The Space Between Roberto Rossellini’s Post-War Films (Rome, Open City, and Paisà) and the Art of Renato Guttuso
Chapter 1: Introduction
Italian History and World War II
On 25 July 1943 Mussolini was arrested and his government replaced by a new regime appointed by King Vittorio Emmanuele III. In September, with Italy declaring a formal armistice with the Allies, the German army rescued Mussolini from his Italian captors, occupied Rome, and re-established a much-reduced Italian Fascist regime, the Republic of Salò, near Venice. Nine months of warfare followed before the liberation of Rome in June 1944 and nine more before the liberation of the entire country in the spring of 1945. While the Allies pushed slowly northwards from Sicily, tens of thousands of anti-fascist partisans initiated their own guerrilla resistance to the Germans. These anti-fascists came from a diverse range of political backgrounds: the Communist Party was dominant, but Socialists, Christian Democrats and members of the radical social-democratic Action Party also played important roles. These groups worked together to defeat a common enemy but each had its own view of how Italian society should move forward once peace was secured [Shiel, 2006, p. 46].
Purpose and Objectives
This essay seeks to explore how the political environment of post-war Italy influenced the visual arts not only in terms of artistry but also in terms of spectatorship. A parallel analysis of Roberto Rossellini’s films and Renato Guttuso’s compositions can inform and enrich our understanding of how they operate visually to make comparable statements about the decline of fascism in everyday life. The media that I will be considering are the films, Rome, Open City, 1945, and Paisà, 1946, directed by Rossellini and the paintings and drawings of Guttuso from approximately 1942-1949 especially, Massacre, 1943, Triumph of Death, 1943, Ballo Popolare, 1945, and drawings from the album, “Gott mit Uns” (God with us), 1943-45.
Both Rossellini and Guttuso communicate explicit political messages as well as personal statements of fear and anxiety in their work during the post-war period. Although, their previous work did include political messages, they were of a subtler nature due to the repressive forces of the fascist regime. [1] Despite the differences in their media, the ways in which their war-themed scenarios are articulated invites a comparison. The issues that I will be considering include urban space, representation of the body, and spectatorship as it relates to differences in media and the notion of realism.
Neorealism and Social Realism
The term applied to post-war filmmakers working to create films that closely resembled real life is “neorealism”. Its origin as a literary designation was associated with twentieth-century figures such as Alberto Moravia [2] [Marcus, 1986, p. 18]. The term itself is problematic, as many critics and film theorists have been unable to agree on a concrete definition. This is mostly because neorealism did not adhere to prescribed guidelines and did not apply to a particular “school” of artists. Further, it is more than just a stylistic description; it is specific to the events of the Resistance and the post-war reconstruction of Italy [3] [Marcus, 1986, preface]. As described by Milicent Marcus, neorealism is a special case in which the relationship between style and implied worldview is so deep and morally binding that the modification of one amounts to the virtual betrayal of the other. For many critics, it is primarily a moral statement, leading one critic to the conclusion that it was never an aesthetic code at all, but strictly an ethical one [Marcus, 1986, p. 23].
As defined by Roberto Rossellini,
- Neorealism involves a greater interest in individuals. Modern man feels a need to tell of things as they are, to take account of reality in an uncompromisingly concrete way, which goes with today’s interest in statistics and scientific results. Neorealism is also a response to the genuine need to see men for what they are, with humility and without recourse to fabricating the exception; it means the awareness that the exceptional is arrived at through the investigation of reality. Lastly, it is an urge for self-clarification, an urge not to ignore reality whatever it may be. This is why I have tried in my films to reach an understanding of things and to give them their true value. It is not something easy or lightly undertaken but a highly ambitious project because to give anything its true value means grasping its real universal meaning [Liehm, 1984, p. 137].
Angelo Restivo argues that the paradox of neorealism is that, on one hand, is the faith that the work of art can give us everything and on the other hand, the realisation that in the process of artistic creation something will always, inevitably be lost [Restivo, 2002, p. 22]. Similarly, Andrè Bazin stated, ‘some measure of reality must always be sacrificed in the effort of achieving it’ [Bazin, 1971, p. 100]. Restivo uses Fredric Jameson’s term, “vanishing mediators” to describe the success of neorealism: for Jameson, the vanishing mediator is that which emerges in moments of historical transition, in the moment when the historical situation is radically “open”, and which vanishes as soon as the new order establishes itself and necessarily then erases any notion of contingency, i.e., that it could have turned out any other way. Thus, as the Italian Christian Democrat government solidified its power from 1948 into the early 50s, neorealism too lost its sense of radical openness, and in this sense, neorealism “vanished”.[4] Audience studies, such as those of Vittorio Spinazzola confirm this view [Restivo, 2002, p. 23].
Moravia suggests that rather than characterizing the end of neorealism as it’s demise, it would be more effective to characterize the style of neorealism as post-war specific and therefore unable to exist under any other circumstance. In an interview from 1962, he stated that ‘Today real objectivity, that is to say the objectivity of one and the same conception of reality once shared by painter and viewer, no longer exists. We lack the ideology to justify it’ [Moravia, 1976].
Whereas “neorealism” was specifically associated with filmmaking and historically confined to post-war Italy, Guttuso’s oeuvre maintained its description of “social realism” throughout his career. Considered Italy’s foremost social realist painter of the twentieth century, Guttuo’s powerful realism protests Fascism and oppression. He tackled contemporary subjects such as war atrocities, labour meetings, the of average blue-collar worker, and the Mafia [Richardson, 1983]. However, politically speaking, he did not think himself as a Socialist.
According to Guttuso,
- The freedom of not being in a socialist country, motivated artists to search for a reality as seen by socialists. This freedom meant the ability to express sociality from the inside of each issue that appeared before us – in other words, to see and express contemporary reality from the most modern point of view. This is the condition of the engage artist who is affected by seeing/finding himself permanently merged with life and engaged in the task of grasping this movement/vitality [before him] that is simultaneously historical and atemporal, like everything that profoundly involves the human heart [Stiles and Selz, 1996, 178].
In John Berger’s opinion, Guttuso’s stylistic example offers an alternative for the development of the two movements: Cubism and Expressionism. Sustained by a binding faith in his fellow man, he has always realised the importance of content, and so has understood that the artists’ responsibility is not only for what his brush does to his canvas, but also for what his canvas does to those who gaze at it [Berger, 1953].
