My goal for this upcoming year is to abandon my contrarian prerogatives and self-consciously literary approach to film analysis and instead lift up the people with refreshingly accessible writing and a genuine, infectious joie de vivre so with that in mind here’s a deep dive into the use of editing in a movie about people striving to maintain the integrity of their personal lives against the backdrop of a Nazi occupation and failing completely in the effort, also everyone gets shot.
Rome, Open City
Reviewing – or analyzing, or whatever it is I do on this website – a classic movie is a weird and dumb idea. It’s like reviewing the Lincoln Memorial – what’re you going to do, say it’s bad? The Lincoln Memorial by definition can’t be bad because if it was we’d have turned it into a Sbarro’s by now. So there’s no point in giving your opinion in that direction. And in the other direction? Announcing to your readers that the Lincoln Memorial is, in fact, good? Thanks, Ken Burns. I feel so steeped in the subtleties of American history now. I wasn’t sure what opinion I should have on the Lincoln fucking Memorial until I watched your infinity-hours long documentary about it.
Basically, the problem is this: something like the Lincoln Memorial has become so culturally monolithic that to do anything besides point at it and say “see, there it is. Right there, is the place where it is” amounts to little more than throwing rocks at the sun. And you could never hit the sun, not with that little noodle arm of yours, you pathetic vegan. Go watch the Friends reunion again.
So just saying whether or not a Classic Thing is good or bad is a gargantuan waste of time, you see, but there is some utility to be gleaned from inspecting the mechanical components of the Thing on their own, self-contained merit. If nothing else this approach allows us to, if only momentarily, take Classic Thing from the pedestal upon which it enjoys the eternal advantage over the rest of us not-famous entities, consider it as if it were being released for the first time – without the obfuscating lionizations of time – and then release it back to artistic Valhalla, where we will have determined – empirically, with science, and protractors – it clearly belongs. So I’m going to do that.
I’m Going to Actually Start the Review Now
Rome, Open City is a classic film school movie, like Casablanca, or Lawrence of Arabia, or Ghostbusters, or The Princess Bride. You learn efficient screenwriting from Ghostbusters, proper characterization from Casablanca, literal perfection in all possible capacities from The Princess Bride, etc. And like those other heavy hitters Open City contains in its hilariously lean runtime all sorts of lessons you can apply towards making a good movie of your own. Where it stands apart from the others, however, is the type of good movie you’d be making. Those other movies – which are pretty good, I guess, if you’re into the greatest stories ever filmed – are movie movies. They are overtly cinematic, lilt along to the beats of the human experience as expressed through the large and loud prerogatives of film, and return to us a catharsis that isn’t akin to anything we will ever experience in our own lives but undeniably feels like we could. The transporting power of film, the inculcation of otherwise alien experiences grounded and made relatable by the bounding universality of human emotion, the interconnectedness of all things, etc. Movies, basically.
Open City, conversely, is a masterclass not in projecting onto its viewers the wild experiences and volatile psyches of larger-than-life celluloid figures but by encouraging us – nearly forcing us – to project our own overwhelming normality onto its characters, who themselves possess none of the inaccessible grandiosity of your typical cinematic leads. Like Gomorrah, Open City is as close as you can get to a documentary while still having a script. I mean, for fuck’s sake, its footage of ruined buildings comes from just walking around post-occupation Italy and filming actual, real, bombed-out structures. This leads to an experience that hits so hard because it’s not foreign at all, even though it literally takes place in a foreign country. The more or less banality of the characters’ non-Resistance lives constantly reminds us that we’d be the same way in that situation – not going full Indiana Jones and duking it out with mustachioed slabs of Nazi sirloin, but worrying about whether or not our wedding will go off without a hitch, or if our kid has actually been going to school when we send him off in the morning. We’re reminded of their humanity – and our own – constantly, which makes the gunfire that much more startling, the presence of the Gestapo that much more terrifying.
