3
Maps and Theaters of Torture: Roma, città aperta
The evidence accumulated in the preceding chapter reconfirms a point obvious to adepts of auteur theory. In one way or another director are auteurs by virtue of cartography found both within each of their films and that runs across many others of their signature. Cartography is not equated with an author’s “vision of the world” or of an oeuvre whose sum would be greater than any or all of its constituent topographies. The auteur merits the name because of a cartographic consciousness seen in maps shown or in shots and montage taken to be deciphered as maps. Such was the effect of the overlay of four moments in Renoir’s films of the 1930s. Such, too, is the character of Roberto Rossellini’s cinema in general. The salient traits of the two directors owe much to maps that embody the multifarious and often-conflicting forces that inspire their cinemas. It would seem that, at the end of the Second World War, as an Italian director dedicated to the cause of Italian film, Rossellini wanted to project to the world at large a shattered and shattering historical geography of Italy. His cinematic project was one of reconstructing the nation and infusing an Italian style into his films. Certainly Paisan, Germany, Year Zero, Stromboli, Viva l’Italia!, and other features attest to these ends. But what of Roma, città aperta, the classic that launched Rossellini as an auteur? Surely in this film a mapping impulse is clear, but so also are the contradictions that figure in the quest for power that seems to be a defining quality of the modern map, a quality that René Clair, as we saw in chapter 1, associated with cinema. Roma, città aperta, in which the loathsome sight of torture is excruciating, can be understood cartographically, as a staging of the yoking of locational imaging to terror.
A guiding hypothesis of this chapter is that in the film Rossellini taps into the tradition of the theatrum mundi, a world-theater conceived as an atlas of maps with which its owners can assuage their broadest desires for travel and displacement. The same theater is tied to one of cruelty, to a theater of torture, a subsidiary of the theatrum mundi. From 1570 and well into the seventeenth century Abraham Ortelius invented, published, and circulated the first modern atlas, the Orbis theatrum terrarum, which would be translated into many languages and published in epitome and grand format. Its publication was synchronous with many theaters associated with art and architectural design. The metaphor of the “theater” quickly dominated European print-culture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It drew on the medieval notion of the world in the shape of a circular disk (orbis terrae) but was applied to the “sense of a scene where action takes place” and to a “setting of human life.”1 The atlas became an object that Ortelius claimed would allow the reading spectator to travel all about the world without leaving the room in which the book was placed. The theater was contained in the action of studying the maps and turning the folio pages on which they were printed and painted. Theaters and “world-stages” became the thresholds of books of anatomy, agriculture, logistics and, no less, the practice of torture.2
A reading of Rossellini’s early masterpiece will be engaged through this tradition. Jacques Rancière (2001), for one, has suggested that in features beginning from Roma, città aperta cinematic compositions are as much mapped as they are staged. The films of the neorealist period draw the staging of tragedy into their texture and thus, in their doubling and duplicities, yield images of intractable violence. Heeding Rossellini’s dictum to the effect that he organizes each of his films around a sequence, a single and simple shot, or sometimes even a gesture within a shot, Rancière argues that emblematic proof is found in the death of Pina (Anna Magnani), a turning point in the feature.
The apartment building in which she and her fiancé had found brief solace together has just been ransacked by a phalanx of armed soldiers sent by the Gestapo. The fiancé is captured, thrown in the back of a pickup truck, and driven away. All of a sudden, in this “highly improbable sequence,” Pina breaks through a line of soldiers (bustling and fighting her way, she comically thrusts askew the helmet on the head of one of the SS soldiers), tears herself free from the crowd, and runs after the truck that speeds away. From its point of view the camera, using the flattening effect of a telephoto lens, shows her going forward without advancing. She sprints into the open, is isolated in
the middle of the roadway, a black silhouette on a great white page, tendered toward us, toward the camera, toward the guns, almost comically with her exaggerated gesticulation as if she were hailing a taxi driver who has left without waiting for his passenger. And we think too of these brides and grooms in comedies, late for their marriages, who rush to church half-dressed. And, in fact, it is the altar where the same morning she was going to rejoin Francesco. (2001, 167)3
The sequence, he notes, is one of a “suspension of the image of meaning” that has to fall to earth.
For both the camera and the bullets time has come to be done with the suspense. Pina, gunned down, alights on the white asphalt like a great bird on which, like two other birds cut away by the hand of a painter, that drop down and land about her far from the presence of the militia: the crying child arches over her and the priest tries to tear the boy away from his pain. Never has there been so unified the weight of the bodies that fall with the absolute suspension of grace in this very slight parabola by which, beforehand, are abolished all pain and all disorder. (167)
A feeling of Pauline grace never intercedes to clean or to redeem either the characters or the uncanny staging of the murder. The sequence is “the exact concordance of the meeting of what or whoever was not being sought,” Rossellini intending, without artistic frills, to underscore “the exact concordance of an ethical surge and an aesthetic drawing” (167). A trajectory, a path, or a line—une courbe—of descent is drawn in the articulation both of the shot and of other meetings and cadences. Just when Don Pietro (Aldo Rossi) holds Manfredi’s head in his arms after his body has fallen from the chair of torture, doing what the torturers failed to do, his thumb sealing the victim’s eyelids, he looks upward, not in just in search of the voice or light of God but in ire and anger. Aesthetics of grace are broken when he unleashes his wrath.
