About

Millicent Marcus is the Sarai Ribicoff Professor of Italian Studies and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1974 and specializes in Italian culture through interdisciplinary perspectives that encompass literature, history, and film. Her scholarly work includes authoring several books such as 'An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron,' 'Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism,' 'Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation,' 'After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age,' and 'Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz.' She has also contributed numerous journal articles and encyclopedia entries related to her fields of interest. Recognizing the importance of media literacy in the 21st century, she incorporates a cultural studies approach into her teaching and research, emphasizing the significance of mass media alongside traditional texts.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• History
• Pathology
• Virology
• Law
• Optics
• Biology
• Paleontology
• Medicine
• Art
• Physics

Selected publications

• A film without a sky: An eco-critical take on Liliana Cavani’s Francesco

  Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies · 2025-04-08

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In contrast to Cavani’s 1966 rendering of the Francesco story, this article analyses the anti-picturesque, iconoclastic, earth-bound perspective that she adopted in 1989. This ‘film without a sky’ locates the saint’s path to transcendence in a space below the horizon line, anchored in the body and its elemental relationship to the land. The article pivots around close readings of several key scenes, culminating in Francesco’s reception of the stigmata. A comparison with Giotto’s depiction provides a striking measure of the film’s iconographic daring. While Francesco’s hands, feet and torso are pierced by beams of light emanating from an airborne seraph in Giotto’s version, the film’s saint receives his wounds lying prone on the turf of Mt. La Verna. In Cavani’s ‘film without a sky’, it is the earth itself which becomes the dwelling place of the sacred, the place where matter and spirit come together on the way to deliverance.

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• Cinema is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy

  Italian Culture · 2025-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Radioactive Readings: Maria Anna Mariani's <i>Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander</i>

