Archive: Film Reviews, Portals Special Issue tals
Celluloide
Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996
A Review by Luca Prono, University of Nottingham, UK
Roberto Rossellini's Roma, Città Aperta (1945, Open City aka Rome, Open City) has almost a mythic aura about it. It is one of the founding movies of the neo-realist tradition, it stars Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, then celebrated comedians in their first dramatic roles, it was shot in an adventurous and precarious way using expired celluloid with several producers and distributors joining in and offering support only to withdraw it after a few weeks. It was, the received critical view goes, a daring movie which tried to remember what everyone wanted to forget: the last days of the Fascist regime and the Nazi occupation in Italy. With hindsight, we can say that Roma, Città Aperta celebrates that political alliance between the Catholics led by De Gasperi and the Left led by Togliatti and Nenni which was governing post-WWII Italy at the time when the movie was shot. While that alliance was short-lived, the reputation of the movie has flourished through the decades. No wonder then that its fiftieth anniversary should have been celebrated with a movie about its shooting. From its very title, Carlo Lizzani's Celluloide (1996) enters that process of myth-making that surrounds Roma, Città Aperta. Disappointingly, Celluloide avoids any type of confrontation with the most unpleasant and disturbing aspects of Rossellini's film, such as its problematic sexual politics and homophobia. Celluloide is a proud endorsement of the neo-realist tradition.
A brief summary of Rossellini's film is necessary to follow my argument on Celluloide. Roma, Città Aperta begins with Manfredi, a Communist militant, taking refuge in the house of his fellow comrade Francesco who is about to get married to the good-hearted Pina (Anna Magnani). She is a war-widow with a child from her previous marriage and is already expecting another one from Francesco. Manfredi, who has to remain in hiding, asks the local priest Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) to deliver some money to a group of partisans on the outskirts of Rome. In the meantime, the Head of the Gestapo in Rome (the most effeminate Nazi you've ever seen on screen), Bergman, is actively trying to catch Manfredi. Bergmann's female aid Ingrid, who is of course a lesbian, is given the task of seducing Manfredi's girlfriend Marina (Maria Michi) to whom she supplies morphine. When the block where Pina and her family live is raided by the Nazis, Francesco and Manfredi are caught and Pina is killed while she is running after the lorry that is taking them away (one of the movie's most famous scenes which features prominently on the poster of Lizzani's Celluloide). A group of partisans manage to free Francesco and Manfredi who seek refuge in Marina's flat, but, of course, she betrays them. Manfredi is arrested together with Don Pietro and a deserter Nazi soldier, while Francesco manages to escape. Manfredi dies while the Nazis are torturing him; Don Pietro is executed under the eyes of his parish boys.
Written by Sergio Amidei with the collaboration of the young Federico Fellini, Roma, Città Aperta had a complex genesis. Becoming a model for future neo-realist movies, its plot mixes fiction with historical events, professional actors and people taken from the streets. Pina is modeled after Teresa Gullace, a woman who suffered her same fate. Don Pietro has its historical source in Don Morosini, a priest from one of the poorest areas of Rome who was executed by the Nazis because of his help to the Resistance. Indeed, at one point, Rossellini's film was to be a straightforward documentary on Don Morosini. From the very first scenes, Celluloide echoes the double status of fiction/documentary that characterises Rossellini's movie. The film opens with an external shot of the Italian studios of Cinecittà and we are then taken inside where the actors of Celluloide are trying on costumes and make-up, supervised by the director Carlo Lizzani. They are shown side by side to a picture of the person they are playing. Several noises are heard and the actors Giancarlo Giannini and Massimo Ghini go outside to see what's happening. They witness the arrival of a platoon of Allies among a group of evacuees, a familiar scene in war movies and documentaries. Quite to the point then, black and white documentary footage on this subject is inserted while the opening credits of Celluloide begin to appear on screen. The image then reverts to colour and the camera frames Roberto Rossellini (played by Ghini) walking through the streets of Rome while a platoon of Canadian tanks is entering the city. In these first scenes, Celluloide calls attention to its double status as both fiction and documentary homage to Roma, Città Aperta and the neo-realist tradition as a whole. Celluloide defines itself through the words of the Anna Magnani character on Roma, Città Aperta: "a true but invented story, with true but false actors".