Rancière infers that Rossellini’s sequences are vectored by movements of bodily action and of attractions that run up and down and across the field of the image. Any of Rossellini’s films
is a surface of inscription that refuses to accept the slightest trace of dissimulation; nothing is present that would need to be kept latent, as might a hidden truth behind appearances or a scandal dissimulated behind the smooth surface of things. Here the scandal of an entirely different force is surely that nothing is ever dissimulated or liable to dissimulation. However intensely it examines faces, Rossellini’s microscope forbids itself from discerning anything that an attentive gaze would not perceive on its own. (179)
In a sweeping gesture Rancière takes leave both of André Bazin, for whom Rossellini’s films become a “patient quest given to discovering the secret of beings and things,” and Gilles Deleuze, who finds in the cinema “disconnected spaces and purely optical and sonorous situations” (166).
The surface on which nothing can be concealed is paradoxically, so it seems, a lamination of two planes where a cartography of locational control adheres to another of control through dissimulation. Rancière sees two different Rossellinis working in the strange confines of the Gestapo headquarters. In the torture chamber the resistance fighters “cry too much and speak not enough,” while the adjacent salon or officers’ club is “decorated with mirrors and paintings, furnished with a piano, a studio décor for a Hollywood film of Lili Marlene [Dietrich]’s Berlin” (168). On the one side is “Ingrid,” who directs the actors and actresses and organizes the images that will, on the other side, under the jurisdiction of “Bergmann,” extort truth from those who have fallen under their spell.4 Rancière writes of a mapping tendency that gives definition, depth, and amplitude to the tiny milieu where they work:
Bergmann, the head of the Gestapo, and Ingrid, his associate, have thus divided the sides and roles. Bergmann draws a map of the places, orders sequences and gives commands to the sound crew—to put it plainly, to the torturers—in the room to the left. Ingrid is confided with the direction of actresses and the organization of images that, on the other side, are to produce the desired words of the confession. Her art is that of trapping in their image, in the drug of mirrors, these “actresses” who identify their talent with the cosmetic art of making up their reflection in the mirror of dressing table—this mirror where we see the reflected gaze of Ingrid contemplating her prey, the sudden surprise in her discovery of the photograph of Marina and Manfredi, an immobilized picture on the stage, a little trap in the greater trap. And we understand that Rossellini seeks not to be oversubtle either with the act of denunciation or with Marina’s motivations. The drug with which she is rewarded is merely the slight sum of her impoverished desire, of her great fear of the Unknown. (171)
Bergmann orders and plots the space where his enemy’s secrets will be revealed. Ingrid, a stage manager of sorts, attends to a filmic “theater of operations.” The former uses cartography, guile, and a blowtorch to extract the information he needs from his victims, and the latter exploits the fineries and remainders of classical cinema, its art of simulation and dissimulation, to bring her victims to the interrogation room. According to this reading two kinds of cinematic cartography are in play, the one inherited from logistics and from the art of espionage, the other from classical cinema. The “maps” that belong to the former tradition blend into cinema itself.5
Inspection of the kind that Rancière equates with the eye of Rossellini’s camera lens reveals a variety of maps decorating the walls of different rooms in the film. They are related to the mirrors of truth and dissimulation at once of the film as film, to the spaces it invents, and to the traditions in which it is made. The first map occupies the entire screen. It determines the nature of the space of the room in which it is later seen in partial views, confirming the meaning of the title-credits seen less than five minutes before. The voice-off of the interrogator (Bergmann, played by the dancer Harry Feist) states, “La città sarà divisa” (into fourteen sectors). His words respond to the title credits seen minutes ago. An ichnographic map of Rome and its environs, of a fairly small scale and of a size and aspect-ratio almost identical to the screen, fades into view after three SS troops have inspected the rooftop of an apartment building from which Manfredi, a member of the Italian resistance, has just escaped.
