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Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 neorealist drama is unsparing in its depiction of the heavy price of both resistance and collaboration with the Nazi occupation

Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film is a blazingly urgent and painful bulletin from the frontline of Italy’s historical agony: the Axis power that had belatedly turned against the Mussolini fascists only to be humiliatingly occupied by Nazi Germany on whose orders the dictator was reinstalled in the northern Salò puppet state, resplendent in contemptible impotence and pathos, with Rome at its defeated and compromised centre. It was a film that used the so-recently-devastated real streets and people of Rome on location for a project on which Rossellini started script work well before the end of the war, building on ideas by screenwriter Sergio Amidei with dialogue contribution by the young Federico Fellini.

Rome, Open City is revived as part of the BFI Southbank’s Chasing the Real season of Italian neorealism,...

When the 2020 Oscar for original screenplay went to South Korea’s “Parasite” scribes, some were surprised, but they should not have been; the Academy has long been open to foreign-language contenders in all categories. As early as 1947, when the writing categories were a bit different, the Italian screenwriters Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini nabbed a nomination for “Open City,” as did French scribe Jacques Prévert for “Children of Paradise.”

While during the 1940s and 1950s, barely a handful of foreign-language films reached the nomination stage for writing awards, by the 1960s, every year saw at least one non-English-speaking nominee, and some years, a whopping three. 1962 marked the first Oscar win for international scribes, with Ennio de Concini, Alfredo Gianetti and Pietro Germi claiming it for “Divorce Italian Style.” And in 1966, French screenwriters Claude Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven nabbed a statuette for “A Man and a Woman.”

Although foreign-language writers continued...

Warning: Do not read this story until you have seen the final episode of “Hollywood.”

For its first six episodes, Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” mixed reality and fiction in its portrait of the movie business in the years after World War II. But there’s a good reason why the final episode is titled “A Hollywood Ending” – because it uses the Oscars of March 1948 to paint a picture of Hollywood growing more tolerant, more open to minorities and gays and more embracing of the kind of films that in reality were nearly impossible to make at the time or for decades later.

Like the ending of Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” the episode veers into a kind of wish-fulfillment fiction that is the whole point of its existence.

So we’re not really fact-checking when we look at the show’s depiction of the 20th Academy Awards ceremony.

Rome Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero: Filmed mostly on the streets in newly-liberated territory, Roberto Rossellini’s gripping war-related shows are blessed with new restorations but still reflect their rough origins. The second picture, the greater masterpiece, looks as if it were improvised out of sheer artistic will.

Roberto Rosselini’s War Trilogy

Rome Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 500 (497, 498, 499)

1945-1948 / B&W / 1:37 & 1:33 flat full frame / 302 minutes / Street Date July 11, 2017 / available from the Criterion Collection 79.96

Starring: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani; Dots Johnson, Harriet White Medin; Edmund Moeschke, Franz-Otto Krüger.

Cinematography: Ubaldo Arata; Otello Martelli; Robert Julliard.

Film Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Original Music: Renzo Rossellini

Written by Sergio Amidei, Alberto Consiglio, Federico Fellini; Klaus Mann, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Vasco Pratolini; Max Kolpé, Carlo Lizzani.

Directed by Roberto Rossellini

Criterion released an identical-for-content DVD set of this trilogy in 2010; the new Blu-ray...

Fear

Written by Sergio Amidei and Franz von Treuberg

Directed by Roberto Rossellini

German/Italy, 1954

The moral furor that erupted when Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman began their much-condemned affair in 1950 did not, thankfully, hinder their productivity or their creativity. Despite the outrage, the two embarked on a cinematic collaboration that produced a series of excellent films in a relatively short period of time. While their marriage lasted until 1957, their final feature together was Fear (1954), out now on a new DVD from the British Film Institute. Though the film’s home video release is a welcome one—any Rossellini film made available is a good thing—the film itself pales in comparison to their earlier efforts.

Just as he had on many of his brother’s films, Renzo Rossellini provides the score, which here is instantly redolent with the sounds of a thriller. The opening likewise looks as if it’s a standard film noir,...