Celluloide takes its task very seriously, perhaps too much so. Endless discussions between Rossellini, Sergio Amidei (played by Giancarlo Giannini) and the film crew and producers have the function of explaining to the audience what neo-realism was all about. "Are you waiting for the coup-de-theatre? Well…there is no coup-de-theatre", "Let's get rid of the moonlight, of those spy-story-like big uniforms…everything has to be simpler, more serious and truer to life", "This is not a movie Blasetti-style", "These are natural cues", "The cinematography shouldn't be a colourful postcard, it must adhere to the story we are telling" and so on in what, at times, becomes a sort of "neo-realism for beginners". Lizzani is very careful to make the point that several actors appearing in Roma, Città Aperta were taken from the streets not only due to lack of money but also to respect the fundamental criteria of verisimilitude. Even the professional actress Anna Magnani (played by Lina Sastri) stops being Magnani and fully becomes the ordinary Pina. This is made clear in a scene when Magnani storms on the set of Roma, Città Aperta because she thinks she has lost her role to the then grande dame of Italian cinema, Clara Calamai (to whom she had already lost the lead in Visconti's Ossessione, an event which Celluloide mentions in passing). Magnani tells Rossellini that he is a liar and that she is leaving. He calls her back twice using her real name Anna, but it is only when he calls her with the name of her character, Pina, that she turns again and goes back to him to be auditioned. Yet, quoting Magnani herself, the critic Peter Brunette has given a different account of the events:
Anna Magnani … actually was the director's second choice. He had originally wanted Clara Calamai … but Calamai was under contract and in the middle of working on another film. Magnani wanted to be paid as much as Fabrizi, however, and she later admitted that it was only a matter of 100,000 lire, a point of principle, that almost caused her to lose "the most important film in my career. I realize now that I was wrong" (Brunette, 1987: 42).
No mention of these 100,000 lire (no small sum in 1945) is made in Celluloide. Lizzani's movie goes even further in this identification and shows that if Magnani becomes Pina, Pina too becomes Magnani. One of the most effective and moving scenes of Roma, Città Aperta is the shooting of Pina while she runs after the lorry which is taking away Francesco. Celluloide shows that the inspiration for the scene came to Rossellini after seeing Magnani stumble while she was running after the car of her boyfriend Massimo Serato following a bitter argument.
Celluloide emphasises the features of the Magnani star text that she shares with Pina. She is both a popolana (ordinary woman, woman of the people) always ready to sing in Roman dialect even under the closed shutters of brothels to give some solace to the prostitutes inside and a caring mother. When she tells Rossellini of how she lost her role in Ossessione to Calamai because she was pregnant, she explains that Visconti had forced her to choose: you either keep the baby or the film. Magnani is surprised when Rossellini asks her what she did: "and you even ask me ? Of course I kept the baby". The "Anna Magnani" in Celluloide is, to use the title of Pasolini's film in which Magnani starred, Mamma Roma. Tellingly, the last image of Celluloide is a photograph of Magnani/Pina lying on the ground after having been shot with her son hugging her. In this light, the erasure of any reference to the 100,000 lire mentioned by Brunette and Magnani seems strategic. The film does suggest that at a certain point Magnani is thinking of withdrawing from the movie, yet the reason is not money, but her baby's ill health. The 100,000 lire would have endangered Magnani's image as popolana, while the reference to her baby's health reinforces her image as mother.
