Story of a Film: Rome, Open City

Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City represents one of the turning points in post-war European cinema. This film, along with Visconti’s Obsession, was the first film of the newly arising movement, Italian neorealism that reacted to artificial reality of schematic films made before or during World War II in the famous film studio Cinecittà in Rome. Rosselini’s film avoids the cardboard reality of war stemming from a script and producers’ visions. As Cesare Zavattini puts it, it aims to recreate the reality of war in the form of storytelling. The production of the film was plagued with many accidents and the film itself gained a particular reputation.