but she notes that it is better to be married by a partisan priest than by a Fascist official at city hall. In another scene, a leftist printer pointedly tells Don Pietro that everyone is not lucky enough to be able to hide in a monastery. Even more significant in this regard are the proposals that Major Bergmann makes to both Don Pietro and Manfredi after he has captured them both. To Manfredi, he offers to spare the members of his party if he betrays the more conservative, Catholic members of the Resistance, but Manfredi rejects his proposal by spitting on him, an action of defiance that results in his renewed torture and eventual death. To Don Pietro, Bergmann argues persuasively that the Communists are the sworn enemies of the church, who will destroy all organized religion if they take power. Don Pietro replies that all men who fight for justice and liberty walk in the pathways of the Lord.

As befits a film whose main actors came from the music hall theater and film comedy, Roma citta aperta contains a great deal of authentic humor, but the humor is placed within a profoundly tragicomic vision of life that juxtaposes melodramatic moments or instances of comic relief and dark humor to the most tragic of human experiences that reconstruct a moment in recent Italian history. The church, and Don Pietro in particular, are the object of much of this humor. When the sexton, Agostino, says he cannot loot a bakery because he works for the church, Pina sarcastically informs him he will have to eat his cake in Paradise. When Don Pietro visits a religious shop over Resistance headquarters, he is offended by the proximity of a statue of Saint Rocco and one of a nude woman; first he turns the nude around (giving the saint a beautiful view of the woman's backside), and then after reconsidering the problem, he decides that the saint should not be subjected to temptation and turns his face away from the nude as well! When Fascist soldiers arrive to search the workers' apartments on Via Casilina to look for concealed partisans, Manfredi and others manage to escape because the Italian troops are preoccupied with trying to peer up the skirts of the women on the staircase. It is important to note that these troops are Italians, pictured throughout the film as likable but bumbling and in- effectual clowns, in contrast to the superefficient Germans, who would never act in such an unmilitary and undisciplined manner. This generally comic and sympathetic portrait of Italian officials continues when a tolerant Italian policeman observes Pina and other women looting a bakery. Rather than doing his duty, the man sadly remarks he wishes he were not in uniform so that he could join them. The film's humor takes on a decidedly somber and negative tone when it is directed at the Germans. As German soldiers enter a restaurant where Manfredi is eating, we immediately fear that he is about to be arrested, but this suspense is alleviated by our discovery that the Germans have only come to butcher a live lamb and to eat it, and our fear (as well as Manfredi's) is dissolved by the humorous quip of the res- taurant owner, Flavio — he says he forgot that Germans were specialists in butchering!

The entire film revolves around Rossellini's adept shifting of perspectives from a comic to a tragic tone, and nowhere is this more evident than in the film's most famous sequences, involving the search of Pina's apartment building and her subsequent death as she races after Francesco being carried away in a truck. The event occurs on the day of their wedding; thus, the promise of a new springtime in Italy that Francesco described to Pina earlier will end in tragedy and death. But this tragedy is introduced by a slapstick comic scene worthy of the best vaudevillian traditions. As the Germans and the Italian troops under their command inspect the building, Don Pietro and Marcello (Pina's son, now dressed as an altar boy) arrive at the apart- ment complex supposedly to give the last rites to Pina's father, but actually to locate and conceal weapons and bombs kept in the building by one of Marcello's friends, a crippled young man named appropriately Romoletto ("Little Romulus"). Romoletto represents a mirror image of the partisans but in a comic key, and his earlier appearances in the film generate laughter when he repeats Marxist political slogans without really understanding their significance. In spite of Rossellini's often-cited aversion to dramatic editing, a feature of his later, mature style that will be discussed in subsequent chapters, here he skillfully builds suspense as he cuts back and forth between the priest's search for the weapons and his subsequent descent to the dying man's room, on the one hand, and the menacing ascent of the suspicious Fascist officer and his troops, on the other. When the soldiers finally enter the room, Don Pietro can be seen peacefully administering the last rites to Pina's father, who is wearing a beatific smile, with Marcello at his side. Only after the danger is passed and the priest frantically attempts to revive the moribund sleeper do we understand that to calm the old man (who was terrified when he awoke and saw a priest ready to administer the last rites to him), Don Pietro had knocked the man unconscious with a frying pan, which now reveals a huge dent in it when examined by Marcello. The contraband weapons were hidden underneath the old man's bed only a moment before the arrival of the Fascist soldiers.