But first, because we need at least a little context if I am to successfully jerk off Roberto Rossellini for your amusement, some plot:
Rome, Open City takes place during the latter stages of World War II, right smack in that peculiar period when it was more-or-less obvious that the Nazis were going to lose but that revelation, paradoxically, only made things grimmer in the short-term because those rascally goose-steppers, in classic them fashion, responded to this slight hiccup in their plan for racial purity by simply Nazi-ing extra hard. Add to this the fact that the Allies were pushing onto the continent through Italy itself, and that Mussolini’s fascist regime collapsed pretty much as soon as – mamma mia! – it saw enemy troops on the horizon and, well – the Germans weren’t just occupying Rome, they were occupying the hell out of it.
Our protagonists – who are best appreciated as a collective, as the film deliberately avoids giving any one of them the Hero Role in the film – respond to this new normal as any actual, real people would: they try to fuck up the Nazis’ shit whenever they get a chance, but they also have weddings to plan, confessions to attend, personal issues to sort through, and lives to lead in general.
And that’s about it, really. And the fact that that’s it is chief among the many brilliant minimalist decisions in the movie. There’s no grandiose plot to finish the Nazis once and for all, no MacGuffin that our characters desperately search for because if they find it before the Germans they’ll be granted one wish and they can use that wish to transport Hitler back to Hell, or at least art school. “Throwing wrenches into the Nazi machine whenever the opportunity arises” is simply another unromantic obligation of adulthood that has muscled its way onto the daily to-do list, like finishing the laundry, or making sure to wave back when your neighbor waves at you in the morning, even though he’s a prick and he dumps his lawnmower bag on your side of the fence when he thinks you’re not looking. We all see you, Karl. We see you and we know.
But really, the way in which rebellion is portrayed as having become inseparably mixed with the daily banalities of life is incredible, and the way in which this cocktail of the bland and the grand is presented to the audience constitutes a masterclass in filmmaking, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the editing.
Those Cuts, Motherfucker! Those Cuts!
Editing is the grammar of film. This is not a new insight, but it stands to be repeated whenever you encounter a superlative example of the form. And, brother, the editing in Open City is as superlative as you get. It ain’t just good, it was in its time unprecedented in how it presented the unspoken language of cinema to audiences. Even today filmmakers can’t pull it off right. There are no establishing shots in this fucking movie. There are no sweeping vistas, or low-angle draw-ups. Scenes just kind of start, often with characters – many of whom we’ve never met before – already in mid-conversation, talking about anything from the latest insurgency against the Nazis to the quotidian affairs of life to events never even given specific form or name because they constitute the unrestrainable forward charge of life in general, into which any topic, high or low, fatal or dull, suddenly finds itself miscible within the democratizing context of a life always on the verge of being over. The guard-rails of a typical cinematic experience – here’s an establishing shot to let you know, geographically, where we are in the world, and also what tone you should expect from the events transpiring therein, and also to simply give you a moment to breathe before the next narrative beat – are stripped away and we are left with life just kind of spilling out in a way that is harrowingly organic and denied the calming protection of Plot Prerogatives.
A great example of this elevation of urgency through deliberately uncinematic editing comes from the very beginning of the film: we open on a man watching the Gestapo heading into his apartment building, at which point he calmly – but with obvious apprehension nipping at the edge of his cool – retreats to the roof, and then escapes to another building. The landladies feign ignorance when the Germans reach their floor and start asking about the man, who they believe is a leader in the underground resistance movement. We have no idea who this man is, where we even are in the city, if the Nazis are correct in their suspicion, exactly how much the landladies know, nothing. The events just kind of happen, and you get the impression that the landladies who bullshitted the Germans into going away just kind of sat back down to their tea after it was over. Just another day ending in -y, eh?
From this point we visit, with a rapid-fire approach that never condescends to us with the various commas, colons, or parentheses of film: a single, pregnant mother fretting over both her wedding and the crumbling conditions in the city, a priest who uses a small army of schoolchildren to keep tabs on the goings-on in the resistance, that very same man from the start of the film, a police officer sympathetic to the Italian resistance but too nervous to ever really stand up to the Germans in earnest, and more. All of these characters are mostly just dropped in on without fanfare, and it takes a while to even realize that most of them know each other, and that their lives as friends of the rebellion have pretty much grafted themselves onto their other lives as “people trying to survive World War II.”