Despite Guttuso’s international success with Crucifixion, 1940, he was insignificant outside of Italy from the mid 1940s onwards. Critic, John Richardson, suggests that the primary reason was that Guttuso’s figurative style was not compatible with the taste for abstract Expressionism, Minimal, or Conceptual art, which monopolised the New York scene. In addition, reservations regarding his politics were obstacles to his acceptance in America. Guttuso constantly followed the unfashionable path of Realism by expressing basic emotions in a direct and dramatic way. The horrors of war themes that Guttuso tackled were approached by almost no other artist of the time except for Picasso, with any degree of success. Paintings such as, Occupazione di Terre reveal how successfully Guttuso has reconciled history painting and political ideology with the demands of modern art [Richardson, 1983].
The relationship between Rossellini and Guttuso is not of direct influence, but rather an indirect parallel. In the mid 1940s, a general effort of recovery from the devastation of Fascism and war was taking place alongside the revival of art’s nostalgia for a restored unfractured reality that survived it all. It is in this space that we find Rossellini and Guttuso, exploring the foundations of realism.
Rossellini, Guttuso and Politics
Some neorealist filmmakers did become part of the Resistance; however, Rossellini was not one of them. Director Roberto Rossellini became involved with the cinema towards the mid 1930s, working as both editor and director on several short films for the Istituto Luce [Nowell-Smith, 2000, p. 8].
Ideologically boycotted by the Left after (and indeed before) L’Amore in 1948, Rossellini was rescued on aesthetic grounds by his French admirers and it is the aesthetic and non-political interpretation of his work that has held sway ever since. [5] On this account, Rossellini was an essentially apolitical figure; his films from the Fascist period (he made three, one about each of the armed services) are not Fascist and his neorealist trilogy stands aloof from the politics of the Resistance and post-war reconstruction [Nowell-Smith, 2000, p. 8].
Despite his apolitical identification, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argues that politics were a major source of consistency in Rossellini’s career. Rossellini was a profoundly political artist – a fact which has been obscured in equal measure by people who were aware (but opposed to) his political project and those who denied its existence in the name of higher values. [Nowell-Smith, 2000, p. 9]. In light of Nowell-Smith’s argument, I believe that the post-war films highlight Rossellini’s political ideologies, in particular the alliance between Catholics and Communists in Rome, Open City. [6]
Marcus argues that Rossellini’s struggle was to somehow undo the damage to the dignity and integrity of Rome [by Mussolini] as a historical idea before he could use it to further his anti-Fascist intent. The filmmaker’s strategy of revoking Mussolini’s title to the symbols of antiquity and then appropriating them for his own purposes explains the symmetry of the triumphal marches that introduce and conclude the film. Open City begins with the procession of German soldiers into a square of the occupied city and end with the return of the boys into Rome on the Via Trionfale (Trimphal Way). Theirs is the corrective to the initial march of the occupying troops as the boys reclaim their city for the future of justice and hope that their political activism epitomise [Marcus, 1986, p. 49].
Renato Guttuso, on the other hand, was involved as a member of the underground Italian Resistance. Born in Bagheria, Sicily, Guttuso settled in Rome in 1937, where he had his first one-man show in 1938. From then on his work involved issues of moral and political freedom. He was active in the Resistance in 1943, at which time he went into hiding until after the Liberation in 1944 [Richardson, 1983]. During the war, he painted violent, painful, anti-military pictures [Berger, 1955].
As a Marxist, Guttuso was less concerned with the political and economic aspects of Marxism than to its humanistic values. He believed that of the existing and widely accepted ideology in the world at the time, Marxism offered the most promise of a return to humanism, to a view of man as an end and not as a means. He was profoundly dissatisfied with the absence of human qualities in modern life. For Guttuso the function of art as a document of civilization is subordinate to its potential as a humanizing force [Kibler, 1979].
The Films: Rome, Open City and Paisà
Roberto Rossellini’s, Rome, Open City was the first film to bring Italian cinema to the attention of an international audience after World War II. It was enthusiastically received in New York and would run there for 21 months after its first showing on 25 February 1946. In both the USA and France and later in Great Britain, it opened up an import market for Italian films, which encouraged other directors to expose their work internationally [Forgacs, 2000, p. 9].
The events depicted in the film had taken place in Rome in the first months of 1944 when it was under German occupation. Allied (British and American) troops had entered the city on 4 June 1944 and the film had begun to take shape that summer. The film was shot partly on location in the streets and in a working-class tenement building with the residents as extras and untrained actors in the cast. It depicted events particular to Rome. Simultaneously, it touched on experiences and memories of the war that were common to people elsewhere and this helped give it its strong resonance with audiences internationally. The film is considered the founding work of Italian Neorealism [Forgacs, 2000, p. 10].
The main characters of Open City consist of Giorgio Manfredi, a Resistance leader; Francesco, a printer for an underground newspaper; Pina, his fiancée and organiser of the neighbourhood women; Marcello, her activist son, and Don Pietro, priest and committed partisan. In their pursuit are the Gestapo forces of occupied Rome, led by Bergmann and Ingrid, his lackey. The link between the two groups is Marina, Manfredi’s ex-mistress, who is corrupted by the Nazis. The story presents the daily lives of these characters and includes humorous dialogue throughout until the theme darkens when Pina is gunned down by machine-gun fire, an Austrian deserter commits suicide after being captured, Manfredi is tortured to death, and Don Pietro is executed [Marcus, 1986, p. 36]. At the point of Pina’s death, the film makes a general shift from domestic comedy to public tragedy. The protagonist of the story is Rome itself, as a place, as a people and as a historical entity [Marcus, 1986, p. 46].
In 1947 screenwriter Sergio Amidei stated ‘We made Open City under the impression, the suggestion, and the influence of what we had just lived through...More than that, we all have been the instrument of will of the underground army that was anxious to write it’s page for the book of history’ [Marcus, 1986, p. 36].