  Italica · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While the association of Italy with nukes in the title of this remarkable book might strike us as far-fetched, Anna Mariani's work makes an urgent and convincing claim for their interdependence. Italy had, and still has, no nuclear arsenal of its own, but it houses hundreds of American bombs and is thereby tethered to global strategies of deterrence based on the threat of mutual mass destruction. What is more, the physicists who pioneered nuclear fission, some of whom emigrated to the US to complete the work that would lead to the bomb, were Italian. These ragazzi di Via Panisperna—named for the address of the Institute of Physics at the University of Rome—were led by Enrico Fermi, who went on to produce the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on the campus of the University of Chicago.But it is Mariani's subtitle that will be the point of departure for my analysis, with its singling out of the bystander as her book's protagonist. In the nuclear age, Italian intellectuals necessarily “stand by” as accomplices, given their country's implication in the history and the ongoing state of the nuclear threat. The uneasy awareness of this complicity is the subject of the book's five chapters, each of which is devoted to a single author (Moravia, Calvino, Morante, Sciascia, and Pasolini). While none of these names would immediately come to mind if one were asked to identify leaders of a national anti-nuclear campaign, Mariani astutely reveals how the threat of annihilation deeply preoccupied each of these authors, whose writings on the subject marked significant turns within the course of their respective bibliographies—a point I will emphasize in the pages to follow.Among the most ingenious techniques for characterizing the poetics of these bystanders is Mariani's often surprising choice of texts—little known journalistic pieces or short stories that add richness, depth, and nuance to the canonical works on which these writers’ reputations were built. The effect is that of montage—understood in general terms (we'll consider it in a narrow, technical sense in the Pasolini chapter) as the juxtaposing of disparate elements to release a new energy of interpretation. In the case of Moravia, for example, whose landmark novel Gli indifferenti enacted a poetics of resignation, the nuclear threat prompted a turn toward civic engagement, leading the author to campaign for, and win a seat in, the European Parliament. During this time, his writings took journalistic form in the “Letter from Hiroshima” and assumed a fictional guise in “There's a Neutron Bomb for Ants Too.” In her analysis of this latter text, two techniques emerge as keys to Mariani's interpretation of the poetic bystanders’ work: allegory and scale—terms that will recur throughout her study. The allegorical reading of ant extermination in the short story has the effect of miniaturizing the otherwise inconceivable scale of destruction at Hiroshima. In fact, scale becomes a problem for all of Mariani's intellectuals who tried to face the “metaphysical intractability” (13) of nuclear destruction. Spatiotemporal scale becomes a concern of Calvino with regard to the disposal of nuclear waste in the essay “The Superfluous” (78). The same writer conducts an “experiment in scale” to expand our “moral imagination” in Cosmicomics (88), and Morante's struggle with the immeasurability of mass death makes it impossible for her to represent Hiroshima in the narrative of La Storia, her epochal novel of World War II.Mariani's chapter on Morante is also of particular interest for its focus on a critically neglected element of this monumental text. I'm referring to the historical chronology that introduces each year of the fictional narrative. As Mariani notes, the border between these two modes of writing is porous, especially with regard to tone in the passages where the “indignation that palpitates in the novel” (120) seeps into the chronicle, violating the latter's neutrality by rendering judgment on the facts it purports to convey. Mariani will insightfully pronounce this framing device a “full-scale parody of historical discourse” (121). Yet the most striking paratextual move—one that is easily overlooked, but that Mariani's nuclear perspective brings into sharp focus, is the epigraph attributed to “un sopravvissuto di Hiroscima.” The originator of this citation remains unidentified—a fact that heralds the exclusion of Hiroshima from the narrative since the scale of suffering precludes transforming a victim's story into a fictional mode capable of eliciting a degree of empathy adequate to the event.Despite Morante's “failure to convert atomic explosions into episodes that are narratable in the novel form” (123), she did not hesitate to express her anti-nuclear stance in speechmaking. She did so in an address entitled “For or Against the Atom Bomb” delivered in both Turin and Milan in 1965 before publishing the written version in a literary journal that same year. In her exegesis of the speech, Mariani astutely