A Map Room
What happens before the map appears determines how it is tied to the articulation of everything seen and heard throughout the film. The Germans are aware of the proximity of Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), the resistance fighter. Marina (Maria Michi), his lady friend, calls him from a telephone at her bedside. A bilingual member of the SS crew answers the phone, first making the mistake of revealing his German identity (“Allo,” he utters, before correcting himself, stating, “Pronto”), a slip that Marina does not quite grasp because she states that she would like to speak to Manfredi. The telephone call gives the Germans further cause to search the apartment. After rummaging a vacant room the soldiers open a door and climb a set of stairs leading to a terrace in daylight. One soldier, seen in medium close-up and from a countertilt that captures the textured wall and chimney of the roof under a grey sky, looks outward and over the camera.6 His gaze, focused on the horizon in the distance, does not seem to discern much of anything. A very fast pano-tilt drops down from the horizon to a maze of tiled roofs and a garden (where three chimneys are visible next to the branches and leaves of a small tree) in the complex of living space that would be below the German’s eyes (shot 27). The camera stops there but yields clues neither to the German nor the viewer. The film cuts back to the German who begins to turn about-face.
In what appears to be a false or clumsy edit, a faux-raccord, the film cuts to a medium view of the man in the middle of his turn. He stops. Standing above two old Italian women to his left and right, and in front of two parallel western towers of a church seen in the first shot of the film, he is flanked by a soldier in the background to the right and, in the foreground to the left, another soldier who also wears the helmet of the Wehrmacht. He utters dryly, in fairly fluent Italian, “Chi abita là?” (Who lives there?). In the space of a second his speech betrays the reason why the former shot held on the living space of the building. The woman to his left responds, “C’è l’ambasciata di Spagna [it’s the Spanish Embassy],” to which, miffed, he responds, turning back, “Ah . . .” (shot 29). The men have no inkling about where they are in the city they occupy. The German soldier looks toward the horizon before the map of the following shot dissolves into view. What the soldier could not see from the rooftop is not exactly what the map shows. The question concerning how to look at the city as a city and as a map is put forward in the minuscule divide between the end of the sequence of the search and the first takes in the Nazi inquisitor’s office.
The map of the city is apportioned into fourteen zones that turn about an unmarked circle at center from whose line of circumference an arrow points upward to the border (north) of the map. The metallic voice, off, of a man who speaks perfect, clear, and pedagogically impeccable Italian, describes the map. The voice itself is doubled by a right hand that holds a lighted cigarette that seems to draw itself over the map as might a teacher’s wand in a classroom. The camera pulls back enough to elicit a comparison between its own frame and that of the map in order to show, entering the frame directly in front of the camera, the back and head of the uniformed officer (epaulettes decorate the shoulders of his tightly tailored jacket). He is next to a less sartorially elegant civilian, seen in three-quarter view, who gazes at the map. The camera pulls back rapidly and decisively from the figure of the hand (wearing a chain bracelet) holding the cigarette and pulling its burning tip over the space that the voice (off) describes and that is reproduced in subtitle: “The city will be divided into fourteen sectors. The Schröder plan, which we have already applied in several European cities, allows us, using the minimum effort, to comb scientifically through large masses of people.”
A first viewing of the shot, especially in the three or four seconds between its emergence into view and the entry of the two men in frame, has the effect of a map that speaks.7 The voice, momentarily that of the map itself, recalls the tradition of power and godlike authority that administrators and engineers had ascribed to maps when they were first used both in arenas of monarchic control that gave way to democratic process. In the tradition of the theatrum mundi the image of a map could virtually speak in the name of the subjects inhabiting the space it represented. As the shot pulls back, the Italian police commissioner comes into view from the left. His aspect is in strong contrast with the svelte officer in frighteningly meticulous and formal control of the Italian idiom. The Italian does not speak. In the shot he is, as the editor of the screenplay describes, “listening deferentially” (Roncoroni 1973, 11). Two views on the map are offered in the same shot. One is from the standpoint of those in power over the urbs and the other from that of life lived by those born into the language and space of the civitas.8
As the camera pulls farther back to show that it is the brutally arrogant Nazi who speaks (with his left arm bent and cocked to thrust his elbow into the rotund Italian’s chest and the thumb of his left hand pushing so hard on his side that it cannot fail to anticipate the presence of a thumbscrew) the police commissioner takes a black handkerchief from his jacket and nervously wipes what his gesture indicates to be a supremely aquiline—and therefore generically “Italian”—nose. The officer brandishes his lit cigarette over the map, literally burning the land as a torturer might put a hot poker to the flesh of the victim he interrogates. In response to the German’s description of the Schröder plan and burning effect of his cigarette the Italian nervously utters “Ah.” The timorous vocative forces recall the perplexed “Ah” of the SS soldier who could not fathom how a Spanish embassy can be situated below the tiled roofs of an Italian cityscape. As hinge between the two sequences, the map unsettles both the city and its representation.