Paisà represents Italy in the present tense at the very end of World War II. Peter Brunette suggests that the main theme of the film is unity in difference. Mira Liehm quotes poet Paul Eluard description of Paisà as, ‘a film in which we are impatient rubber-neckers and greedy voyeurs; but one in which, like all good rubber-neckers, we are both actors and spectators. We see and we are seen, and this upsets us. Life surrounds us, involves us, and overwhelms us’ [Liehm, 1984, p. 67]. With Paisà Rossellini intended to recreate the Allied troops’ advance toward the north while their presence was still fresh in the minds of the “paisans” and to express the mixed feelings these events evoked in the population. Paisà is explicitly and implicitly suffused with the theme of waiting. Rossellini’s strategy enables the representation of waiting to provide an ideal opportunity for reality to manifest itself in either real or fictitious time. In each episode, someone is expecting an important event to take place, a hidden truth to become apparent, an anguish to disappear [Liehm, 1984, p. 68].
Throughout this essay, I will focus on the Rome episode which tells the story of an American GI who encounters a prostitute in Rome and does not recognise her as the innocent girl whom he had met earlier. The episode begins with the American GIs driving into the city as the Italians gather around enthusiastically in a parade-like procession. Then Rossellini takes us six months into the future where Fred and Francesca meet on the street but do not recognise each other. Francesca is a prostitute and she entices the drunken soldier, Fred, to go home with her. Once they are inside the bedroom, he is uninterested by her seduction and begins to reminisce about his experience in Rome six months prior. [Fig. 1] The story flashes back to his arrival in Rome: After Fred emerges from the tank that he was confined to throughout his journey he meets Francesca, who invites him into her home for some water. Fred and Francesca communicate despite their language barrier and when he departs, she invites him to return sometime.
Following the flashback, Fred’s comments such as, ‘Rome is full of girls like you now...you’re all alike’ and ‘When we first arrived all the girls were beautiful and full of life’ demonstrate his disenchantment. Francesca realises that she is the girl that Fred was reminiscing about and she leaves while he is sleeping but arranges for the madam of the house to give him a note with her address on it when he wakes in the morning. In the last scene, Fred is holding the piece of paper with Francesca’s address on it and then throws it onto the ground. When a fellow GI asks him what it was, Fred replies, ‘Just an address of a whore’. The episode closes with Francesca waiting in front of her house in the rain for the GI that never shows. The final scene marks the end of an illusion, which reinforces the theme of waiting as mentioned above. Sandro Bernardi argues that waiting constitutes the very form of cinema; the sequence-shot makes it possible to see time passing. This scene is not only a reflection on life, on the external world, on waiting; it is also a reflection on the relationship between people and the world. [Bernardi, Magician of the Real, p. 54]
The Paintings and Drawings of Renato Guttuso
Of his post-war compositions, Guttuso’s more explicit references to contemporary violence were generally made in drawings, a more spontaneous and intimate medium than painting. Particularly, his opposition to Nazi-Fascism expressed in a portfolio of drawings titled Gott mit Uns, 1944, produced in response to the massacre of 335 Italian prisoners perpetrated by German soldiers at the Ardeatine caves outside Rome. The massacre was carried out on 24 March 1944 in reprisal for the killing of 32 German military police by urban partisans in Rome. The Roman publisher La Margherita published it illegally in 1944 with an introduction by Antonello Trombadori.[Figs. 2 & 3] By comparison, it would have been much more difficult to organise an equivalent underground production and distribution network for a medium such as film that required considerable financial backing and commanded greater public visibility [Pucci, 2006].
Examples of Guttuso’s paintings from this period that deal directly with violence include Massacro (Massacre), 1943 and Trionfo della morte (Triumph of Death), 1943. [Figs.4 & 5] Both are heavily dependent on the timeless, universalising iconography of Picasso’s Guernica, 1937. For instance, the twisted, naked corpses of faceless men and women, fallen horses, and generally chaotic arrangements describe a timeless state of brutality and despair where the perpetrator is only identified allegorically. Ballo Popolare, 1945, [Fig. 6] painted as a mural for the Olivetti shop in Rome as a representation of indigenous popular culture, seems to be at the opposite end of the spectrum compared the paintings discussed above, however, I will argue that its strong underlying tensions highlight the war-torn state of the Italian people and have heavy allusions to Communism.
Chapter 2: The Neorealist City and the Division of Space
Urban Icons and Landscape
Although the viewer is privy to the knowledge that Rossellini’s films and Guttuso’s compositions take place in post-war Rome, the lack of recognizable Roman landmarks creates an ambiguity and thus the characters’ concerns can relate both nationally and internationally. In Rossellini’s Open City, with the exception of a view of St. Peter’s Dome in the opening and closing shots there are almost no identifying landmarks. [Figs. 7 & 8] Scenes are shot inside character’s apartments, Gestapo headquarters, Don Pietro’s church, or outside on nameless streets and unrecognizable landscapes. In the Rome episode of Paisà, the only iconic landmark depicted is a fleeting glimpse of the Coliseum as the GI’s are arriving and departing in their trucks. The representation of Rome lies within the characters and their personal struggles.
Similarly, Guttuso’s landscape painting, Tetti di Roma (Roofs of Rome) depicts a residential neighborhood as seen from a balcony with the St. Peter’s Dome looming in the background. [Fig. 9] This landscape is serene allowing the viewer to take stock, meditate whilst gently reminding them of where they are. The majority of Guttuso’s drawings in the mid 1940s, including his Gott mit Uns series do not contain any objects or background scenery. Examples of this exception are the sketched Fucilazioni, 1942 and the watercolour Fucilazioni, 1944. Both compositions depict German soldiers pointing their rifles at their victims as they are lined up against a wall and contain a roughly drawn Dome in the background on the upper right hand side. [Figs. 10 & 11] I suggest that this is a reinforcement of the artists’ commitment to the depiction of every day life, with the Dome in the background as a reminder of national and spiritual identity. Thus, remarking on the inevitability of individuals to be tied to something momentous.
Marcus argues that the image of the Dome suggests a visual allusion to church and state, and in the case of Open City, the ideals for which the priest, Don Pietro died - secular activism under the aegis of Christian spirituality . Thereby, Rome becomes a symbol of regeneration, as capital of the pagan past, as headquarters of the Christian present and as a figure of the Kingdom of God to be founded on earth at the end of time [Marcus, 1986, p. 53]. Perhaps, Guttuso, is also offering his viewers a sense of relief and an opportunity to believe in a rejuvenated future, by depicting the Dome in the background of his drawings. I suggest that in the background is his statement of hope amidst the hopeless scenes depicted in the foreground of drawings such as Fucilazioni, 1942 and 1944.