Thanks to this focus on Magnani's star image, Celluloide is able to reproduce the opposition in Rossellini's film between the ordinary but heroic Pina and the beautiful but treacherous cabaret actress Marina. In Roma, Città Aperta the character of Marina is played by Maria Michi, who, as Celluloide makes clear, was Amidei's fiancée. While the crew of Roma, Città Aperta is shooting the scene of the lesbian seduction between Marina and the Nazi Ingrid framed by the big mirror in Marina's changing room (according to the tired cliché that identifies homosexuality with narcissism), they are interrupted by a phone call from Anna Magnani. She asks Rossellini for help: her baby is gravely ill and has to be taken to hospital. Rossellini goes and Amidei takes over the shooting. She asks Maria Michi and the other actress involved in the scene to rehearse it first, but Maria is clearly listless and lazy. She refuses to rehearse without her fur coat because she is cold. When Amidei slaps her, she leaves the set, betraying him professionally. The relationship between Maria Michi and Sergio Amidei in Celluloide mirrors the relationship between Marina and Manfredi in Roma, Città Aperta. At the beginning of Celluloide, when Amidei tells Rossellini about how he wants to use his own autobiographical escape from the Gestapo for the beginning of Roma, Città Aperta and the introduction of the character of Manfredi, the movie inserts black and white images illustrating Amidei's words. In these scenes Giannini, the same actor who plays Amidei, also plays Manfredi. Manfredi and Amidei are strongly associated: both are loners, both are Communist militants, both have a cause to fight for. Thus by betraying Manfredi in Roma, Città Aperta, Marina/Maria Michi betrays Sergio Amidei in Celluloide too. And, indeed, at the end of Celluloide Maria does betray Amidei and confesses that she is seeing another man.
The male focus of Celluloide is on Sergio Amidei, rather than on Rossellini. He takes centre-stage and is portrayed sympathetically. The movie emphasises his intellectual honesty and unwillingness to compromise (which contrasts sharply with Rossellini's readiness to insert characters and scenes simply to please the producers). His misogyny and bitter comments towards Maria are justified in the movie by his integrity and we are invited to conclude that his character and personality were too complex for a woman like Maria to understand. Roma, Città Aperta invites the same conclusion for the relationship between Manfredi and Marina. Celluloide follows closely Roma, Città Aperta in its disturbing sexual politics. In Rossellini's movie, women are to be admired when they are like Pina: strong, fertile, working-class, badly dressed, without artistic ambitions, Catholic but married to a Communist who is the man of the household, heroic in sacrificing her own life for her man. In Roma, Città Aperta as well as in Rossellini's later Germania, Anno Zero, sexual difference signifies "Nazism" and thus "pathology". Celluloide makes the point that the actor who plays Bergmann, the Gestapo Head, was selected not because of his acting skills (he was simply a dance teacher) but because he was very effeminate. In a disturbing scene, Amidei, whom Celluloide makes every attempt to endear to the viewer as the author of, and authority on, Roma, Città Aperta, declares that the effeminate German is perfect for the role, because "you know, all Nazis were that way". In the course of the same scene, Amidei, Rossellini and their assistants immediately distance themselves from the German dance teacher by making comments on the attractiveness of the women who are being taught. "These are healthy and honest Italian heterosexual men" could be the subtitle to this scene. There is no attempt on the part of Celluloide to correct the homophobic and misogynist sexual politics of neo-realism.
In the long run, Lizzani's film suffers more than it benefits from its total worshipping of Roma, Città Aperta and the tradition it sets out to celebrate. Its unwillingness to engage with, and revise, the most disturbing aspect of neo-realism makes Celluloide a rather flat movie. Giancarlo Giannini and Lina Sastri are extremely convincing in their roles and give strong performances. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the rest of the cast. They simply cannot match the charisma of the people they are playing. Massimo Ghini displays an excess of unnerving mannerism in his portrayal of Rossellini, Antonello Fassari has a hard time playing the larger-than-life Fabrizi and the mediocre Anna Falchi is entirely miscast as Maria Michi, making the audience sympathise even more with Giannini/Amidei during their confrontations. Christopher Walken, usually a rather good actor, is wasted in the extremely minor role of Geiger, the American distributor who bought Roma, Città Aperta after it had opened in Rome to cold reviews and took it to New York where it triumphed. By constructing an hagiography of Rossellini's film and its crew, Celluloide loses sight of its own artistic worth. In an extreme act of self-denial, its narrative follows closely both the structure and characterisation of Roma, Città Aperta. Yet, by failing to provide an alternative reading of Rossellini's film, Celluloide eventually signifies its own blandness for having too interesting a movie within itself rather than the greatness of the neo-realist text. Celluloide proudly celebrates the Italian neo-realist tradition, yet Lizzani's film is only a belated by-product of that tradition with all its shortcomings and very few of its virtues.
References
Brunette, Peter (1987). Roberto Rossellini. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.