Pantalla LCD

of Everyday Life. Certeau compared the urban system of places to a language system, in that they both consist of a more or less fixed set of elements allowing infinite combinations by different users, and he likened the individual act of moving around the city to the act of speaking:

The act of walking is to the urban system what the enunciation, or speech act, is to the language or to the utterances produced. At the most basic level there is a triple “enunciatory” function: first, a process of appropriation of the topographic system by the pedestrian (in the same way that a speaker appropriates and takes up the lan- guage system); second, a spatial realization of place (just as the act of speech [parole] is a sonorous realization of language [langue]); third, implied relations between differentiated positions, in other words, a set of pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements (just as ver- bal enunciation is “allocution,” it “places the other in front of” the speaker and brings contracts between other speakers into play). It seems, therefore, that one may make an initial definition of walking as the space of enunciation.7

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17. ‘‘VV Lenin” on the wall behind the patrol. (Frame enlargement, Cineteca Nazionale, Rome)

In the city from below, feints and subterfuge have become a way of life and facades are deceptive: an antique shop is a front for a hidden printing press downstairs, a priest carrying books is really carrying money, a restaurant owner turns out to be a member of the under- ground who passes information to his comrades under the noses of the Germans, and the person we thought was Giorgio Manfredi turns out to be Luigi Ferraris but is subsequently given, by Don Pietro, a forged identity card in the name of Giovanni Episcopo. It is a city, too, where clandestine movements and communications cut across or beneath the official communications of those in power. In the opening sequence, as the Gestapo arrive to search Manfredi’s apart- ment, a radio can be heard picking up the BBC Italian Service, known in Italy as Radio Londra, which was widely listened to during the Nazi occupation despite the risk of punishment.8_{On the printing press lo-}

cated beneath the antique shop that Don Pietro visits Francesco and others are running off copies of L’Unit`a; Francesco later smuggles a copy home past a Fascist curfew patrol for Manfredi to read. The shot of Bergmann in his office looking at this and the newspapers of

the other antifascist parties confirms that he has intelligence about the Underground, but it also shows, again, that he is unable fully to control or stem its activities. As such, it is an eloquent image of the power of the city below him, its ability to produce counterinforma- tion against the official information (posters, leaflets, newspapers, radio bulletins) distributed by the Germans and Fascists. An image that works in a similar way is the shot of the slogan “VV [viva] Lenin” and another VV over a hammer and sickle which are scratched onto the exterior walls of a building behind the curfew patrol that stops Francesco (see Fig. 17).

Adriano Apr`a has suggestively described this other city in the film as a dispersed or “decentralized” city, in opposition to the “central- ized” city of the authorities.9 _{This is another way of representing}

the division between above and below. The decentralized city, how- ever, also has its own modes of internal cohesion and its strategies of everyday resistance. These strategies include, as well as clandestine movement around the city (a form of “spatial resistance”), alterna- tive uses of language, from code names to communications hidden from the occupiers to sarcasm and derision (all forms of what we might call “linguistic resistance”).

One example of the latter is insubordinate humor, directed against the dominators, which they either may not pick up or may not con- strue as openly subversive. When the German soldiers bring two live sheep into the restaurant and tell Flavio, the antifascist owner, that they have brought meat, he replies: “I run a restaurant, I’m not a butcher.” “We’ll be the butchers.” “Ah, of course, I know you lot are the specialists.” Similarly, when the Fascists arrive to search the wash- room, they ask the woman, “What are you doing here?” “I’m washing my stuff.” “Get outside. No one will touch your stuff. We’re here.” “Oh, of course, how stupid of me.” Such jokes or ironic remarks are among the ruses of power available to subaltern peoples in situations of domination in which they have no legal outlets to express dissent. In creating horizontal cohesion among the dominated, they may be said to constitute in themselves an “art of resistance.”10 _{In the film}

these bits of dialogue work also by a rhetorical mechanism of double address: a speech is directed at characters in the story but its hidden meaning is picked up by the audience, who by sharing the joke, en- ter into secret complicity and solidarity with the Roman people on the screen. As these examples indicate, even though all the dialogue

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and sound effects were postsynchronized, the aural dimension of the film is just as important to its overall dramatic and rhetorical effect, and to its recording of Rome in 1945, as its visual aspects.

THE HORIZONTAL CITY: MOVEMENTS AND OPPOSITIONS