Comic gags disappear thereafter, for in defiance of the soldiers around her, Pina runs after the truck carrying Francesco. Immediately prior to the shooting that ends her life, Rossellini's camera shifts to the interior of the truck to capture the scene from Francesco's point of view, and the fact that we share it increases the dramatic impact of the scene. We hear a loud burst of machine-gun fire, Marcello races toward his mother screaming, and Pina is shown lying in the street, her face turned in the agony of death and her right leg bared to a garter belt, an image underlining the obscenity of her untimely demise. In the next sequence, and completely without rhetorical or sentimental emphasis of any kind, Francesco's truck is ambushed by partisans in one of the very few exterior sequences Rossellini employs in the film. As Francesco escapes, we suddenly realize that Pina's death was completely meaningless, like so many occurrences in wartime.

The scenes situated at Gestapo headquarters in Via Tasso are justly considered among the most moving of the entire film, and they, too, are constructed around the juxtaposition of different moods and cinematic techniques. And in these sequences, contrary to the traditional belief that sets are of little importance in neorealist films, the very structure of the set itself heightens Rossellini's drama. From the central office in which Berg- mann interrogates his prisoners, there are two doors opening out onto entirely different worlds. One door leads into a torture chamber inhabited by ghoulish Nazis whose fingers are stained with the blood of their victims and who nonchalantly and indifferently light their cigarettes with the same blowtorch with which they scorch Manfredi's chest. The other plunges us into a completely different, decadent atmosphere where German officers play cards, drink brandy or champagne, listen to piano music, and chat pleasantly, oblivious to the human suffering on the other side of the wall.

Only Bergmann moves effortlessly between these three different locations, and his physical movements between them, viewed most often from Don Pietro's perspective, who remains in the central room and peers through each door, accentuate the emotional and moral distance between the two individuals. Ironically, while we are privileged to see every little detail of the horrible drama that is unfolding, Don Pietro's spectacles have been broken during his capture, and the point-of-view shots nominally from his perspective are much clearer than if he had actually viewed them himself.

Manfredi's torture is one of the most horrifying scenes in the history of filmmaking, and yet, Rossellini achieves an enormously emotional impact upon his audience without ever showing the viewer the actual events of his torture. Instead, we see detailed close-ups of the anguished reactions of a myopic Don Pietro who can hardly see the scene himself. Voice-overs convey the screams from the other room, and like Don Pietro without his glasses, we experience the torture of Manfredi through the power of our imagina- tion. Even in this scene tragedy mixes with black humor. While Manfredi's agony moves the priest to tears, a German soldier quietly sharpens his pencil and awaits Bergmann's orders. When Manfredi dies, without revealing the names of his compatriots, Rossellini frames this Communist partisan leader as if he were photographing the crucified Christ, employing the traditional iconography familiar to us all from numerous works of art. The final touch to this picture of moral degradation is provided by a drunken Marina, who strolls from the salon where Ingrid is entertaining her, unaware that the ex- lover she has betrayed is being tortured to death in the next room. She is draped in the luxurious fur coat that she has received as her reward, but as she peers into the room with Hartmann and sees Manfredi, she screams and faints. Ingrid's only reaction is to scold Bergmann for his failure, reminding him that she did not think it would be easy to break Manfredi and then coolly picking up the coat Marina has dropped, with the callous remark: "For the next time. "

