1. The film serves as a moment in film history that kicked off one of the most important film-historical phenomena of the second half of the 20th century—the New Wave movement. It once again announces to the whole world the important position that cinema occupies in modern life - film is an intervenor, a participant, an interpreter, a caller and a constructor.
2. In the film "Rome, the Undefended City", the great era, the group portraits of heroes, and the resistance movement are at the same time closely related to the deep identification and understanding of daily life and people at the bottom.
Rossellini's 1945 film "Rome, the Undefended City" clearly marked a moment in film history, a veritable immortal masterpiece in film history.
In 1945, the year when World War II ended, the anti-fascist alliance defeated the fascist forces of the Axis powers, and mankind passed through a cataclysmic catastrophe peacefully. Produced in the year the war ended, this film uses a realistic approach to present a specific war-era "Roman style painting", but it is not a style painting in the general sense, it is not everyday life, it shows the The harsh scene of war is the test of human life, human dignity, and human belief in the harsh scene of war.
The Second World War is by far the cruelest and most dangerous war in human history. The uniqueness of this war is that it not only means that human civilization once faced an extremely difficult and extremely harsh time, but also means that Human beliefs have been brutally and violently battered since modern history. Human beings continue to improve themselves by upholding developmentalist beliefs, and become more civilized with the advancement of technology. In this war, all the latest technologies are used to serve the war and the slaughter of human beings. Auschwitz and Hiroshima became two heartbreaking symbols of the war. Although World War II ended, it left a huge debt to mankind, and human society is faced with a huge issue - a reflection on war, and a reflection on modern civilization at the same time.
There is an important moment in film history - 1927. In this year's American movie "The King of Jazz", sound entered the art of cinema as a brand new element. It changed from a purely visual art to an audiovisual art. After that, film art went through a long process of learning to use sound, grasping sound, and transforming film from visual art to audio-visual art. It is very interesting that in the history of film, we have been encountering and witnessing the fact that the art of film is constantly being changed with the change of technology, and it is often a huge technological revolution that causes a huge turning point in the art of film and even causes Breakthroughs in film history.
A peculiar situation in the history of cinema is that new technological advances open up the space for cinema, but the art of cinema undergoes a peculiar process of degeneration. New technological elements add a lot of limitations while offering enormous possibilities and convenience. When sound entered the film, when people struggled to learn how to use it, the fall of the film manifested itself in its rapid re-indoor drama or stage drama.
When the story has completely become a room drama and a living room drama, the movie once degenerated into the so-called "quality movie" or "white phone movie". In other words, what fills the screen is "The Life of Bourgeois," an annoyance, a trivial love story, and the trivial joys and sorrows of everyday life. In the course of the war, due to various wartime mobilization needs and various political pressures, the film has increasingly become an imaginary space for escaping and far from reality.
After the war, "Rome, Undefended City" marked a moment when the camera broke through the walls again, towards life, towards society, towards reality, towards the harsh historical moments and people we have been through and people are still going on. Experiencing the extremely harsh reality of the post-war recovery period.
"Rome, the Undefended City" opens up the possibility of opening up a huge space and a huge world to the cinematographer, not just a drab, albeit beautiful, scene enclosed in four walls schedule to complete.
As a moment in film history, "Rome, the Undefended City" launched one of the most important film-historical phenomena of the second half of the 20th century - the New Wave movement. It is a film art movement that is continuously transmitted in films of different countries. Every new wave of films will not only bring about a revolution in film aesthetics, but also refresh the way that film art expresses society, reality, life, and soul. All kinds of possibilities, and at the same time, it once again announces to the whole world the important position of film in modern life - film is an intervener, a participant, an interpreter, a summoner and a constructor.
In this film, all the elements that will constitute the Italian neorealist movement in the future are tried and presented, but the film itself is not typical, it still continues the characteristics of chamber drama and melodrama, so even after the film is released At that time, the audience received rave reviews, but there were also critics, saying that it was too face-lifting, and black and white was too clear.
After World War II, with the reflection on the war, the questioning of the rise of fascism in Europe, with the rise of a whole new art film movement in Europe, a huge social change began to emerge, which made the second half of the 20th century. There is a very special color tone in modern history. In this specific historical period, people formed a specific sense of morality and ethics, and formed a specific social position, social angle and social identity. During this period, no matter which social class one is in, the overall social culture has an ethical orientation toward the weak and the bottom, paying attention to people in suffering, identifying with them and empathizing with them. Such an ethical orientation gives people in suffering, people at the bottom, and the weak in the power structure of society a moral height and a moral justice. At the same time, it summons the whole world and the strong empathy of different social strata, through which people pay attention to the suffering people and the lower society.
The 20th century was a century of betrayal, a betrayal one of the rarest in human history: high-class people betrayed their class toward low-class people, identified with low-class people, looked at them, and tried to stand with them. This is the most powerful emotional force, a moral force, in Italian neorealist cinema since then. This kind of morality is not moralism, because it does not contain force, it does not contain oppression, it does not contain any sense of compulsion or compulsion, it is a kind of pure sympathy, because of empathy, because of a strong attempt to end society Suffering, a rich emotional expression formed by a desire to change the world.
Today, it seems that we may be more moved by the first half of this film, which is a very simple and unadorned "Roman style painting". Later in the war, when Mussolini's regime collapsed and Mussolini's fascist government began to fail, Italy was occupied by German troops. The story tells the story of the end of the war, the Italians and their lives in the dark. The camera lens in the film focuses on the fighters of the resistance movement, and the most moving part of the film is that the fighters do not appear as heroes, but as ordinary people in front of the audience.