The effect of a disembodied space is immediately amplified on the soundtrack. As the two men look at the map, and as the officer ends his sentence with a tonic accent on minima di fòrza (the map will have maximum effect with a minimum of force), three theatrical taps are sounded. The officer raises his head and puts into profile a look of ruthless contempt. A door opens and an assistant, Krammer (Eduardo Passarelli), enters, passing by a set of files on which are posed an officer’s hat, upside down, bearing the ensign of an eagle.9 The three beats announce that a play will begin. The tapping and abrupt entry of Bergmann’s aide is a repetition of the entrance of the German police force in the first episode of the film (shots 3–4 and 10). After a pan to the right that follows a small truck crossing a piazza and screeching to an abrupt halt, a long shot registers five German soldiers jumping out of their vehicle: a ringleader runs to a doorway. In the far distance he begins to knock loudly. All of a sudden, during the tapping on the door, the film cuts to a view of a balcony, its balustrade to the left and on the right a row of windows covered by wooden shutters. The transition is so abrupt—the noise is equally resonant in both areas—that continuity is strained. The closed shutters, like the map, begin to speak. In the midst of the din, in a second volley of banging, the voice (off) of a radio broadcaster announces in two languages, “London calling Italy, La voce di Londre.” One set of shutters opens, but instead of an embodiment of the “voice of London” there appears an elderly woman, Nannina (Amalia Pelegrini) who leans and out and looks down. Suddenly again, now in a shot from her point of view, the camera cuts to an extreme downward tilt to the truck that displays on its roof what seems to be a red cross (shot 5). It no sooner cuts back to Nannina who looks skyward and wails, “O Jèsu,” before she closes the door. From the outset Rome is “open” but its windows are “closed.” An ambulance carries not medics but the phalanx of Nazi thugs. A theater of fear and confusion is announced. Like the map seen at the beginning of the thirtieth shot, the wall, the shutters, and the doors seem to be seeing and speaking from two simultaneous and opposite points of view. One is that of Italy and the Resistance, and the other the German occupiers who enter and control the space. In both sequences a door, a shutter, or a threshold opens onto spaces of inexorable violence.
Figure 11. Roma, città aperta (1945): Bergmann informs the chief of police of the “Schröder” plan that uses maps to capture members of the Resistance.
Thus when the maps are first seen (in shots 32 and 34) reference is made to a theater of operations that fits a pattern of paradoxically expanding closure. With a telling flick of his fingers—that mixes condescension, sadism, homophilia, and homophobia—Bergmann orders his aide to leave. The film cuts back to record his exit and the strange décor of the bureau, dossiers, and inverted cap (shot 35). The camera returns to the commissioner and the inquisitor in front of their maps before it begins a quick pan that follows Bergmann as he passes by a third map, now of the world (the right edge cuts down through the middle of Africa), on the wall adjacent to where the two views of Rome and its environs had just been seen. Bergmann briskly walks to his desk, seen in three-quarter view, on which is posed a bright reading lamp. The three maps infer that a spatial progression is being registered in the career of the panoramic that begins with a small-scale view of Rome and passes by the world at large.
The office has the look of a map room or even of a perversely constructed counterpart to the tradition of mural maps, inaugurated in Renaissance Italy, that include the nearby Galleria delle Carte Geografiche in the Vatican.10 If in the sequence passing reference is made to the model of the Italian studiolo, Bergmann’s brisk promenade from the wall map to the desk follows to a certain degree the plan of the gallery in the Vatican, in which the person who walks through the space takes part in a spatial narrative and a process of illumination. He rehearses the principles of the “spatial narrative,” a term coined by Michel de Certeau, in which maps that describe the plan or layout of an inhabited place are contrasted to tours, or existential itineraries that turn the mapped places into living spaces.11 But Bergmann’s tour is anything but existential. Simulated, it is an artificial form of experience. His words reiterate those of the designers of atlases, for whom the viewer looking at the images or turning the pages of the atlas would never need to travel outside of the simulated space of the maps and their texts.12 The Italian commissioner marvels like a child over Bergmann’s ingenuity in locating the resistance fighter’s whereabouts from shards of photographic evidence. Bergmann proudly replies that he is a cartographic traveler. He has met Manfredi “right here, on this desk [questo tavolo]. Every afternoon I take a long walks through the streets of Rome, but without stepping out of my office” (shot 43). Seen in medium close-up at his desk, fondling the pictures and suggesting that they need to be coordinated with the maps—inasmuch as the image of Manfredi and Marina was taken in front the Spanish steps, at whose piazza the film begins—Bergmann adds that he is “extremely fond of this type of photograph, which takes people almost by surprise” (shot 43). In this inverted world it is the person who is betrayed or “taken” by the picture, and not the other way around.
The map room is an antechamber placed between a torture chamber and an officers’ club. The studiolo, that had ideally been designed to “mirror the sum of wisdom attained by humankind” (Schulz 1987, 99), is transformed into an intermediary zone. As of this sequence (shots 30–48) the camera attends to action around the desk and the doorways that lead to and from the salon to the torture chamber. Rife with allegorical innuendo, the spatial component plots a neo-Freudian psychopathology of the Nazi world, in which an insufferable “superego” inhabits the officers’ club furnished with a piano, heavy sculpture, and ornately framed paintings while the “id,” its loathsome opposite, lives in a room filled with forceps, torches, and thumbscrews. Between them, in the antechamber containing the maps, would be the “ego” that owes its shifting and unstable character to the proximities of refinement and sadism.