According to Siegfried Kracauer, in the street, cinema could apprehend the relationship between the human subject and his or her physical and social environments with particular insight, and that relationship was most intense in moments of historical crisis such as that of neorealism. In other words, ‘When history is made in the streets, the streets tend to move onto the screen’ [Shiel, 2006, p. 65]. Mark Shiel argues that the neorealist city exists between modernity and the pre-modern in that its accumulated layers of ancient, medieval and renaissance history always reminding us of the past rather than thrusting us into the future. For example, Italy was behind cities like Paris and Berlin as far as urbanization until the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 60s. Therefore, the neorealist city does not depict the hustle and bustle of other cities; it is quieter and less cosmopolitan. Paisà is an extreme case – one of relatively few neorealist films which spend any length of time among the bombed-out ruins of Italian cities [Shiel, 2006, p. 68].
In neorealist film, the destruction was not only human and physical but also metaphysical and existential. It blended the documentation of material hardships and the exploration of spiritual trauma. In Paisà, the Coliseum in Rome appears only incidentally in the distant background as Fred gets into his truck to join his fellow GIs on the road out of the city, leaving behind his lover, Francesca and Rome itself, disenchanted. The Dome in Open City is symbolic of Rossellini’s hope for a better Italy after the war [Shiel, 2006, p. 70].
The deployment of these urban icons is casual and modest. It contrasts clearly with the touristic myths of the Italian city as a place of classical beauty or exotic decadence, which had been well established in western culture for centuries. It also contrasts the deliberate ways in which Italian architecture had been utilised by the Fascist regime for which the city and its buildings were a means to project fixed ideological meaning. For example, cinematic representations of the city in the Fascist era emphasized urbanisation and modernisation as positive evidence of the providential and productive rule of Mussolini’s regime [Shiel, 2006, p. 70].
Guttuso’s compositions also reflect this absence of iconic landscape and in some cases omits landscape altogether. In his Gott mit Uns series, there are no background objects, limited or no landscape, no village, no still lifes, nothing that connects the figures to a specific location or time except the figures themselves, and specifically their clothing. The palette is black ink with the occasional water-coloured splashes of reds and blues, symbols for earth and sky, blood and suffering. There is no room on the canvas for past or future; the figures and scenarios live in an eternal, present state of anguish that voids the world and everything in it to represent human suffering [Grasso, 1982]. The figures themselves become the landscape. [Fig. 12]
Bernardi associates landscape in Rossellini’s films with myth as an epiphany of the sacred. He argues that the landscape reflects the relationship of the individual with the whole and that through landscape characters, in their experience of vision, come out of themselves to discover and observe the world in which they live. As a result what emerges from Rossellini’s films is the sense of loss experienced by the individual living in the contemporary world; the lost sense of unity of the world, of the unity of humans with the world and, consequently, the individual’s loss of identity too. [Bernardi, Magician of the Real, 2000, p. 51].
In Paisà, Bernardi suggests, Rossellini begins link landscape to the theme of death. He argues that the film is dark and uncertain, thus it slips away from us at least as much as the characters do. Its meaning changes in each episode, it oscillates like a pendulum between liberation and catastrophe, epic and tragedy. The film continually moves to a vision of people without a world and the landscape plays a fundamental role in producing meaning, or rather the lack of meaning which constitutes the film’s ambiguous nature. [Bernardi, Magician of the Real, 2000, p. 54]. Rossellini’s own anguish, desires and fears are reflected in some of the characters, who are photographed so as to appear as part of the landscape. They are almost never shown without their surroundings, as if imprisoned by the films frame. There is no escape from the encounter with truth [Liehm, 1984, p. 69].
Guttuso’s drawings reflect this loss in that his figures are either faceless or unrecognisable. The spontaneity and roughness of his enforce their collective struggle and consequently, their loss of individuality. Further, due to the lack of landscape, his individuals must serve as landscape and human being at the same time. Emerging from Guttuso’s desolate backgrounds is a darkness that threatens his figures, crushing them as if with an unending oppression. The feeling in his Gott mit Uns drawings is of desolation, a ghostly presence associated with death and the notion of visible and invisible realities.
Rossellini’s use of maps in both films is extremely significant as it pertains to the division of urban space. Rome, Open City depicts two maps. The first is the Nazi map displayed on the wall of Bergmann’s office divided into many subsections in accordance with the Shröder plan. [Fig. 13] The second map is displayed in Francesco’s apartment which labels centers of underground activism. While the Nazi map is meant to divide and conquer, Francesco’s map is meant to unify. Marcus suggests that Manfredi’s tortured blood-lined face recalls the contours of these two maps and the two “Romes” they represent. [Fig. 14]
Guttuso’s compositions demonstrate divisions of space through his use of colour and perspective. The most obvious division is the dichotomy of good and evil in his depictions of the oppressor and the oppressed. For example, in the drawing, Colpo di Grazia, 1944, from the Gott mit Uns album, one oppressor is depicted in the background, completely black in colour observing the entire scene, while in the foreground another has his back to us. [Fig. 15] Meanwhile, the victims are piled up on the floor with their hands behind their backs, the one exception being the off-centred figure that is facing us. Aside from the oppressor in the background, all other figures are white and the only other colour present is red representing blood. In several other Gott mit Uns drawings the enemy is absent or in some cases depicted allegorically, for example, Radio Berlino, 1944 and Manifesto per la Resistenza italiana, 1944. [Figs. 16 & 17]
In his painting Morte di Maria Margotti, 1949, representing the death of a labourer in the course of a general strike near the Po Valley, [Fig. 18] a woman is lying on the ground bleeding with her neck cut evidently by the scythe that is next to her. The enemy is not shown but her fellow labourers are raising their fists in rage and their gaze is presumably directed toward the invisible attackers. Similarly, in Pina’s death scene in Open City, we see her running after the truck and then falling to the ground after shots are fired, but we do not see her shooter. In both cases, the enemy is invisible thus intensifying the lonely figures sense of futile violence.