points out how Morante herself engages in textual analysis to expose the trivializing effect of mass media coverage with respect to nuclear matters. The banalization of the term “atomic” as a synonym for “superlative,” “sensational,” “unprecedented” (107) is a case in point. Most stunning is Mariani's revelation of an incomplete novel, written between 1958 and the mid-1960s, entitled “Without the Comforts of Religion” in which the origin of the term bikini is traced back to the Pacific atoll made uninhabitable by atomic testing. The link with the trope of the “sexy bomb” (109–10) is not far to seek, as we will see in her chapter on Pasolini.Among the great virtues of Mariani's scholarship in general is her blending of thematic concerns with an acute awareness of what makes her objects of study quintessentially literary works. The attention to the literariness of these texts—the focus on the medium-specific creative techniques that make them works of art, worthy of the closest attention to the concrete vehicles of their content—is a hallmark of her approach. This dual perspective—thematic and linguistic (the latter in the broadest possible sense)—counteracts the temptation to engage in purely ideological or theoretical argumentation. Throughout this study, the author is exquisitely attuned to language—its lexical, grammatical, and syntactic power to enact meaning. Moravia's gift for lowering his linguistic register to make familiar the unthinkable, Calvino's ability to establish a rhetorical bond of intimacy with his reader in an article on radioactive waste, the “nervous parataxis” regarding his anxiety about how to dispose of it, the same writer's “frenzied accumulation of synonyms” (95) to describe a protagonist's “implosion” in Cosmicomics, and the penning of an abnormally long sentence—an entire page in length “graphically [suggesting] the continuity between all the time dimensions, thereby spatializing the thousand-year periods” (89)—these are just a few examples of Mariani's surpassing skill as a close reader of her chosen texts at the service of interpretation.That Mariani's skills of textual analysis are not limited to written works is made abundantly clear in the chapter dedicated to Pasolini's 1962 documentary La rabbia. It is in this chapter that Mariani offers a rich overview of the essay-film as a genre, linking it to Pasolini's signature use of montage to make familiar images strange, to remove them from usual contexts and rearrange them in new relationships to activate spectators’ awareness (168). Nothing could be more startling in this regard than the juxtaposition of the mushroom cloud and a headshot of Marilyn Monroe. On the surface, this editorial move posits the obvious equation of female sexual allure—the blond bombshell—with nuclear power. But Mariani adds considerable depth and nuance to this linkage by exploring the semiotics of such images, and the underlying logic of their connection. The mushroom cloud functions as a paradox—both signifying and hiding the explosion itself—a visual expression of what cannot be seen. Only at a distance, Mariani argues, “can catastrophe become an aesthetic object,” only at a distance “can the bomb resemble a frothy, enchanting mushroom” (175). The link with the image of Marilyn Monroe, in her gorgeous iconic guise, serves a similar purpose, inserting an aestheticizing distance from a deeply troubled life story, while at the same time shrinking that distance by inserting a series of still photos of Norma Jean Baker before she became the celebrity frozen in the headshot juxtaposed with the mushroom cloud. What ties the mushroom cloud and the headshot together, then is the “infinite photographic reproducibility” of such imagery (172–73) and consequent aesthetization/anesthetization of its effects.Throughout the book, Mariani's interest in the relationship between genre and nuclear concerns bears noting—the historical novel in Morante, science fiction in Calvino, the allegorical short story in Moravia, and the essay-film in Pasolini. Her analysis of Sciascia's nuclear fiction hinges on the mechanisms of the inchiesta letteraria, and in particular the anomalous generic direction in which the story of Ettore Majorana, one of the ragazzi di via Paisperna, leads him. In the context of Italian nuclear complicity, according to Mariani, the cynical, ironic, detached, Enlightment-inflected approach adopted by Sciascia in his investigative fiction gives way to hagiography in The Mystery of Marorana. Such a surprising and radical turn in Sciascia's literary practice reflects the author's unstinting admiration for Ettore Majorana's choice to “disappear” from the group of Italian scientists on the road to developing the bomb. Like Melville's scrivener, Majorana “prefers not to,” he chooses saintly withdrawal rather than pursue the atomic project, as if he saw the catastrophic consequences of what he had abetted in its nascent stages. As such, Sciascia's protagonist occupies the position of a nuclear accomplice whose guilt impels him to act, as does the writer himself who inscribes his uneasy awareness of Italian nuclear responsibility, and his admiration for someone who attempted to “set a different course for history” (160).Hovering over the entire study is the theme of engagement and the creative mechanisms that Mariani's five protagonists employed to express their own awareness of the nuclear peril and to induce their readers/viewers to do likewise. In the case of Calvino, Mariani presents herself with the most formidable of challenges—to argue that this author's turn in mid-career to the literature of extravagant imaginative play marked by Cosmicomics is really not a withdrawal from engaged writing, but rather a diverse, more oblique and difficult invitation to reader involvement in nuclear thought. Here she articulates a dissenting opinion in the face of the critical consensus that Calvino had become “ludic and vacuous” (8) with Cosmicomics, arguing instead that its poetics is in keeping with the author's 1960s view that literature can educate “only if it is difficult and indirect” (84). It is on the allegorical level, Mariani claims, that Calvino's foray into outer space delivers its anti-nuclear teaching, that the writer activates a hermeneutical process whereby readers will come to expand their “moral imagination” (88) about matters on earth.Mariani's acute insight into the mechanisms of nuclear-aware writings (and filmmaking) as invitations to activist engagement on the part of readers/viewers finds far more obvious exemplars in the chapters on Moravia, Morante, Sciascia, and Pasolini. But the meaning of “activist” can vary among the responses that Mariani's protagonists aspire to produce. For the filmmaker, the inducement to decipher the logic of montage—to fathom the rationale behind unexpected juxtapositions of images—leads his viewers “not simply to watch: they must also act.” But Mariani goes on to clarify that “action does not mean mobilizing (which would be an unrealistic and ingenuous expectation) but rather, choosing, engaging critically, interpreting” (179). In the Morante section, the explicit spur to nuclear-awareness-through-interpretation takes the form of the “koan”—a species of Zen riddle that defies logical resolution and thereby serves as a critique of the “instrumental reasoning” (13) that led to the bomb. Nowhere in the book is the clarion call for committed art more emphatic than in the above-mentioned pages devoted to the “For or Against the Atomic Bomb” speech, “which does not just demand a commentary: it demands a responsory.” She defines this highly resonant term as “a way of approaching the text that engages in dialogue with it, that reacts actively to its prompts, that restores their context and at the same time extends them into the here and now” (101).Mariani's otherwise unimpeachable study, however, avoided Italian terms, understandable in her outreach to a broad, Anglophone public. While this constitutes a very minor problem in the use of English titles for works such as La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno's conscience) and History (La Storia), where the translations reduce the ambiguous doubleness of coscienza and storia, she also shied away from the term impegno, preferring engagement (with its French reverberations) and commitment. This meant skirting the rich, specifically Italian historical context of the term, something which Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug confronted head on in the very title of their 2009 volume Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture. While Mariani does not overtly situate her study in relation to Italian letteratura impegnata from its anti-Fascist underpinnings and its Marxist-inflected roots to its more recent manifestations, she nonetheless charts a course of great literary-critical consequence. What she models is a hermeneutics of impegno, requiring readers to do the interpretive work that makes them coproducers of meaning, charged with the cognitive and ethical responsibility inherent in such a procedure.Let me end with a return to the word responsory as a dialogue issued by a text that may refer to issues contemporaneous to its writing, with the potential to extend that dialogue into the readers’ “here and now.” My own reading of this urgent and remarkable book was informed by the here and now of climate change—the subject of Mariani's coda. As she succinctly put it: “The world is still going to end, but the apocalypse has changed guises” (184). Through the critical exercises that Mariani so expertly models—rhetorical analyses of mass media means for anesthetizing public consciousness, the insistence on acknowledging our positions as complicit bystanders of the status quo; the quest for ways to understand the arts as vehicles of not just commentary but responsory; the need to perceive the nuclear peril as “concretely approachable” and apocalypse as thinkable; and the effort to expand the horizon of our moral imaginations—Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age requires us to take up our role as observers who are no longer willing to just “stand by.”

