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THE FILM SINCE THEN
behind the fascist facade burst forth violently and gave rise to films exemplifying the nature of each and plotting the course of each. Italian films of the past three years have been more vital and vigorous than films anywhere else in the world. In their concern for reality, for immediate problems, for basic human concerns, they reveal themselves as by-products of social revolution. Or they have up until recently.
They are almost exclusively the product of young and unknown men. Mussolini's industry and its personnel seem to have disappeared as completely as the film industry of pre-revolutionary Russia did in 1918. Roberto Rossellini, pre-eminent among the new talents, had done little with film before the partisan movement during the last months of the Italian campaign. Immediately after the Liberation of Rome, he and his friends gathered captured cameras, slender finance, and actors from nowhere and, against the background of Rome itself, produced the extraordinary document of the German Occupation, Open City (1945). This vast cross-section of the lives of the insulted and degraded Italians contained also some remarkable sequences revealing how completely the Gestapo had penetrated into every segment of the fascist state. No film has ever equalled it in vituperation of the Nazis and their even more despicable Italian allies. But the most impressive sections of Open City were those which showed how all kinds of ordinary Italians, from Catholic parish priest to Communist partisan had, without help or leadership, realised their common interest and found a way to action. Such a thesis might have seemed mere apologia except for the extraordinary reality of this production — a reality which arose not only from the fact that it was filmed in the actual streets and houses of Rome (some of the shots were taken while the Germans were still there), but even more because its characterisation of the Italian proletariat, from the children to the very old, was honest, unsentimental, and devoid of self-pity. It was not a justification of a people who had succumbed earliest to fascism, and resisted it
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