I suggest that in the instances where Guttuso has depicted the enemy, or alluded to him allegorically, he is creating visible tensions within the canvas. However, in the instances where the enemy is absent, he is creating invisible tensions between the spectator and object of art.
Rhetorical Space and Narration
Forgacs also examines this rhetorical use of space in Open City (rhetorical construction being the selected events and their dramatized re-enactment). To this end he discusses four ways in which the film rhetorically organizes urban space: by framing the city with Long Shots that open and close the film (these are the skyline shots that show the Dome in the background); by suggesting vertical divisions within the city between occupiers and occupied; by tracing out horizontal movements and oppositions across the city; by using the various elements of mise-en-scène in interior space to heighten contrasts between different characters and settings [Gottlieb, 2004, p. 109].
Drawing together these points, we may conclude that there are various levels at which the film harnesses space to a rhetorical strategy of depicting the divided city and of reinforcing social and moral constructs within it, and these different levels become integrated to persuade the audience to see people, places, and events in a determinate way. However, Forgacs admits that the film retains considerable value and power as an evidential record as well. For example, regarding the vertical city, Forgacs distinguished between the different “uses” of the city, on the one hand for surveillance and control from above and on the other for appropriation from below, by means of walking and other kinds of movement along the ground. This kind of activity was described by Michel de Certeau in Practices of Everyday Life. Certeau compared the urban system of places to a language system, in that they both consist of a more of less fixed set of elements allowing infinite combinations by different users, and he likened the individual act of moving around the city to the act of speaking [Gottlieb, 2004, p. 116].
Restivo also cites Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics, strategy being the top-down deployment of discourses and practices of social control by a centralized power and tactics being those “practices of everyday life” that work to carve out a space of resistance to the hegemonic forces. Open City’s entire narrative strategy is to juxtapose these two, and in doing so, it sets up a tension between a totalizing narrative structure and the constant attempts to subvert it [Restivo, 2002, p. 26].
Fogracs argues that Open City is a testimony because it records on celluloid how Rome looked after World War II, including sites of memorable events. The most notable instance is the field at Forte Bravetta used as the setting for Don Pietro’s execution. It was on this site that several antifascists including Don Guiseppe Morosini, one of the models for Don Pietro’s character, was shot during the occupation. After the Liberation (10 June 1944), various leading Fascists who collaborated and/or carried out acts of repression or torture were also shot at this site. In this way, an otherwise ordinary-looking strip of land serves as a stimulus to collective memory and has an authenticating function in a scene that is in other respects a dramatized reconstruction, from the shaky hands of the Fascist who fumbles with the cigarettes and matches to the presence of the young whistling spectators[7] [Gottlieb, 2004, p. 108].
The film as a whole shows how people in Rome dressed, gestured, spoke and moved about the city in 1945. It also shows how people in the city at that time wanted the Occupation and the Resistance to be remembered, namely as a period of collective suffering in the face of violence and injustice that had produced a relatively unified resistance movement and martyrs for the cause of liberty [Gottlieb, 2004, p. 108]. Further, the representation of remembered events that gives shape to Rossellini’s film is fabricated for specific persuasive ends. Neorealist texts dealing with the Resistance, consisted not of direct representations of events in reality but of textual elaborations of already represented events, of stories already talked about or written down. In other words, narratives built up out of other narratives that carried over some of the latter’s interpretative categories and their rhetorical colouring. For example, the scene where Pina is gunned down whilst chasing after the truck carrying Francesco after he is captured is modeled after the actual death of Terese Gallace, a pregnant Italian woman that was gunned down by the Nazi’s [Forgacs, 2000].
Guttuso also asserts his testimony of the anguish and inhumanities of war in paintings such as Morte di Maria Margotti, 1949. This is a representation of agitated action and suspension of the tragic, in a petrified state. In this instance, Guttuso announces impending catastrophe by the representations of recognisable tragic events [Calvesi, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1996].
In film, there was additionally a bank of visual representations, recent and otherwise, on which to draw. Forgacs cites Virgilio Fantuzzi’s suggestion that the shot of Don Pietro cradling the dead Pina alludes to deposition and pieta scenes of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ and that the torture of Manfredi suggests various crucifixion images, most notably Guttuso’s Crucifixion of 1940 [Forgacs, 2000, p. 19]. [Fig. 19]
According to Cesare Zavattini it was an unavoidable necessity to insert a “story” in the reality to make it exciting and “spectacular”. The most important innovation of neorealism is to have realized that the necessity of the “story” was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts [Zavattini, 1982, p. 93].
Guttuso’s post-war paintings consistently maintain a narrative aspect and a dialogue with life and history that is contemplative, but not in a relaxed way because the images are disturbing due to their horrific subject matter. There is a strong “literary” component in his art, which always prevented him from separating painting from narrative. He believed that art should be of its own time, accessible to all and above all, useful. Whitfield argues that reading Guttuso’s paintings as if they were books about the Italy that once was will perhaps help us to understand why so many writers saw in him the painter who has succeeded in articulating their dismay [Whitfield, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1996, p. 14].
Painter, Guido Ballo, stated, ‘Guttuso has always tended toward contact with things, urgency of expression, and images we feel we can touch, and he has always tried to participate as fully as possible in the human drama of our time’ [Kibler, 1979]. The narrative quality of Guttuso’s compositions is intended to support an ideological structure. It is the totality of the work—people, events, ideas, and the relations among them—that he is trying to communicate. [Kibler, 1979].
Chapter 3: Representation of the Body
Gestures and Behaviours
In addition to the spatial divisions discussed above, this opposition between social worlds is marked out further as an opposition of political and of social identities, overtly coded on the body [Forgacs, 2000, p. 47].
Angela Dalle Vacche suggests that neorealism relates closely to the Commedia dell’arte in that the elements expressed in the neorealist film result in the rejection of a binding script, casting based on physical appearance and acting emphasizing gesture. Like the Commedia, neorealism relies on the body rather than the word by using gestures and behaviours to document on historical experience [Dalle Vacche, 1992]. Gesture, change, and physical movement constitute for Rossellini the essence of human reality. This means too, that his characters are more apt to be affected by the settings through which they move than the settings are liable to be affected by their movement [Bazin, 1971, 100].