‘Rome, Open City’ movie returns: 4K digital restoration of Roberto Rossellini masterpiece at London’s BFI Southbank (photo: Anna Magnani in ‘Rome, Open City’) A restored digital print of Roberto Rossellini’s best-known film, Rome, Open City / Roma, città aperta is currently enjoying an extended run — until April 5, 2014 — at London’s BFI Southbank. Inspired by real-life events and made right after the liberation of Rome, Rome, Open City stars Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero, and Maria Michi. Though not a local box office hit at the time of its release, Rome, Open City, shot with a minuscule budget in the ravaged streets of Rome, became one of the most influential movies ever made. Its raw look, "documentary" feel, and scenes shot on location (though studio sets were used as well) inspired not only other Italian directors of the post-war years, but filmmakers everywhere, including those in Hollywood (e.g.

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Films du Losange / Sony Pictures Classics) There was a time when Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Sergio Amidei, Eric Rohmer, Louis Malle, Lina Wertmuller, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière, and others like them got nominated in the best screenplay category. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for two or three foreign-language films to be shortlisted in a single year. Hollywood movies aren’t any better and foreign movies aren’t any worse than they were 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, but the theatrical distribution of foreign-language films in the United States is probably at its worst level since the studio era. Compounding matters, most current members of the Academy’s Writers Branch [...]...

Distinguished Italian director noted for art documentaries

Though the Italian media prefer to remember him as one of the inventors of the first popular programme of television commercials – called Carosello (Carousel) and broadcast each evening at peak viewing time on the only channel of the Italian public broadcaster Rai in the mid-1950s – Luciano Emmer, who has died aged 91, was a distinguished Italian cinema director. He directed a dozen features during 70 years as a film-maker, the first of which, Domenica d'Agosto (Sunday in August), became an international arthouse hit in 1950. He was, however, best known for scores of documentaries on art.

Born in Milan, Emmer spent most of his childhood in Venice, where his father was the city's municipal engineer. As a boy, he made good use of his father's free pass to the local cinemas, where his preference was for Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, but he also...

For nearly 15 years after his 1945 masterpiece Open City became a critical and commercial phenomenon, director Roberto Rossellini never stopped making great movies, including his related neorealist classics Paisan and Germany Year Zero, and the Ingrid Bergman vehicles Stromboli, Europa ’51, and Journey To Italy. Trouble is, audiences and critics unfairly abandoned him—his affair with Bergman was even denounced on the floor of the U.S. Congress—and by 1959, he was still searching haplessly for redemption. Re-teaming with Open City screenwriter Sergio Amidei, Rossellini cannily seized upon a perfect moment in Italian history to make Il Generale ...

DVD Rating: 3.5/5.0 Chicago – The Criterion Collection expanded by two titles recently and fans of Andrzej Wajda and Roberto Rossellini will be happy to see two of their films in slots #463 and #464 in the most acclaimed series of DVDs in the history of the format. Rossellini’s “Il Generale Della Rovere” and Wajda’s “Danton” might not be as high-profile films as some recent Criterion releases, but they have been given the typically spectacular treatment that this company has been known for over the years.

Rossellini’s “Il Generale Della Rovere” is a transition film from one of the fathers of neorealism’s more human films of the ’40s and ’50s to his historically-based work of the ’60s and ’70s. The director is still most known for that early period with “Rome, Open City” being required viewing for anyone with the guts to call themselves a film historian.

Danton was released...

ROME -- Seven films, including Warner Bros. Pictures' Batman Begins, will make their European bows at the 51st Taormina Film Festival, which kicks off Saturday in Sicily and runs through June 18. Six other features set for either their European or world premieres in Taormina's Ancient Theater were announced Monday night at a news conference in Rome. The premieres include Do You Like Hitchcock? by Dario Argento, Le Couperet by Costa-Gavras, Schatten Der Zeit by German director Florian Gallenberger, The Shadow Dancer by Brad Mirman, Incautos by Spanish director Miguel Bardem, The Games of Their Lives by American director David Anspaugh and a documentary about Italian screenwriter Sergio Amidei by Italian directors Ettore and Silvia Scola.