On Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and why Italian Neorealism was a moral movement as much as an aesthetic one.

Rossellini made Rome, Open City on raw film stock while Rome was still under Nazi occupation. He was using filmmaking partly as a way of documenting what was happening. The result was a film with a roughness in its image that was not a stylistic choice in any conventional sense — it was a consequence of material conditions and available resources.

But what Neorealism did that purely documentary work doesn't do is use that roughness as an argument. When Rossellini shows a street in war-torn Rome, the unprettified image says something that a beautiful image of the same street cannot say: this is how things are, not how films usually show them. The aesthetic is a form of honesty.

The movement that followed — De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Visconti's La Terra Trema — extended this into a moral framework. The decision to cast non-professional actors, to shoot on location, to refuse the consolations of genre convention — these were not just stylistic preferences. They were positions on what cinema owed to the people it depicted.