Abstract
This chapter investigates Rossellini’s representations of compassion, opening new lines of inquiry in the examination of the film. It also highlights potential connections with the traditional patriarchal ideology, prevailing during Italy’s Fascist period, and deviations from it, which neorealist artists try to eliminate. Rossellini uses compassion as a way to solve struggles and to underscore and approve modern women’s political and social participation. The film also suggests that those qualities are valued only when women also demonstrate the patriarchal values particularly glorified by Fascism, such as commitment to the roles of wife and mother associated with the domestic sphere, thus proposing a less inventive way of problem-solving.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Forgacs, “The term ‘open city’ had the specific meaning during the war of a city which was to be excluded from military operations, could not be used as a transit zone for troops or materials and could not be the seat of a military government (Cairo and Athens were also designated open cities in this sense)” (“Twentieth-Century Culture” 31).
- 2.
See Jaggar for a detailed examination of these aspects of emotions.
- 3.
The script for Rome, Open City, as scripts for many other movies by Rossellini, was written by Sergio Amidei in collaboration with Federico Fellini. However, citations within this work are from Rossellini’s The War Trilogy, translated by Judith Green.
- 4.
As clarified earlier, in this study, features of similar emotions may be included in compassion. Stein’s example on empathy is pertinent to our analysis of compassion.
- 5.
In tune with Perry’s reading, bread may also suggest Christian values. Jesus Christ called himself “the bread of life” (John 6.35); he also said, “If a man eats of this bread, he will live forever” (John 6.51). Jesus also blessed bread and presented it as transformed into his body during the great Eucharistic mystery: “Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to His disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat: this is my body’” (Matthew 26.26). In this context, bread may be a symbol for Pina’s salvation because in taking bread she expresses her opposition to the Nazi regime.
- 6.
For an explanation of denotative and connotative meaning in cinema, see James Monaco 161.
- 7.
The inspiration for this scene was the actual shooting of Teresa Gullace. More information about her and Don Morosini, who inspired the character of Don Pietro, can be found in Celli’s “Italian Neorealism’s War Legacy: Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945) and L’uomo dalla croce/Man of the Cross” (1943) and Marcus’s “Pina’s Pregnancy, Traumatic Realism, and the After-Life of Open City.”
- 8.
The presence of children as testimonial witnesses to the events narrated is typical of neorealist cinematography. For more details about this topic, see Roy Armes 154 and Landy 33.
- 9.
Gabriele Pedullà informs us that Viganò’s narrative is characterized by feminist themes and stories of emancipation. In his opinion, the author’s short stories’ favorite subject is “women that stopped being afraid” (262).
- 10.
According to Monaco, “A ‘metonym’ is a figure of speech in which an associated detail or notion is used to invoke an idea or represent an object. Etymologically, the word means ‘substitute naming’ (from the Greek meta, involving transfer, and onoma, name)” (167).
- 11.
According to Forgacs, “The Via Tiburtina, where Pina tells Manfredi her father had a tinsmith’s shop and Marina’s mother was a custodian (portiera) of an apartment block, is another consular road, forming one of the boundaries of San Lorenzo, a working-class district erected in the 1880s which had become known for its anti-Fascism under Mussolini’s regime and which had been badly damaged by Allied bombs on 19 July 1943” (Rome, Open City 43).
- 12.
Bondanella underscores this analogy: “When Manfredi dies without betraying his cause, Rossellini frames his Communist Partisan leader as if he were photographing the crucified Christ, employing the traditional iconography familiar to us all from numerous works of religious art” (41). A similar argument can be found in Perry’s Il Santo Partigiano martire 44.
- 13.
Mark Shiel underlines precise traits that make Pina the symbol of Italian womanhood: her resistance identified in “her natural moral goodness, her passionate sense of self and her instinctive defiance of the occupying Germans” (49).
- 14.
Ben-Ghiat (“Neorealism in Italy” 158) clarifies this similarity between Fascist and neorealist films in her explanation of the origin of neorealism. The new aesthetic developed during the dictatorship but it swelled, as a movement, only after the fall of Fascism, thus offering the intellectual community the freedom to investigate their social and political environment.
- 15.
For more information about Rossellini’s debt to Fascist films, see Celli 227.
- 16.
See Armes and Cannon (“Resistance Heroes and Resisting Spectators” 155) for descriptions of Maria Michi’s involvement in the Resistance.
- 17.
Liliana Cavani’s La donna nella Resistenza (Women in the Resistance) is another valuable work that underlines the historic evidence of women’s dynamic involvement in the Resistance. Commissioned in memory of the twentieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation, this documentary includes several interviews of women participating in the conflict. One of them, Marcella Monaco, organized the liberation of Sandro Pertini, President of the Italian Republic in 1978, from the Regina Coeli prison. Also, Martin Ritt’s Jovanka e le altre/Jovanka and the Others is a remarkable confirmation from Yugoslavia of brave female-led resistance against the Germans.
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Milli Konewko, S. (2016). Compassion and the Construction of Women’s Identity in Rome, Open City . In: Neorealism and the "New" Italy. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52416-4_14
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