Italy Wallpapered: A Map in an Apartment
A map identical to that of the Roman region on the wall in front of Bergmann’s desk appears in Pina’s apartment in the sequence leading to Manfredi’s meeting with Don Pietro. The narrative builds on the spatial and cartographic allegory seen several minutes earlier. Pina has just returned from the local bakery where she has purchased some bread and generously given several loaves to a sacristan. Pregnant, she trundles upstairs to Francesco’s apartment, in front of which she encounters Manfredi and gladly learns that he does not belong to the secret police. She summons her son, Marcello, who is playing with one-legged Romoletto, by the rooftop, where the boys are up to no good. She enters Francesco’s apartment. In a strange spatial articulation the camera pans right to follow her movement (from left to right) into a crowded room where, on the wall to the left, appears the corner of a map behind a pendant lampshade.
Pina says that Don Pietro will soon return and that she and other women had laid siege to a local bakery. Manfredi speaks, voice-off, as if he were an officer interrogating her about the women who took part in the raid. Shrugging her shoulders, she turns about to avow that some of the women are committed to a good cause: the camera cuts, in the middle of her sentence, to a brief but startling view of Manfredi (shot 85). Isolated, in medium close-up, he stands in front of a closed window that opens onto a cloudy sky through a gridded barrier that had been applied to protect home dwellers from being hit by shattering glass in the event of explosions. A configuration of Xs is enhanced by a shadow that is cast on the jamb just to the left of Manfredi’s right temple. By virtue of the lines radiating from his temple, as if his portrait were imitating an icon of the pantocrator or a divine inquisitor, his stare is relentless and penetrating. In the preceding shot nothing signals the presence of the window or announces the pose he now takes.
The image—sudden, radiant, unsettling, and ominous—complements two shots that follow in the space of two seconds where Manfredi suddenly appears, now in another area of the room, in front of the map of Rome and its vicinity. Between the one take and the other, in a countershot (in medium close-up) Pina looks directly at the camera (and thus Manfredi), finishing the sentence she had begun, in which she tells him that most of the women in the raid merely wished to steal as many loaves as they could, and that someone stole a pair of shoes and a scale, which prompts Laura (Carla Revere), who later will be revealed to be Pina’s “bad” sister, to add, voice-off, “I’d like to know who stole . . .” (shot 86). Suddenly, again without rhyme or reason, Manfredi stands in front of the map and turns left to look in the direction of the origin of the other voice. The space of the apartment is shown flattened by what is given to be a diametrical opposition of the window to the map.
It cannot be said that a “good” map is set in counterpoint to its “bad” companion, just as the virtuous Pina is not quite the opposite of her decadent (in Pina’s words, “stupid”) sister, Laura. The antithesis is suggested in order to be called in question. A relation of adjacency replaces one of opposition, thus complicating the values that would be assigned both to the maps and the personages. The editing of the rest of the sequence makes this clear: in a plan-séquence of fairly long duration (shot 97, almost 38 seconds), in a dialogue given to the geography of Marina’s early years, after Pina explains that Marina was the daughter of a concierge in the Via Tiburtina, where she and Laura were raised by their father who had owned a tinsmith’s shop, the film cuts to Manfredi in profile in medium close-up, in front of the map. Behind his back the pendant lampshade, which seems to be a displaced tabernacle or baldachin, stands in front of its left side. The viewer is invited to look for the Via Tiburtina on a map where it cannot be found.13
Manfredi confesses that he is no longer “seeing” Marina, and that their relationship has gone on for too long. Pina exits toward the camera, leaving Manfredi to look down, not without regret or melancholy, to light a cigarette as he recalls, in momentary soliloquy, the places where he had known her. The map now “speaks” with nostalgia. A narrative worthy of flashbacks in the style of Casablanca shines through his words. He had just come to Rome, he met her at a restaurant near the Piazza di Spagna, and after the air-raid siren had sounded, the couple hunkered down at the restaurant when others ran for their lives. The map behind Manfredi becomes a stark contrast to the affective spaces he wrings out of the past when he mentions the Piazza di Spagna. His movement makes visible the map, that now would be a Carte du Tendre, which stands between him and Pina both as a document and a piece of wallpaper. Manfredi (at the end of shot 97) turns away from the window and looks right, toward Pina (off frame), who confesses that a woman can change when she is in love. The shot itself changes. Pina is seen for an instant, frontally, in the next shot, her last word, innamorata, in lip-synch. The film suddenly cuts to Manfredi who walks toward her, across the room, and while in front of the map asks her of the authenticity of her love. In moving toward her, his cigarette, dangling from his mouth, points at places on the map. Uncannily the cigarette that Bergmann had sadistically applied to the city-view (shot 14) now seems to burn a path over the topography around the Tiber to the north of Rome. Manfredi asks her if it is true that she and Francesco will be married. Rubbing her hands on her belly as Manfredi puts the cup of coffee to his lips, she gladly affirms that she is pregnant by her friend and will soon be married. Manfredi looks across the space occupied by the map to Pina’s belly. The composition of the woman and the map suggests that from the partial view a new body—a child and a nation—might be born.