Dalle Vacche’s argument is that in representing the impact of official history on daily life and anonymous people, neorealism adopted the microscopic scale of the Commedia and turned away from the monumental setting of opera. With its attention to physiognomy and behavior, neorealism put movement into the statues of Fascist cinema and as a result Rossellini’s bodies became frail and transitory [Dalle Vacche, 1992].
There is a scene in Rossellini’s Rome episode of Paisà in which a crowd of people including local Italians, prostitutes, and American GIs are in a crowded bar, sitting at small café tables, smoking, drinking and socializing. It is a loud, confined space depicting leisure time with an underlying tension. This tension is first brought to our attention by two women arguing, namely Francesca threatening bodily harm upon a woman who is attacking her virtue. The tension comes to a head when the bar is raided by the military police and some people are arrested while others flee the scene. The tension within this scene coming from both the character’s hostile emotions and the military raid transforms a fun, relaxing evening of fraternization into chaos.
Underlying tensions are also evident in Guttuso’s Ballo Popolare, 1945, [Fig. 6] which overshadows his composition of a crowd of people dancing. For instance, the relentless glare of the lamps beaming from above, the faces of the dancers are in some cases, either not there at all, ambiguous or distorted in such a way that they appear to be masks, reminiscent of Picasso’s Demoiselles de Avignon, and the uneasiness of the dancer’s movements who appear to be stiff, lifeless, and melancholy as if they are being forced to dance against their will rather than for their own pleasure. I suggest that the dominant red colour of the dresses alludes to Communism and is strategically positioned to stand out in the painting. Despite the depiction of such a pleasurable activity, there is an invisible anxiety or disturbance. Thus, the people in the picture leave the sphere of mere episode to enter than of the artists’ meditation on life, on the flow of existence, on the relations between a pressing present and an uncertain future [Grasso, 1982].
From Moravia’s point of view, Guttuso’s composition paintings mostly represent crowds grouped together by only one relationship – violence. Typical examples can be observed in paintings such as, Massacro, 1943, and Trionfo della morte, 1943. Moravia argues that it is precisely violence that constitutes the link between Guttuso’s pictures, violence between the figures in the picture and violence of the painter on the figures. The first clue for Moravia is the embarrassment, clumsiness, awkwardness, discomfort, discordance and unnaturalness of the gestures and attitudes of Guttuso’s bodies. The attitudes are not those of men and women who want to move and know why they are moving of their own free will, but those of people who are pushed and forced to move by some external agent against their own free will, such as the dancers in Ballo Popolare. The Germans in Gott mit Uns, for instance, are not shooting, arresting, torturing and threatening by their own will but by the external will of the author, that is, by a violence that forces them to be violent [Moravia, 1976].
History and the Body
In this way, the human body as depicted by both Rossellini and Guttuso is not only a representation of history but also of the artists’ own anguish and fears. Both depicted the body as an object to define their ideals. In Rossellini’s case, the casting of non-professional actors in neorealist cinema opened up a new way of thinking about the representation of history. To quote Gian Piero Brunetta regarding Paisà, ‘History passes over the body of these characters and even today… We are struck by the perfect congruence of all elements and by the perception of profound change in an apparently immobile landscape and body politic… with one blow Italian cinema shakes off a whole literary and theatrical tradition and, bringing popular characters back to center-stage, it upsets a static system of representation thus narrating the breakthrough of a new history’ [Dalle Vacche, 1992 p. 251]. In light of Brunetta’s remarks, Dalle Vacche argues that neorealist cinema consists of a move away from academic literature and toward the body. The body on screen serves as the reflection of a fictional, national self. To that effect non-actors are effective due to their physical appearance and stereotypical behavior [Dalle Vacche, 1992, p. 254].
Rossellini stresses the need for civic cooperation among different classes to denounce the disastrous effects of social injustice on individual lives. Dalle Vacche asserts, ‘As soon as the uneventful lives and idiosyncratic manners of supposedly “typical” Italians appear on screen, their faces and bodies, just like the masks and costumes of the Commedia, allegorize an imaginary nation called, “Italy”. For example, in Open City, Manfredi embodies the nation as a whole, not just the working class [Dalle Vacche, 1992, p. 182]. Guttuso also represents civic unity in that his victims are represented as equals united against their Nazi oppressors. He does not differentiate between victims according to class, race, political or spiritual beliefs. His victims are not identifiable as anything other than average citizens of Rome and of objects created to express his ideologies.
According to Guttuso:
- An idea is an object, to be treated as such, to be depicted as such, and therefore perceptible, touchable, ’visible from all sides’. (Ideas organize themselves into a system which is a system of objects). For that to come about it is necessary to handle another kind of memory which is part of us as we are, why and how we are made and have formed. A memory which is a presence constituting the things (object-ideas) that have formed us. In this case paintings can no longer be movies, silhouettes, film strips of the past, but forces of a polyhedron, part of a system, of a mineral which is our “present” [Grasso, 1982].
Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge explores peripheral histories and “suppressed knowledges”. As Foucault explains, history is not a single-layered process, but the result of an accumulation of sedimentary strata. ‘Beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars and famines, there emerge other apparently “unmoving histories” [Foucault, 1989, p. 64]. According to Dalle Vacche, Foucaults’s “apparently unmoving histories,” takes us back to where we started, to the intersection of cinema and history in the bodies of neorealist non-actors, to Brunetta’s description of an “apparently immobile landscape and body politic”. Further, Foucault’s new “unmoving histories” can be situated within the history of Italian cinema itself, traditionally split between documentary realism and allegorical spectacle [Dalle Vacche, 1992, p. 283].
The following statement by Guttuso supports Dalle Vacche’s argument that the body is the site of history in realist images.
In 1971, Renato Guttuso stated, ‘Face is everything, in faces there is the history we are living, the anguish of the times. We bear it engraved more than the events affecting us directly or taking place far away; we are the true film of reality; and I paint it’ [http://www.guttuso.com, 2007].
Chapter 4: Spectatorship and Media
The Documentary aspect of the Realist Image
In the words of Andrè Bazin, ‘Rossellini’s films make one think of a sketch: more is implicit in the line that it actually depicts’ [Bazin, 1971]. The grittiness of Rossellini’s films resulted from the reliance on the unpredictability of natural daylight and poor studio lighting, differentiating film stock and of course, the location shooting depicting the devastation of Rome [Forgacs, 2000]. Guttuso’s work depicts a grittiness of it’s own especially his pen and ink drawings with their quick and spontaneous lines, the simplicity of pen and ink, reminiscent of a newspaper and the lack of any landscape or peripheral objects implies an urgent message. In their own way, each artist portrays an element of urgency unique to realist images.
