Rome, Open City

  • May 8, 2014 / 19:00
  • May 18, 2014 / 16:00

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero, Harry Feist, Vito Annichiarico, Nando Bruno
Italy, 103’, 1945, black & white

Italian with Turkish subtitles

The war was barely over when director Roberto Rossellini filmed his 1945 masterpiece Rome, Open City, bringing the immediacy of a documentary to the devastating story about the choices people must make when all order has collapsed. Rossellini set his film a year or two earlier, as the occupying Nazi authorities conspired to crush the city’s resistance. Rome’s people were forced into an impossible position – resist? Collude? Or merely exist in the painful grey area between the two? Rossellini’s characters are many (and several were non-professional actors), but at the heart of this honest, angry film is an engineer and resistance fighter on the run (Marcello Pagliero); a priest (Aldo Fabrizi) assisting the cause, and a brave pregnant woman (Anna Magnani) engaged to another partisan. Much is devastating – but Rossellini found room, too, for the humor and warmth of everyday life.

Rome, Open City

Rome, Open City

Paisan

Paisan

Germany Year Zero

Germany Year Zero

Stromboli

Stromboli

Umberto D

Umberto D

Bread, Love and Dreams

Bread, Love and Dreams

I Vitelloni

I Vitelloni

Journey to Italy

Journey to Italy

Banditi a Orgosolo

Banditi a Orgosolo

Cesare Zavattini

Cesare Zavattini

History of Italian Cinema

History of Italian Cinema

Trailer

Rome, Open City

Moscow Conceptualists

Moscow Conceptualists

Our institutions have been stuck on linear Neo-Platonic tracks for 24 centuries. These antiquated processes of deduction have lost their authority. Just like art it has fallen off its pedestal. Legal, educational and constitutional systems rigidly subscribe to these; they are 100% text based.

From the Age of Reason to the “Tortoise Trainer”

From the Age of Reason to the “Tortoise Trainer”

A Salon exhibition held in the Grand Palais in Paris on May 1, 1906 showcased an Ottoman painting. This was Osman Hamdi Bey’s famous “Tortoise Trainer”. 

Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Between 1963 and 1966 Andy Warhol worked at making film portraits of all sorts of characters linked to New York art circles. Famous people and anonymous people were filmed by Andy Warhol’s 16 mm camera, for almost four minutes, without any instructions other than ‘to get in front of the camera’.