Figure 12. Roma, città aperta: Manfredi, under a lampshade, speaks with Pina in her apartment. The regional map is identical to one of the maps in the interrogation chamber in the previous illustration.
In sum, the map in Francesco’s apartment becomes an allegorical point of reference in the geography of Roma, città aperta. Manfredi and the map of Italy are abandoned and no sooner retrieved. In the long take the protagonists virtually “become the map,” not only because they hide in closed rooms that bear the promise of a greater geography, but also because in the same space the men have planned a raid at the Tiburtina Bridge (not shown on the map) at six o’clock in the evening (as elaborated in shot 136).14 But the hero is also “mapped” when he wonders, facing Francesco over the bowl of soup, how the Germans ever “found me out.” The answer had been seen in the use, first, made of smaller-scale projections and then in the double-dealings with Marina, who put on the edge of a mirror a photographic memento of herself and Manfredi standing together on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna (shot 156).
A Theater of Torture
From this point the cartographic decoration in the domestic space disappears. Much of what follows takes place in Bergmann’s antechamber, the salon, and the torture room. In the famously excruciating sequences (shots 466–624, roughly of a duration of eighteen minutes) that articulate the interrogation of Manfredi, and then his torture and murder in view of Don Pietro (and, later, Ingrid, Hartmann, and Marina) the film exposes a theory and a practice of torture. It is a theater of cruelty that includes the dramatis personae, the principal players in the film, along with their implicit counterparts, the spectators in the movie theater. The two sequences are riddled with maps that seem familiar but that also emerge from nowhere. For the first time the camera aims from a point to the front and left of Bergmann’s desk toward a corner where his assistant Krammer sits by a typewriter. To his left, on the wall to the left of the doorway opening onto the torture chamber, is a fifth wall map, now a narrow view of Italy and Europe that is behind a bookcase on which sit four files (shot 470). The map becomes a sighting point and a visual legend to the torture. After a match cut from Bergmann to Manfredi that cues the former lighting a cigarette he gives to the latter, the camera pulls back to show Manfredi and Krammer walking toward the camera that, we soon discover, is at the threshold of the torture chamber. The Mercator projection is in the background (shot 477), directly behind Manfredi’s head.
After Bergmann subpoenas Don Pietro to appear before him a volley of shots places the inquisitor in front of the wall map between Krammer’s desk and the doorway that opens onto the torture chamber.15 Bergmann stands in medium close-up while the map constitutes a flat and unremitting background behind him. But it is adjacent to the deeper and terrible field of view of the torture just to the right. As in the cinematography of Renoir, the decoration emphasizes a contrast of depth and flatness and of two forms of abstraction, one of the utter invisibility of pain and the other of a fake representation—seen from the standpoint of God—of the world.16 The camera correlates, too, the power Bergmann exercises with the map by following him as he impatiently fixes himself in front of it (shot 509), at the very moment, ironically, when Pietro (voice-off) drones, “the paths of the Lord are infinite.” In front of the map Bergmann impels his interlocutor to save his friend from pain that he cannot—voice-off—“imagine,” just as the image-track focuses on the blind assurance printed on Don Pietro’s face (shot 512).