I suggest that the temporality of Rossellini’s Open City and Paisà were a call to action that required the spectators to be involved. As Forgacs points out, the spectator is drawn into emotionally involving identifications throughout the film for instance, the boys and Don Pietro as well as the nervous younger priest and the reluctant firing squad in the execution scene of Don Pietro. The continuously moving camera draws the viewer into action by carefully juxtaposing striking details. The genuineness of the situation and people create the impression that the event is taking place “before the viewer’s eyes” creating an authenticity unique to neorealist films [Liehm, 1984, p. 62]. In contrast Guttuso’s works of art are a socio-political statement referring to a historical event. I propose that the limitation of the medium dictates the spectator’s perception of what is happening versus what has already happened. Guttuso’s paintings and drawings share a documentary quality recounting a past event thus distancing them personally and empathetically from their viewer. In most of his Gott mit Uns drawings, Gutuso’s subjects (bodies) do not directly engage the viewer. The viewer is witnessing a horrific event but is not part of it and therefore, not held responsible. The demand is merely of their submissive attention. I believe that this was not only a way of creating a timeless image but also the way in which Guttuso was most comfortable depicting his fear and anxiety of the present reality. Further, these statements did not offer the viewer a sense of hope for the future. Of course, as previously mentioned, some exceptions do apply.
James Hay argues that while the realism of a still image may depend in part upon a viewer’s sense that the “event” did occur, cinematic realism results more from a viewers' feeling that the event is occurring. The difference is based, in a very general sense, on cinema’s kinetic or transitive properties, such as montage, synchronous, [8] sound, etc., which can contribute to a viewer’s sense of spatial continuity. Because this sense of spatial continuity depends upon a coherence of action, it is a films narrative and particularly its logic of action that offers audiences a unified and meaningful view of nature [Hay, 1987, p. 23].
Motion, Time and Space
This leads us to consider the notion of “reality” as represented by motion, time and space. As pointed out by Rudolph Arnheim, neorealist media was a reality combed with abstract or fiction. Further what fascinated spectators regarding cinema was not plot but motion [Arnheim, 2006, p. 180]. Therefore, while both Rossellini and Guttuso were dramatizing actual events, how does the element of movement reinforce the spectators’ sense of reality?
Stephen Health asserts that the very principle of the cinema is fact that it reproduces movement which is essential to maintain the flow of the motion picture. Unlike real life, where time and space are continuous, it is not so in film. Instead the period of time being photographed can be interrupted at any time. For instance, one scene may be immediately followed by another that takes place at a totally different time. Within individual scenes the succession of separate events implies a corresponding sequence of time [Arnheim, 2006, p. 182].
Further, the motion picture in itself is an event in that it looks different every moment, whereas there is no such temporal progress in a painting. The audience does not directly experience the technical aspects of the cinematographic process. Motion as it is experienced by the audience relies on the following factors: the movements of the objects that are photographed by the camera, the effect of perspective and of the distance of the camera from the object, the effect of the moving camera, and the synthesis of individual scenes, accomplished by montage, in the overall composition of motion, and the interaction of movements that are put next to each other by montage. Motion not only serves to inform the audience of the events that make up the story, it is also highly expressive. In film things appear closer, sharper and the direction and speed of each motion is set off clearly by the narrow rectangular frame of the image. Motion is not limited to the actor; man is always an inextricable part of his environment. The environment shares in the acting and produces a motion that can be more expressive than that of the human body [Arnheim, 2006, p. 184].
In Rossellini’s Open City and Paisà time is accounted for more realistically in that the camera follows the actor rather than using heavy editing which involves changes from scene to scene. An example of how Guttuso expresses this flow of time is his painting Ballo Popolare, 1945. At first glance the painting depicts a large group of people dancing but upon closer inspection, there appear to be four separate scenes of people dancing. The use of the lamp, occurring four times in the painting, each time positioned in another direction and illuminating a different degree of light demonstrates these four episodes. I interpret this painting as Guttuso’s attempt to record the events of one evening in a successive manner, tracking moments in time as they occurred consecutively, thus tracking time itself in the only way possible without actual movement. [Fig. 6]
Moravia claims that movement in Guttuso’s pictures goes from the outside inwards. Hence, Guttuso’s crowds are like objects thrown into confusion and borne away by a hurricane or hurtled in all directions by an explosion. In this way, Guttuso is a real Marxist in that he firmly believed that the representation of reality was not enough: he had to introduce movement and dialectical impulse into reality [Moravia, 1976].
With respect to space, the film is a most egocentric medium. It makes the viewer sit back inactively while the world and its changing contents move around and past him. With respect to time, however, the viewer need not remain a detached outsider. His seated body anchors him to a point in space but not to a moment in time. The sequence presented in the film can capture him so that he moves along with the story and is caught up in the course of events, which he perceives from the constantly changing vantage point of the present moment [Arnheim, 1988, p. 213].
Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein argues that montage is the most powerful compositional means of telling a story, a syntax, for the correct construction of each particle of a film fragment.[9] He asserts that methods and means of the filmically portrayed fact must be handled so that it simultaneously shows not only what the fact is, and the character’s attitude towards it, but also how the author relates to it, and how the author wishes the spectator to receive, sense, and react to the portrayed fact. He argues that the role of composition entails that the object of imagery and the law of structure, by which it is represented, can coincide. For example, “sorrowful sorrow” or “joyful joy”, the hero sorrows or joys and the music added is sad or happy. Composition takes the structural elements of the portrayed phenomena and from these composes its canon for building the containing work. In doing this, composition actually takes such elements, primarily, from the structure of the emotional behaviour of man, joined with the experienced content of particular portrayed phenomenon [Eisenstein, 1982, p. 151].