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• Pina's Pregnancy, Traumatic Realism, and the After-Life of <i>Open City</i>

  Italica · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This study attempts to account for the haunting power and the enduring legacy of the most wrenching shot-sequence in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City. I am speaking of the scene in which Pina is felled by Nazi gun fire as she chases after the truck carrying Francesco and his comrades seized during the raid on their tenement building in Rome's Prenestino neighborhood. This scene, whose power to shock and disrupt remains unabated over the years, even when audiences are amply forewarned of the serial deaths that will be visited upon Open City's resistance characters, has come to transcend its narrative context and to stand, by synecdoche, for the entire cinematic movement which Rossellini's film was credited with founding. The iconic power of the scene was in evidence at the 1995 Cinecittà exhibit marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italian cinema, where a video loop was entirely dedicated to its continuous replay. In that same year, Carlo Lizzani devoted a feature film, entitled Celluloide, to recreating the production of Open City (a choice of subject matter that elevated the making of a film to the status of a primary historical event, on the order of a military battle, a legislative triumph, or a major political scandal), in which the shooting and editing of Pina's death scene was given pride of place.1 Perhaps the strongest argument for the iconic power of this scene is the commemorative stamp, issued by the Italian government to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII, which featured the image of Pina's death as the defining emblem of war. To underline the synecdochal value of that image, a caption beneath it read “Il cinema neorealista” and below that label, “Italia.” Several years later, Ettore Scola made a brilliant short film entitled ’43–’97, featuring a young Jewish boy who escapes the Nazi round-up of the Roman ghetto by hiding in a movie-house, where he views a montage of films in which Pina's death scene stands as the first example of postwar Italian cinematic achievement.2 Within the fiction of Scola's short film, of course, the young Jewish boy's escape from Nazi persecution sets up an ironic counterpoint to Pina's fate in the wake of the German assault on her tenement, but the message is nonetheless one of survival—it affirms the undying power of a single shot sequence to conjure up an entire era, both historical and cinematographic, and to inspire generations of filmmakers who will venerate and develop that legacy.Before making his own sequel to Open City in the narrative of Mamma Roma (to be analyzed farther on), Pasolini was to enshrine his account of Pina's death scene in verses rich with promise for our own study of film and collective memory. The poem in question, “Continuazione della serata a San Michele,” recalls the second part of an odyssey that had begun in Trastevere and concludes in an outdoor cinema in the San Michele district near Testaccio.3 “Subito entro: scosso da un interno clamore / deciso a tremare nel ricordo” Pasolini writes of the emotions generated by the worn-out poster that had enticed him into the arena. Before the film even begins, then, Pasolini is in a heightened state of psychic preparedness, primed for what Jameson calls the “nostalgia mode of reception”4 by the poster's image of “il caldo viso ovale dell'eroina” that offers such a striking contrast to the “grige persone” gathered to watch the film in the “arena senza vita.” “Subito,” he repeats several lines later, “alle prime inquadrature / mi travolge e rapisce . . . . l'intermittence / du coeur.” The sudden intrusion of this French phrase with its reference to the involuntary memory of Proust enacts grammatically the very experience it describes. The poet is indeed the passive object of a process of evocation that he cannot control: he is abducted by memory. “Mi trovo nelle scure vie della memoria e nelle stanze / misteriose dove l'uomo fisicamente è altro.” Kidnapped and led along streets and into rooms on the movie screen, the poet is simultaneously taken on a journey along memory traces embedded deep within his psyche. “Eppure dal lungo uso fatto esperto / non perdo i fili”—as the poet navigates the topography of the film, its familiarity (“ecco . . . la Casilina . . . ecco l'epico paesaggio neorealista”) enables him to thread his way across the memory map of his own mind. But this leisurely, comforting, and deeply elegiac stroll past “i fili del telegrafo, i selciati, i pini, i muretti scrostati” cannot remain indefinitely in the corridors of nostalgia. As Pasolini's reminiscence moves along the list of picturesque antiquarian details of the “paesaggio neo-realista” progressing to the abstract “forme della dominazione nazista” the verses undergo a radical shift. The poem has finally arrived at its destination: the point where a specific scene from Open City breaks into Pasolini's verses, where idyllic flânerie along the paths of fond recollection gives way to the sudden violence of the film's first catastrophic event.Quasi emblema ormai, l'urlo della Magnanisotto le ciocche disordinatamente assoluterisuona nelle disperate panoramichee nelle sue occhiate vive e mutesi addensa il senso della tragedia.È lì che si dissolve e si mutilail presente, e assorda il canto degli aedi.With Pina's death scene, “l'epico paesaggio neorealista” becomes the stage for tragedy, the memory map is torn, and the poet is reduced to silence.How can we explain the transcendent impact of this particular moment in Open City, when so many other episodes should qualify for an equivalent place in the pantheon of filmographic recall? If martyrdom alone were the explanation, then why is the fatal torture scene of Manfredi, or the execution of Don Pietro not equally seared into our collective consciousness? In attempting to address this question, let us follow Christopher Wagstaff's lead in analyzing the remarkable acting performance of Anna Magnani as she propels herself through the passage leading to the street, and then at the departing truck, with a wild fury that is extraordinary in the literal sense. Normally, if you run and rerun a struggle or a fight in a film enough times, you begin to see how it was choreographed. No matter how many times you rerun this scene at whatever speed, Magnani seems out of control.5In other words, the character's actions at this point seem to exceed the boundaries of the work—they push against and break out of the film's representational frame—just as Pina shoves away the Nazi guards and rushes out toward a death that is too swift and senseless to be contained within its narrative vehicle and its technological frame. Barthes’ concept of the “punctum” (an “element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me . . . that accident which pricks me [but also bruises me, is poignant to me]” as he writes in Camera Lucida)6 could not find a better example than this moment in Open City, which indeed pierces the spectator, producing shock waves that verge on the traumatic. And it is with the very notion of trauma, understood etymologically as a wound,7 that I would like to open my own investigation into this scene's “excess” with respect to the rest of the film. For I believe that the traumatic nature of the representation explains the inordinate impact of Pina's death—a death which can be considered, in retrospect and with the appropriate irony, the scena madre of neorealism.Defined as “the disruption or breakdown that occurs when the psychic apparatus is suddenly presented with stimuli, either from within or without, that are too powerful to be dealt with, or assimilated in the usual way,”8 trauma offers multiple interpretive openings into the scene. As spectators, we come to this narrative development in a condition of absolute unpreparedness—we are entirely vulnerable and defenseless before the assault that is to take our heroine away. The shock, in mid-film, is dramaturgical in nature—we have been lulled into the rhythms of the conventional melodrama which seems to be unfolding as Pina prepares for her belated wedding with Francesco, and tenement life percolates around her, with its quaint touches of local color, vaudeville gags, and populist bonhomie. Pina has “carried” the film from the moment she first appeared on screen, cursing lustily as she emerged from the crowd of neighborhood women storming a local bakery, and laying proud claim to the title “Sora” whose dialectal resonance locates her squarely within the “extended family” of Rome's activist proletariat. The character's charisma leads us to strongly identify with her modest list of personal wishes: to celebrate her wedding in Church (rather than in Fascist City Hall); to heal the rift with her alienated sister Lauretta; and to arrive at war's end with a newly intact family unit. So powerful is the momentum of this traditional dramaturgy—we are so “wired” to accede to its logic—that its rupture in mid-film is simply beyond our ability to assimilate. We remain traumatized by it, the “psychic apparatus” of our film-viewing selves breaks down and we experience the second part of Open City in a state of stunned disbelief.I have borrowed the term “traumatic realism” from Michael Rothberg's fine book on Holocaust representation, which focuses on the literary genre of testimony, caught between the competing demands for documentary, referential truth on the one hand, and self-conscious, modernist (and even postmodernist) reflections on the impossibility of its task, on the other.9 The “traumatic” focus of Rothberg's study is inherent in its very subject matter—a historical event so extreme as to defy containment by any normal representational means. What requires a “traumatic realist” approach, then is the very exceptionality of the object of representation—an exceptionality that will have strategic implications on the level of form. The “referent” of Rossellini's film, instead, is all too woefully familiar—military occupation, clandestine resistance, betrayal, torture, have long been the stuff of historical narrative. In the case of Open City, then, it is the convention of cinematic realism itself that is traumatized, the vehicle of realistic representation that is brought to a screeching halt in the face of Pina's narratively unassimilable and technically uncontainable death.Reverting to the etymology of trauma as wound, we may look to Cathy Caruth's of to the nature of this within the context of cinematic that the of trauma in and but the of then, is the experience of the by in the face of historical and as it the power of to on the could be then, that the scene of Pina's which conventional development and cinematic of enacts on the level of the collective upon the Italian by the of In other words, the scene itself becomes a in the memory or that into but remains the attempts to place it within a and I would that is to the traumatic impact of Pina's death than would be by the disruption of the and the of Pina is not a down on the of her but she is also a so her death becomes a death on for which is the most literal In film historical this scene a striking The of the in the dramaturgical to us of any with to Open City's narrative and the stage for to is in Pina's death scene, I would that we may the birth of a cinematic development from the of trauma and rupture by the This is the scene in which the Rossellini's find their most and and we could so as to Open City's film historical take the of Rossellini's we the state of Italian cinema in when was reduced to a and were to the film the most of and would not be on the list of in an to its past Rossellini's in Open City in his to that film had a referential the to and As is the of and was to an film, entitled on an of the Nazi of As the short were into a with a the of of the the and even the of of the major in the film have their in historical is a of and of and military and Don Pietro is on Don and Don But the point in the film where representation and most is the scene of Pina's on the shooting down of a who was the of her along with a of other to for the Nazi This was as a by a German to of an object for who would a to Nazi this scene, Rossellini's is to that Nazi object or to it and it as a of than as one of and in the film's this scene a that this of than Pina on a the where Francesco and his comrades were has her the truck carrying him away in a of impact and cinematic was Anna after the in which her was the movie in a which to Pina as the than the of Nazi The in the and of the scene up for multiple of and with a fire that to the absolute many of the other historical on which Open City was the death of Pina / in the collective of local so that the film sequence would have a of a moment of that would have even at very the truth of the film. to the film's is the of in Don Pietro in this scene, was his own experience as to the shooting of as has the in Open City's be by the that its was by the and that up around this to our study is the of in a by entitled by the City may be as the for the at the and into the and of Rossellini's of this cannot be to the and of Pina's toward the Nazi The of the sequence are and are with the in his Don Pietro the with a of us that in Pina's own was to that of the the del when she her to un in in her with a look and a And in a scene after her during in the local the of the strongly Pina's with the her status as a of to the message of Open City is the of the recalls the of the and with to the of and Don activist the postwar But the of Pina's remains at the of our even as we the of the young at the end of the film who into to their for a of and The of the as of this be by our traumatic of the that not with a to our of Open City as a of the postwar Italian The of the which of for the of the at as as in / senza in / non where the has come to of political and In Open City Pina this with who has been by the of and to the and to the of her of women the Italian condition at this historical but it is the who the Italian collective and in her as and it is she who to heal the family of in the of the traumatic and iconic scene of her has such a of so deeply into the Italian as to the of Pasolini's to Open City in the poem If the of is in with both the personal and the collective I believe it then we could postwar Italian filmmakers to be to the power of this traumatic cinematic memory. And it should come as that such as and Pasolini would into that memory to it in the of and the of the postwar Italian The most to such a of in their is the of as the of a or who would have the of Pina's had the narrative of Open City her to the war. I am speaking of and Pasolini's Mamma Roma with Open City, an of the Italian from the through the to the of “Il of the the of film, is a from the Prenestino and like her Open City she is and a But this is where the for the of her and to the of the most as if the experience of the and had over her a making her a literal of the to the order of in is to her the in a film, and to that end she is to push her to the of the and herself to of an when not In her of at the of her has the the inordinate the of her to the and and brought the family to the verge of But in a of at the end of the film, to the of her and the that she has her by the and her for this her to the by and at the of could be as the of a a which by the of the film to the level of that had Pina from the very of Open City. of a postwar upon the of and her from an are to the by the of cinema and are what seem in their as from the of war. In to a part in the a melodrama by postwar Italian cinema as a by for its to the of for the of the cinematic status But by the end of that on itself by the own to the of is in the of as the of her who had been reduced to before and who had a of the that the to the of her and the that she has The of cinematic to the of her own psychic a she had into a image, to be and by the of on this into the and strongly of Pina's as she away from the Nazi guards to follow truck, the her way to and him with his But of Pina's in this scene has the of both the character's us of the between their In the by Pina was one that to of in the of the of that promise has a which a can its own image of and And the that the cinema can is to the of and the film in their years later, Magnani will in a film where her becomes a powerful of the Italian condition the end of Pasolini's Mamma Roma becomes the in this cinematic which the memory of Pina as a of the to which postwar has to the promise of collective In the of Mamma a to her way out of the and into the Pasolini the of in the of the but that Magnani had in Open City. But the Mamma Roma has in with of than with as the is that in of a and to a better and up the as a of than of her own Mamma Roma her part in the of the it is in her that Pasolini us to in his film after the of to that of and to the postwar from Mamma would have been after the making his and his to an on the of for collective in the wake of and war. Ettore at the of Mamma we that the is a and that Ettore in a on to him from Mamma Roma had Ettore out to in the of where he had up to any of that could have him for life in is with that Mamma Roma Ettore to the and in the process of she her la la she And her un a a il her absolute for a life of Mamma Roma movement across the with movement across that in Ettore from the as a young of the to in the she is him to a that will his she will not a condition for her Mamma Roma the one that would lead Ettore to within the of the film. is the who offers Mamma Roma the that would her from Ettore should in The of the postwar years be from da dove da the Mamma by its in the of a itself by the But like in Mamma Roma seems by the historical experience of and her of remain to of status and that Ettore is and the to the the non si il the of an or a with the and of the In we can see that Pasolini has been up such an all Ettore against a of rich with for the of the young In a shot Pasolini's Ettore through the the of in the postwar on the of usual gives way in this scene to the of an in striking contrast to the of the We come to that this on the of is a a of the it to a on the postwar of and other words, an like Ettore No image is of Pasolini's than the one of the by the of a in the of what to be a of times in the film through the of Mamma Roma the powerful as the of the character's which into at first as the of Roma becomes an in of and becomes the object of Mamma at the end of the film after she of The is a as Mamma Roma had in one of the her to the the image of the over the of the Pasolini recalls the of Open City, whose into with the of San Pietro on the In so Pasolini sets the of in to its the nature of the by a which is in the death of Pina and the of her in Open City a traumatic memory deeply embedded in Italian collective postwar Italian filmmakers have been to on that to conjure up the of for which she and to the the moment of Magnani the that made her the of in and the of Open City indeed come to life in of and Ettore of Mamma the the level of political personal that made Pina the of the the of and Pasolini's to Open City, the within the narrative of Rossellini's film as a of the postwar that was to

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  PublisherDOI

• ITALIAN FILM IN THE PRESENT TENSE

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

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