ROBERTO ROSSELLINI
Rome Open City
Presented here is an episode of the mainline CriterionCast podcast. I have been a regular contributer to this podcast for a couple of years, and have been honored to appear on a number of different episodes about individual films in the Criterion Collection.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:11:32 — 98.2MB)
This time on the podcast, Jordan Essoe, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Arik Devens discuss Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City .
This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the films that would follow it to form The War Trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member— Rome Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake.