Rome, Open City

Directed by Roberto Rossellini (and curiously written in part by Fellini), Rome, Open City was filmed in the bombed out Rome of 1945. As part of the Neo-Realist section of my degree I'd always kept this nugget of information in my head, but not much more. After watching it, that is still my introductory remark: "Yeah, I watched Rome, Open City the other night, it was filmed in the bombed out Rome of 1945." This is partly due to the awful quality of the DVD release that we watched: no apparent attempt at updating and restoring the footage and the subtitler was obviously of the narcopleptic variety, choosing to give us only a third of the speech spoken in the entire film. At one point five minutes of conversation went by without a flicker of a white word at the bottom of the screen.

As such - and, admittedly because I was tired and fell asleep in parts - I don't really have much to say about it!