The cartography prompts a viewer to wonder how the scene can be seen. The visibility of torture, itself a ritual that requires the presence of a spectator, is implicitly summoned by the way the map is placed in relation to Bergmann and the scene itself. A final confirmation of the visual power of the map is given in an uncanny moment when, exasperated by Manfredi’s stubborn refusal to yield secrets, Bergmann makes a final plea (shots 557, 559, 561) to his victim. Bergmann’s assistants revive Manfredi with an injection. In close-up, and in low-key lighting, Bergmann watches in the torture room that displays on the wall behind him (and later behind Don Pietro), in chiaroscuro, a strange shadow that seems to be “of a large torture instrument, like a wine press.”17 Whatever shadow it casts—of a printing press, a thumbscrew, a cruciform shape—it suddenly gives way to the image of another (possibly a sixth) wall map in the place where it ought to appear in the rhetoric of shot-and-countershot of Bergmann and Manfredi (shot 562). The film jump-cuts to a more pronounced close-up, now in less chiaroscuro, of Bergmann who is in front of a portion of the wall map of the Roman region that had been seen in both the antechamber and Francesco’s apartment. Its upperright portion is in shadow as Bergmann accuses Manfredi of being a Communist allied with reactionary political parties. It is logically the very space where the strange and powerfully abstract shape had been just four seconds ago. And suddenly again, in the same sequence (shot 565), the camera returns to the view of Bergmann in front of the abstraction. Even if this sequence was cobbled together from disparate fragments of film the relation between the uncanny power of an abstract symbol and a map is made glaringly clear.18
Wiped Surfaces
The lapse in continuity that confuses a wall map with a projection convoking myriad fantasies of torture would be an infelicitous mistake were it not repeated in other ways in the creases, gaps, and transitions in the film. Here the cartography opens onto a perspective where “realism,” dissimulation, and power are equated to be of a measure reaching far beyond the context of Italy in 1945. In the early 1970s, upon the publication of the screenplays of his war trilogy, Rossellini noted that contemporary cinema treated only three or four subjects, and that in the instance of the misguided war in Vietnam (and it could be added, today, in the events we witness in the Middle East) war was being seen through a filter of “Freud, sex, [and] violence.” No vision of the phenomenon was available for reason of “a paucity of cinematic themes,” of “empty virtuosity, schematization, and oversimplification” of anguishing situations.19 No treatment of visible and discursive formations—to borrow the idiolect of Michel Foucault—of war was possible, perhaps because images could not testify to the phenomenon itself. The latter had to be approached, he suggested, through a greater degree of abstraction.
The abstraction is seen in the ways that the maps belong now to an Italian cause and then to the power and torture led by the coalition of Nazis and Fascists. Rossellini’s maps are signs of visibility that open, penetrate, and create spaces while at the same time they are exasperatingly occlusive, without clear symbolic or allegorical charge. For the sake of closer analysis it can be argued that they are to the field of the image in Roma, città aperta what a classical transitional device, the wipe, is to the narrative of the film. By 1945 the wipe had become something of an anachronism. Its role in Movietone News was parodied in the opening sequence of Citizen Kane (1941), in which it went in all four directions (left, right, up, and down) when the camera followed conveyer belts of newspapers delivering their pulp to the four corners of the frame. Surely by the end of the Second World War the wipe would have been a reminder of the effects of propaganda in newsreels taken before the filming of the concentration camps.20
It is often said that Rossellini’s cinema owes much of its force to straight cuts of uncompromising violence and even discontinuity. The wipe appears in the film fifteen times, most often with deftness that often makes it either invisible or accords it a premium of action and movement.21 The itineraries of characters are hastened when the wipe follows the direction of their steps and brings them to their destination. In accord with the narrative and spatial logic of the screenplay the wipe is present where people are on the move, in the streets and along the avenues of Rome, but not where they are incarcerated, interrogated, and tortured. Quite often straight cuts across doorways, especially those that separate the officers’ salon from the “studiolo” and the latter from the torture room have a wipe-effect that speedily taxies the viewer from one space to another. Yet from its first instance the wipe is taken almost literally, as a progressive effacement of one plane of action adjacent to the inscription of another. When the first wipe (between shots 6 and 7) follows Nannina closing the shutter of her window from left to right the movement draws attention to the closing of slatted apertures. When brought forward by the action of the wipe the shutters, icons of the cinematic mechanism, suggest that when the film opens, it also closes. When the line of divide between the sixth and seventh shot reaches the middle of the frame, a strange temporality is given: the space that gives way to another in chronological time is situated to the right and not to the left. What has yet to take place in the trajectory of the shot ought to follow the way an alphabetic sentence is read. What is coming is felt as “past” because it is on the left. In these shots one surface of panels with shutters gives way to a wall and, suddenly, to a terrace and a door from which Manfredi emerges and runs off in the direction of the cityscape beneath the sky in the background. The wipe causes the film to close, open, close, and open itself again. The wipe gives a literal sense to the shutters, the terrace door, and the oscuro, if not the chiaroscuro, of apprehension and escape, and of simultaneous closure and aperture. It leads from a viewpoint on the Piazza di Spagna to that of the partial horizon of Rome.
The wipe is used both strategically and tactically. It draws the texture of editing into the drama and serves as a hinge or a line dividing viewpoints and places. The cartographic effect of the wipe—or what the maps do to draw attention to its virtue—is especially made manifest in two places. In the first, between shots 156 and 157, Ingrid has just entered Marina’s dressing room in the cabaret where she works with Laura. A brazen vampire or a raven with a widow’s peak, Ingrid has emerged from behind the door Laura opened upon hearing a gentle knocking in the thick of the music of the cabaret. The camera follows her in medium close-up as she moves, in profile, to Marina’s mirror, on which is placed a photo of the actress standing with Manfredi in front of the Piazza di Spagna. Having turned to both sides to display the left and right sides of her face in profile, Ingrid moves toward the image and inspects it as might the spectator the film itself. But what she sees is—or is not—what we see: she looks at the picture but becomes doubled, turned into a split-representation of herself that she might behold at the same time she gazes upon the photograph. A symbolic magic seems to result from the image that suddenly turns the narrative into a historical and anthropological fact.22
Figure 13. Roma, città aperta: Ingrid studies a photograph of Marina and Manfredi at the Piazza di Spagna. In the wipe the mirror on the left reveals the books (on a desk) that figure in a plan to attack the German occupants. Ingrid sees both the photograph and the space revealed by the wipe.
The shot becomes the ground of a wipe before the wipe begins to move from left to right. When it splits the field of the image into two equal parts Ingrid suddenly gazes both at the picture of Marina and Manfredi and at three books in front of a stove that appear in three-quarter view before the shot gives way to a scene of Agostino (Nando Bruno) tending to the fire. For an instant Ingrid is omnivoyant. She sees her own reflection and the hideaway where Pina will appear. She sees and reads in the same gaze. All of a sudden the wipe confirms— doubles—the doubling of the shot and suggests a coextension of opposing visual planes and places. It reproduces much of the uncanny effect seen in the map of Rome and its regions decorating two antithetical spaces.23 In its liminal and fugacious passage the wipe underscores how the film is producing a spatial unconscious in which opposing forces are both melded and kept at bay.
In the second instance, in the gap between shots 384 and 385, the partisans of two opposing ideologies, genders, and affective spaces gaze upon each other. The Gestapo on their heels after Pina’s murder, Francesco and Manfredi take refuge in Marina’s apartment to bide time before they can accede to the sanctuary of a monastery. The two men occupy the living room while Marina and Laura undress together in the bedroom. Fraught with grief, Francesco needs aspirin (the counterpart to Marina’s cocaine) to assuage the pain of a splitting headache. Seen in profile, rolling a cigarette while Francesco lies on a couch to the left, Manfredi plots their future after the disasters and triumphs of the day. Marina, in the background behind an illuminated lampshade placed between the two men in the middle ground, furtively opens the door, eavesdrops, and closes it before she exits. She returns to the men’s room with the aspirin and bids good night to them while Manfredi, self-contained (even though he cannot find a match to light his cigarette), does not turn around to acknowledge her words. He remains seated, looking down while Francesco, supine on the couch, remains in his field of view.
Suddenly the film wipes to the right, effacing Francesco and replacing him with a supine Laura, in almost the same pose, in Marina’s bedroom. Between the two rooms is the lamp that could belong to either. For an instant Manfredi, eyes shut, seems omnivoyant in what he might be seeing on the inner surface of his eyelids. Through the spectator he sees the women who are in their space while he stays in the room he occupies with Francesco. An uncanny violence is contained in the two coextensive surfaces that are seen to be at once vigilant and somnolent, active and passive, male and female, resistant and compliant. As the shot is completed, Marina sits where the illuminated lampshade disappears. She sits in front of the bed that has the radiant design of a peacock tail (or an anticipation of the NBC logo) and then is adjacent to a shaded lamp on a dressing table next to an ashtray and a telephone. Manfredi’s petrifying aspect gives way to its opposite. Each side is structured by way of its decorative surface of signs that turn the depth and volume of the rooms into affectively charged surfaces. Such, too, is the condition the maps have embodied elsewhere in the film.
This chapter began with reflections on cartographic consciousness as a pertinent trait of the auteur. Shared by Renoir and Rossellini, it is made manifest in the allusive but decisive presence of maps that speak in and through the narrative images of their features. The chapter began, too, with Jacques Rancière’s reading of the suspension and then the collapse of images of meaning in Rossellini’s cinema from the neorealistic phase to postwar films that include Voyage to Italy. For Rancière a determining trait in the director’s signature is found in the simultaneously active and passive virtues of the mise-en-scène, its shooting, and the editing. The camera submits to the director’s active will, but it also elicits a passive and quasi-conscious viewing of what can be seen and read in and about the frame. After a close study of the maps it might be said that the cartographic impulse in Roma, città aperta also belongs to both the active and passive registers of the film. It binds the opening, which begins with a topographic view of the city at the Piazza di Spagna in twilight, to the end, where a slow pan follows the children and future of Rome who leave the scene of Pietro’s sacrifice at the rifle range at Fort Bravetta. They descend to the Rome that, for a first and only time, is seen as an “open” city under a daylit horizon. Surely the theater of cruelty made visible in the film has found analogues in Abu Ghraib and other places. The relation, not central to the cartographic mechanisms, is nonetheless worthy of reflection.
Figure 14. Roma, città aperta: Manfredi, in vigil, looks at Marina’s sister, in another room, in the space of the wipe that moves between the living room (where the men are in hiding) and the bedroom (where the women sleep comfortably).