Perception of the Real
Kracauer argues that cinematic film influences the spectator in a manner denied to other media. Further, film images affect primarily the spectator’s senses, engaging him physiologically before he is in a position to respond intellectually. He supports this assumption in the following arguments. First, film records physical reality for its own sake. The spectator cannot help reacting to them as he would to the material aspects of nature in the raw, which these photographic images reproduce, hence their appeal to his sensitivity. Second, film renders the world in motion, which seems to have a “resonance effect” provoking in the spectator such kinaesthetic responses as muscular reflexes, motor impulses, etc. and this objective movement acts as a physiological stimulus. Third, film not only records physical reality, but also reveals otherwise hidden provinces of it, including such spatial and temporal configurations as maybe derived from the given data with the aid of cinematic techniques and devices [Kracauer, 1960, p. 158].
These devices as pointed out by Kracauer include a lowered consciousness of the viewer brought on by the darkness of the movie house and loss of identity in the dark. The moviegoer is in the position of a hypnotized person. He argues that for an idea to be believable it must captivate not only the intellect but the senses as well. The prospective believer may reject an idea intellectually and yet accept it emotionally under the pressure of unconscious drives. With regard to documentary film Kracauer asserts, ‘Everybody tends to believe that pictures taken on the spot cannot lie’ [Kracauer, 1960, p. 160].
Cinema has a photographic but also auditory capacity to register and preserve in addition to its evidentiary force that transpires even in the work of fiction. Film possesses an indexical/documentary-like claim to the medium itself [Stam and Raengo, 2004]. In Norman Bryson’s discussion of Pierce’s notion of the indexical sliding scale, he emphasises the concept of motivation in the analysis of the sign. According to Pierce, a photograph for example, (in our case we can use the example of film), possessed high motivation in that the meaning-bearing surface of the sign – the photo-sensitive plate – came into direct contact with the world at the moment of exposure. To the general class of sign systems where a direct link between the sign and its referent seemed to exist, Pierce gave the name of “index”. At the other end of the spectrum (in our case, Guttuso’s compositions), under the general class heading of symbol, were places those systems where the relation between sign and referent seemed to Pierce conventional or artificial. There no motivation is present: The connection between the sign and its meaning is formed exclusively within the intending consciousness [Bryson, 1983, p. 52].
Marcus argues that the reconstructed event often produces a stronger illusion of reality than the original. What defines realism is a certain set of principles, such as Aristotle’s laws of necessity and probability, which govern the internal relationships of the various parts of the representation and which are seen to have their source in the natural world. Thus, when Aristotle upholds nature as the proper model for artistic imitation, he refers not to a series of objects in the physical universe, but to the movement from potentially to actuality by which all things reach formal perfection. Artists can improve upon what is incomplete, imperfect, flawed in nature. Aristotle argues that the ideal is indeed inherent in the real and artists should bear witness to this truth by purging nature of all obstacles to its perfect progress [Marcus, 1986, p. 7].
Bazin describes a house built out of bricks to highlight his argument that neorealist film has a meaning that is posteiori, to the extent that it permits our awareness to move from one fact to another, from one fragment of reality to the next, brick by brick. Whereas in the classical artistic composition the meaning is established a priori: the house is already there in the brick [Bazin, 1971, 99].
Guttuso’s compositions sought to combat alienation and contribute to the creation of a new rapport with reality. For Guttuso, subjective as opposed to objective reality is by far the more significant of the two. Things are used principally as a means of communication, while it is man who gives to objects their significance [Kibler, 1979].
Guttuso’s aim was to reveal a reality that was hidden from others and in so doing to contribute to a rapport with that reality. His figurative art is reality related by metaphor and humanised by the vision of the artist. Kibler argues that the object as depicted by Guttuso, for example, is “distorted” to conform to his particular view of it. If the spectator looking at the painted object can discern the artist’s view of it, then communication between the two has been achieved: for a moment, at least there is a unified view of a metaphoric reality and implicitly the possibility of a unified view of reality is perceived. Although the object composes a reality in itself, it is simultaneously a reality with which human beings can have a rapport. Art becomes a means of communication No longer alienated; the spectator and artist are united by the work of art whose value resides not intrinsically but in its capacity for creating a rapport among subjects and objects. Art is a mediator between reality and the individual, and it is always to be considering within the framework of the culture, which produced it. Either reflecting a particular civilization or bringing about a change in that civilization For Guttuso, the highest function of art is historical and moral rather than aesthetic [Kibler, 1979].
Chapter 5: General Conclusions
Both artists successfully implemented a horrifying realism of the still fresh memories of the German Occupation in Rome, however in their respective arts, Rossellini and Guttuso, arrived at their realism in different ways. Despite their differences, they both created works that demonstrated subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, anti-fascist propaganda. Perhaps that is why Guttuso was chosen to create the poster for the film Paisà! [Fig. 20]
In addition to differences in media, the artists’ political involvement was also a major factor in determining the representation of history. Rossellini was looking back at events in which he was not officially politically involved and created the illusion that the events were taking place in real time, thus allowing himself and his spectators to become involved. As pointed out by Mira Liehm, when Rossellini made Open City, he already saw film as an instrument of a modern vision, a way of seeing things “with one’s own eyes”. He used film as a mass medium to disseminate to a wider audience information that previous techniques could communicate only to a happy few. The novelty of Open City lies in its transformation of art into information. Rossellini provides the viewer with a real memory of something the viewer has not actually experienced [Liehm, 1984, p. 65].
Guttuso is making a statement about events in which he was personally and politically active and in doing so the nature of his drawn and painted images locked these horrific events in the past allowing the viewer to contemplate and even bear witness to but not to become involved in. Guttuso’s images are locked in a static state. The nature of the drawn or painted image reinforces an absence, which unlike the moving images of film, offer no possibility of change or relief. The limitations of his medium are well suited to the statement that he is making [Pucci, 2006].
Further, where Rossellini’s message of urgency is communicated through the medium of film to reach a mass audience, Guttuso’s message, just as spontaneous and urgent is used to communicate with a select few, most likely politically involved individuals, as was the case with Gott mit Uns, via an underground publication. Although Rossellini’s individual characters portray very personal events, the appeal of his films are collective. On the other hand Guttuso’s anonymous faces and collective message appeal to a more intimate individual audience.
The post-war art work that we have been looking at contains elements of an absolute significance – it reflects the idea that everything can be recounted; but their sense remains metaphorical because there is still an invented story, a dramatized representation of actual events [Zavattini, 1982].