And this unromantic editing just keeps hitting us again and again with its total refusal to cast these people into the sweep and freedom of heroic identities. The pregnant mother and her soon-to-be husband have a moment where the former cries and suffers a mini-breakdown in the hallway of their apartment at the sheer amount of shit happening in her life, and Italy in general. We don’t get any kind of soft-lighting closeup for her Acting Moment, Take Notes Everybody – just the opposite, in fact. Her moment of emotional collapse is simply dissolved away from by the film and we fade back in on the same two characters, presumably the next morning, as they calmly talk business again. This is not a mistake in the filmmaking – we are being shown just how insignificant personal issues are against the backdrop of war, and how quickly and coldly a person must move on from whatever thing is going on in their life. A more cinematic movie would separate the crying scene and the subsequent sober one with footage of, say, a storm rocking the exterior of the apartment complex they’re in all throughout that harrowing night, but this is war by way of Rossellini, son – all the symbolism is on backorder.
Even the closest thing the movie has to Hollywood moments are filmed in an aggressively banal fashion. When the Nazis finally say “fuck it,” and decide to storm the apartment complex where they think rebellious plots are being laid the entire approach of the Gestapo is presented like something from a newsreel. It’s shot after shot of Germans pulling up in cars, but filmed entirely from windows, dispassionately, like you’re seeing cell-phone footage sent into the local news station. Normally you’d at least orient the camera movements around the experience of one character in particular – the protagonist, anyone. But that’s a level of agency only seen in cinematic movies, where the universe of the film somehow knows to capture your reaction to each development. Not so in Open City. No sexy wide-angle shots here, no disorienting 360° rotations, no phantom-ride angles, nothing. Just this clinical, “I guess this is happening now,” approach that serves to heighten the anxiety of the moment in just how realistic and frighteningly bland it is.
Technically, “Resistance Fighter” is my LARP Character
And these constant pressures have basically separated each character into their component parts, a compartmentalization that makes them in many ways strangers to one another, and confused in their own skin. All of the characters lead such necessarily shuttered existences that even other, very closely associated acts of resistance are news to them. An army of children blow up some kind of Nazi installation halfway through the movie, and the characters we’ve met so far are just as surprised as everyone else at the development, because no one bothered to tell them it was going to happen. The bombing is not an important plot point, it’s not set up earlier in the movie, and there’s no satisfying narrative payoff from it, and none of this is a mistake on the movie’s part – it’s just a thing that happens, like breaking down and crying in the hallway of your apartment, that needs to be moved on from, if you even bother to incorporate it into your conception of yourself at all, or if it’s just something you can slough off like another layer of miserable skin. There are just too many narratives going on within the matrix of this rebellion for anyone to keep track of any of them, so the adults just need to accept that their children are violent freedom fighters now – it happened sometime, probably right under the adults’ noses, and they’re not even inadequate guardians for not noticing it, there are just too many versions of any one person to notice or account for all of them.
And the most brilliant part of the children’s bombing mission, the part that truly highlights just how many different and concurrent identities each citizen of the city has been refracted into? After their act of violent, explosive sabotage, the children return to their apartment complex and break into a fearful run as they pass in front of a doorway behind which they know a disciplinarian of a parent lurks. Yes, that’s the thing that scares our freedom fighters the most – not being executed by the Nazis, but getting yelled at by a local parent for staying out too late. Hey, they’re just still kids, after all, right? Priorities.
The End
Open City bypasses simply being good on its way to being something new. The entire visual language in which the movie communicates is a reappraisal of the way in which we talk through images, and especially the way in which we edit those images to give them further meaning on the margins. It really is a graduate course as well as a story, and something worth checking out if you’re interested in how movies are made, and how storytelling works in general, and the endless forms storytelling can take. Normally I don’t traffic in the whole One Hundred Movies to Watch Before You Die schtick, because I have no idea what you might like, I probably couldn’t name a hundred movies, anyway, and even if I tried to make a list like that I’d probably just write MacGruber down one hundred times because Will Forte has loud sex with a ghost in that movie, and I think that’s funny. But if you want to get your nerd-boner on with some film theory told through the vector of a basically flawless movie, then check out Rome, Open City. Also MacGruber.