Programación en los microcontroladores

city” was used again on September 10, 1943, in the text of the agree- ment with which Italian troops surrendered Rome to the advancing German army. However, the Germans had no intention of respecting the terms of this agreement and they proceeded to occupy Rome and set up a military command there. The Allies consequently continued their bombing raids on the city. In other words, the notion of the open city was only ever unilaterally applied by the Italians and it was flouted by the Germans and thence by the Allies.

Nevertheless, respect for the terms of the September 10 agreement and demand for restoration of the open city status remained among the principal slogans used by the antifascist movement in Rome to galvanize popular support against the Germans. Among the Com- munist Party leaflets distributed in workplaces in March 1944, six months into the nine-month occupation, one, headed “Imponiamo il rispetto di Roma Citt`a Aperta” (“Let’s insist that Rome Open City is respected”), stated: “the violation of the Open City pact by the Germans, which is provoking Anglo-American bombing, is getting worse all the time. . . . We must unite and organize a collective, force- ful and compact struggle against the cynical violation of Rome Open City and its disastrous consequences.” Another leaflet, addressed to the “Workers of Rome,” put “respect for Rome Open City” at the top of a list of demands, followed by an end to round-ups for forced labor and calls for a doubling of pay, increased food rations, and regular benefit payments for the unemployed.3

The early audiences of the film in other countries who were un- aware that the open city pact had been ignored by the Germans (and thence by the Allies) could work it out from what they saw on screen. The film showed the Germans imposing their rule on the city, and it showed the damage produced by the Allied air raids. But they could also work out from the film how the desire for an “open city” helped to drive the organized resistance and to fuel the anger of ordinary people.

As a visual depiction of the divided city, the film has at once the value of a testimony and the status of a rhetorical construction. It is a testimony because, for all its artifice – actors, scripted performances, built sets – it records on celluloid how parts of Rome looked at the end of the Second World War, including sites of memorable events. The most notable instance is the field at Forte Bravetta, used as the

setting for Don Pietro’s execution at the end of the film. It was on this site that several antifascists, including Don Giuseppe Morosini, one of the models for Don Pietro, had been shot during the occupation. After the liberation of Rome ( June 10, 1944) various leading Fascists who had collaborated or carried out torture or repression in the city during the occupation were shot on the same site, and some of these executions (those of Pietro Caruso on September 23, 1944, Federico Scarpato on April 27, 1945, and Pietro Koch on June 5, 1945) can be seen in the section directed by Luchino Visconti of the documentary film Giorni di gloria (1945). (This film, produced by Titanus with the collaboration of the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare Branch, was first screened in September 1945 in the same festival at which Open City had its public premi`ere).

In this way, an otherwise ordinary-looking strip of land serves as a stimulus to collective memory and has an authenticating function in a scene that is in all other respects a dramatized reconstruction, from the shaky hand of the Fascist who fumbles with the cigarettes and matches to the presence of the young whistling spectators. The latter detail, crucial to the pathos of this scene, is historically quite implausible: Forte Bravetta was a guarded area during the occupation, and outsiders could not gain access to executions. There was no wire fence around it and, in fact, the shots in the film of the boy’s reactions were done elsewhere and at a different time.

The film as a whole shows too, often in a quite accidental way, particularly in the scenes with “nonactors,” how people in Rome dressed, gestured, spoke, and moved about in 1945. It also shows how people in the city at that time wanted the occupation and Resis- tance to be remembered, namely as a period of collective suffering in the face of violence and injustice that had produced a relatively uni- fied resistance movement and martyrs for the cause of liberty. This representation of events is tendentious and historically questionable because it straightens out a more complex and ambiguous historical truth. Nevertheless, it needs to be recognized as also in itself a form of testimony, the result of a strong collective wish to give a particular kind of account of recent history.

Naturally, once one starts to talk in this way about the film as a tes- timony of shared beliefs and desires, its status as testimony begins to shade into its status as rhetorical construction. I am using the terms rhetoric and rhetorical here in the generic sense developed in classical

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SPACE, RHETORIC, AND THE DIVIDED CITY IN ROMA CITT `A APERTA 109

antiquity of a conscious use of language by a speaker or writer to persuade an audience of something, as in a law court or a political assembly. This process involves a selection (inventio) and a particular arrangement (dispositio) of linguistic and stylistic elements. I suggest that analogous processes may be applied in a film. I do not wish to enter here the larger and more complex question of whether film may be considered a language, but simply to claim that any arrangement of narrative or visual elements in a film that serves an identifiable pur- pose of persuasion of the audience may be described as rhetorical. My argument in this instance is that the representation of remembered events that gives shape to Rossellini’s film is fabricated for specific persuasive ends. It involves the working up of certain pieces of raw material into a selective myth or legend to the exclusion of other memories: those, notably, of political divisions among Italians, guilt over nonresistance, cowardice, or collusion.

Just as the film organizes its raw story material, drawn from real events, into a coherent narrative about the courage and solidarity of Italians against the foreign oppressor, so it arranges its raw visual ma- terial into a distinctive rhetorical shape. Implied spatial metaphors and symbols impose neat shapes on historically messy events, just as clear spatial contrasts reinforce the social and moral polarities con- structed in the story. In doing so, they play a key part in the film’s fashioning of a good memory out of the occupation and its way of persuading audiences to see characters and actions in a certain light. It is this rhetorical use of space in the film that I shall examine in what follows. I shall discuss four ways in which the film rhetorically organizes urban space: by framing the city with the long shots that open and close the film; by suggesting vertical divisions within the city between occupiers and occupied; by tracing out horizontal movements and oppositions across the city; and by using the various elements of mise-en-sc`ene in interior space to heighten contrasts between differ- ent characters and settings.4