One of the film's female leads is Pina, a young widow with a child, a woman who has fallen in love with another man and is about to get married. In the simple heart of Pina, this wedding is what she is looking forward to, but it is also filled with unease and guilt, because in her opinion, the man she fell in love with - Francisco should have a better fate, not To marry an imperfect, mutilated, worn-out woman like her. No one will forget her sudden death, shot in the street by a bullet on the day of her wedding, in that extremely concise shot.
When this character appears, not as a hero, as a transcendence, on the contrary, as a capable housewife. She appeared in a bakery scramble caused by her, and the narration said that at this time everything was using ration coupons. In the words of another character in the story, in today's world, except for disease, everything is To ration. When the narrator said that only 100 grams of bread were rationed per person per day, Pina launched a small disturbance and successfully made herself harvest a lot of bread. Her appearance began the film's harsh but not lacking in warmth. time.
The first half of the film "Wartime Roman Graffiti" is probably the most fascinating part of the film, especially today it seems, every time I rewatch this film, I am amazed at the details of the film, every time I rewatch it There will be a heartfelt smile at those moments.
In the film, the priest is playing football with the children with a whistle in his mouth. His very lively primary school physical education teacher-like role seems to be highly inconsistent with the image of a Catholic priest. The most important basic feature of a priest is his warmth, his tenderness, and his love for ordinary people. These things are completely secular and not sacred. It is the worldly sense of a clergyman that gives him a radiance of humanity.
The film ends with the execution of the priest by the fascists, who through death returns to the height of the divine, but this divine is also human, because it is the dignity of man, the dignity of faith, and in the harsh environment of war , the adherence to the bottom line in the face of harsh human nature.
In the clip where the priest enters the home store and the fighters of the resistance movement, the director consciously took a camera position and placed the close-up shot of the priest behind the foreground of the two statues, so there are two statues at the forefront of the picture, One of the two statues is a Romanesque nude and the other is a Christian saint. In the close-up shot, we can see the priest's uncomfortable expressions and body language. In the end, he twisted the naked girl to one side, and after thinking for a while, he turned the saint to one side, forming a back-to-back relationship between the two statues.
The director uses such details to make the audience full of humor and understanding to understand the immanence of religion for the role of the priest. It is not any Taoism. At the same time, the audience will feel the two periods of European civilization or when the two characters meet. , giving the character a strong sense of comedy.
One of the details I liked very much was when Pina sent her son to find the priest, which was also the moment when an underground organization secretly connected. The most interesting thing is that he walked through the church with the priest, who did the customary movements of his profession with extreme ease, knelt down on the altar and saluted, and then went to kiss the icon. The kid did the same thing that was habitually behind his back, but when he went out, he said to the priest that I didn't want to waste time in church at all. This is a sense of humour and comedy formed by the contrast between an extremely rude, arrogant, naughty street teenager's rhetoric about religion and the religious habits of his body.
The film paints us a picture of national resistance with a sentimental and comedic plot, where the Italians, after experiencing the tyranny of one fascist, refuse to submit to the power of another fascist, which also means foreign countries. invaders and foreign occupiers. Combining such a sense of humour and a sense of life with a righteous and dignified tale of resistance heroes, it can be said that it is Rossellini's genius creation, but it must also be said that if not There is that kind of empathy that cannot share such a betrayal of the class of that era, toward the bottom, toward the identification of people in suffering, it is impossible to discover and recognize this emotion.
The main story of the film seems rather simple or even too straightforward today, and even many flaws can be seen, for example, the female Nazi in the film is implied to be a lesbian. The temptation that leads to the ultimate betrayal and depravity of the woman the hero loves is, while drugs and substances, seem to be sex at the same time. There is a prejudiced imagination in it. If you combine it with the historical Nazi-fascist persecution of homosexuals, you will see the historical limitation of this prejudice itself.
The film still inserts nuanced humor in the most brutally dramatic moments, which is at the same time a kind of self-referentiality of film history.
Knocking people out with a frying pan is the oldest part of the silent film era. Such a plot not only suddenly adds a sense of humor and comedy to this tragic moment, but also reminds people in film history of many memories of the film.
In this film, the big era, the group portraits of heroes, and the resistance movement are at the same time closely related to the deep recognition and understanding of daily life and people at the bottom.
Another peculiarity of this movie is the use of a lot of street scenes, a lot of war scenes. The quality of these scenes is poor, not because the movie is old enough, but because all those scenes were filmed by the director Rossellini in a candid wartime documentary, using news flashes and in extremely low light The material itself made the screen have this rough and inconsistent quality at the time of the screening, but the director also used the grain of the film to give us a historical texture and a media form for recognizing history. This is a very unique and very important feature of this film.
Rossellini is a generational master of Italian cinema and a fascinating and controversial character in the history of Italian cinema. You may have heard of his peculiar love story with Hollywood's most famous movie star, Ingrid Bergman, who was inspired by "Rome, Undefended City" and "Deutsches Zero" It was the inspiration of these two masterpieces of realism that I met Rossellini.
This film proves to us that reality does not equal realism, because it is not a genre, not a method, it is a kind of courage and responsibility, a kind of courage to face, to recognize, to record, to reproduce and Responsibility, when you really have that courage and responsibility, reality itself is full of stories and comedy.
dictionary:
1. White Phone Movie
A film popular in the 1940s during the fascist regime in Italy, it was dedicated to describing the luxurious life of rich people, named after the rich people who used white telephones. The content is "hedonism" and "escapism". After the Second World War, it caused a backlash in the field of artistic creation because it was separated from the real life of most people in society, leading to the rise of Italian neorealism.
2. Bourgeois
Synonymous with the French middle class, it represents the way of life of the middle class: rational, prudent, advocating capitalism.
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