During Manfredi's torment, Rossellini introduces the viewer to another German officer, Major Hartmann, who listens to the piano with Bergmann and Ingrid in the adjacent salon. There, Bergmann declares to Hartmann that the Germans are a master race and that the Italian under interrogation would eventually betray his cause. If he did not, then Italians would not be inferior to Germans and the war to defend the master race would have no meaning. Hartmann, reckless with too much liquor, argues with Bergmann, telling him that during World War I, the Germans supposed that the people they fought were lesser men, and yet, at that time French patriots died under torture without giving in to their interrogators. Here, at long last, Rossellini seems to be saying, is a German with a conscience. However, the next morning after Manfredi's death, when Don Pietro is sentenced to die by a firing squad, it is the same Major Hartmann, now sober, who commands the Italian troops assigned to perform this gruesome task. And when the superstitious young Italian draftees refuse to shoot a priest (yet another instance where Rossellini portrays Italians as likable but ineffectual and nonpolitical), it is Hartmann who delivers the coup de grace with his pistol with little hesitation and certainly with none of the self-doubt that char- acterized him when he was drunk. In Rossellini's Manichaean moral uni- verse, it seems a German can have a conscience only when intoxicated.

After having manipulated the viewer's emotions throughout the film with such skill, Rossellini does not conclude his film on a completely negative note. Not only does the torture scene contain the iconography traditionally associated with the crucified Christ, but the tone of the last sequence is triumphantly associated with the concept of Christian resurrection and re- birth. Romoletto, Marcello, and the other children observe Don Pietro's execution (no adult witnesses are present besides the soldiers), and as they leave the scene, Rossellini pans after them, Italy's future, placing the children against the backdrop of the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral. Passing from an image of tragic despair to another full of promise for the "springtime in Italy" Francesco foretold earlier in the film, Rossellini creates a vision of hope with this first of many symbolic images associated with children that characterize so many of the neorealist classics.

It should be clear from this analysis of Roma citta aperta that Rossellini's film succeeds precisely because it combines a number of new stylistic ele- ments not normally associated with commercial cinema with what one critical interpretation labels "bourgeois illusionist cinema," a style reflecting a total and unquestioning mastery of a system of representation built up by bourgeois film culture from D. W. Griffith on. It is a system of representation whose fundamental intent is to make the audience suspend its disbelief, and enter the world of the film as if it were the real world; the audience is encouraged to read the time and space of the film's actions as homogenous, unified, 'real': the emphasis on 'reality' at the structural level leads to a masking of the process of production of meaning.

The negative tone of this particular interpretation has been echoed by other critics who have embraced a modernist aesthetic associated in the theater with Bertolt Brecht and in the cinema with Jean-Luc Godard and film theorists influenced by both Brecht and Godard. When Rossellini's neorealist works first appeared, he was seen virtually as the creator of an entirely new realistic aesthetic. Currently, in some critical circles, his reliance upon tra- ditional devices of melodrama - identification with the film's central char- acters, manipulation of the audience's emotional responses to dramatic situations, an edifying conclusion offering hope of improvement, the use of children to evoke a sentimental response in the viewer - has been cited as proof that Rossellini and neorealism in general were politically conservative, if not reactionary, and that little of any consequence was achieved by what has traditionally been defined as a revolution in the history of the cinema with the critical triumphs of Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti (not to mention a host of lesser figures).

The truth lies somewhere between these two extreme critical positions. The early praise of Rossellini for creating an entirely new film aesthetic can certainly not be sustained with Roma citta aperta as the test case. As we shall see in the next chapter, an argument for Rossellini's originality can more easily be made with Paisa. Rossellini's innovations in the first part of his neorealist trilogy lie in his unique understanding of how the boundaries of traditional cinematic narrative could be stretched in a direction that would bear fruit in his subsequent works. But to say that early assessments of this film were overblown is not to admit the validity of the strictures brought against Rossellini of late — that he failed to adopt a modernist aesthetic similar to one espoused by Brecht or Godard and that he did not aim to change society with his films. To deny the evident emotional power of a masterpiece such as Roma citta aperta on the grounds that it breaks a set of modernist rules few writers in the history of literature and even fewer directors in the history of the cinema would accept reflects the kind of politically correct thinking that has become part of so much contemporary academic writing. Neither exaggerating Rossellini's originality in Roma citta aperta nor belittling the emotional impact of what must be defined as a hybrid brand of cinema combining the codes of the traditional narrative cinema with some bold innovations does justice to the creative force that emerges in Rossellini's masterpiece and almost unassisted moves Italian cinema in a different direction for the next decade.

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后续：

教授说这篇文章干货很多，但行文过于all over the place（thesis在章节的近乎中间才出现）。个人觉得说的很对。