#revision - NEO-REALIST ITALIAN FILM

As part of my Italian Avant-garde course this year, we did a week on post-war Italian neo-realist film, which opened me up to a whole new medium of art making that can be as symbolically rich as any painting or sculpture. With a focus on Rome, Open City from 1945 by Roberto Rossellini, Bicycle Theives by Vitorria Di Sica from 1948 and L'eclisse from 1962 by Michaelangelo Antonio, I will consider the changing notions of the city and its periphery, as well as the rhetoric potential of sites and buildings within film.

The EUR on the outskirts of Rome was built as a fascist cultural marker for the 20 years of power that Mussolini had achieved, as well as marking the hopeful future of fascism within Italy. Placed towards the Mediterranean Basin that Mussolini hoped to one day be in control of, the EUR would have been a powerful and symbolic place had it been completed prior to WWII. Unfortunately, the neo-classical building was left abandoned, and after the collapse of the Italian Fascist regime in 1943, the building had a ghostly and empty presence, and the EUR came to symbolise the damaging past. It is this symbolism that John Rhodes uses when speaking about Rossellini's film Rome, Open City, which is a work highly critical of fascism. Rhodes highlights how the pivotal and devastating scene of leading lady Pina's death is closely followed by a scoping view of the desolate EUR landscape, with Rossellini believing that buildings and places hold strong rhetoric values. Whilst this may be the case, and made for highly emotive and charged scenes in the film, Rhodes argues that places are static and values are place upon them from the outside, a case that is acutely clear with the EUR.

Rome, Open City depicts the EUR as a ghostly reminder of a fascist past, however if we compare this to its interpretation in Antonio's L'eclisse, shot on location less than twenty years later, the change is significant. After the economic miracle in Italy, the EUR became a sight for suburban development, where many middle class families moved to live. Instead of holding onto the ghosts of its past, the EUR became a centre of capitalist consumer culture, or as Antonio calls it, 'the world the bourgeoisie'. At the end of L'eclisse, fragmented shots of urban life flick past one another to a silent score of music, each shot dragging, emphasising the mundanity of life but adding an anxious undertone to the film. The anxiousness is furthered with the onset of the nuclear bomb and fear of losing the economic security that they have. Antonio uses these film medium techniques to create a tense environment and the underlying issues and anxieties that lie beneath the pleasant bourgeoisie exterior.

Both of these films have a dominant focus on the EUR and its changing symbolism, however they also actively focus on the periphery of the city. After being war torn, Rome was under stress to deal with the poverty that the war bought, and inner-city housing projects were developed under the Marshall Plan. In Bicycle Thieves from 1948, the poverty of this region is highlighted, showing ramshackle and unfinished buildings. There are critical undertones towards fascism and war and the devastation that it bought.

Film can be a powerful way of creating relationships with politics or revolutionary change, especially when loaded with symbolism. The periphery of Rome was a changing place post-war, and as the final scene of Rome, Open City suggests, in which we see the cast walking towards the city and St Peter's cathedral, the city and religion seem to be the salvaging hopes.

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