From “The Long Night of ’43” to “Rome Open City” the great films that celebrated the Liberation

From masterpieces that have marked the history of cinema to courageous works that reinterpret the most dramatic pages of our past: Rossellini, Bertolucci, Scola, Taviani and more, to celebrate Liberation Day in 25 films, listed below in chronological order. “Roma, open city” by Roberto Rossellini (1945) It does not disregard: the film-symbol of a nation, the emblem of neorealism, a milestone of cinema of all time, filmed a few months after the liberation of Rome and with the war still course. At the origin of the character of Aldo Fabrizi, the figure of don Giuseppe Morosini, killed by the Nazis in 1944. In the scream of Anna Magnani, the pain of a people. “The sun rises again” by Aldo Vergano (1946) Financed by the National Partisans Association of Italy and written, among others, by Guido Aristarco, Giuseppe De Santis and Carlo Lizzani (also actors, with Gillo Pontecorvo), can be considered the ”official film” of the CLN: between melodrama and political struggle, from 8 September 1943 to the insurrection in Milan, it recounts the partisan resistance with reason and feeling. “Estate violenta” by Valerio Zurlini (1959) A rebel Mélo, poignant to the point of being tearing, which places a scandalous love story (a mature war widow and a bored bourgeois scion) between the fall of fascism and the armistice: « The war is over and we have lost it: what matters is to get out of it alive». Is there time to love each other under bombs, waiting for peace? Maybe not.

“General Della Rovere” by Roberto Rossellini (1959) One of the first films with which Italian cinema returns to talk about war events and anti-fascist resistance (taboo topics in the post-war period) with a Vittorio De Sica who, quintessentially Italian, as a scoundrel like many and redeems himself by discovering himself as a hero: another Italy is possible. Leone d’Oro ex-aequo with The Great War, against military rhetoric: the right argued hard. “Il hunchback” by Carlo Lizzani (1960) From the true story of Giuseppe Albano, a partisan of Quarticciolo, an interesting combination of neo-realist spirit and spectacular forms: a story that is also romantic (well done by the forgotten Anna Maria Ferrero) and naturally destined to end badly , against the popular backdrop of the Roman suburbs besieged by the Nazis (Pier Paolo Pasolini is also in the cast). “The long night of ’43” by Florestano Vancini (1960) From the story by Giorgio Bassani, a dazzling first work that has the courage to face the daily cruelty of provincial fascism. With a contemporary ending, in the months of the Tambroni government, which comes to terms with the submerged (the victims of the regime and of the war) and the saved (but also the transformists), in the memory of those who fought for peace. “A difficult life” by Dino Risi (1961) The masterpiece of the director, the protagonist (Alberto Sordi) and the screenwriter (Rodolfo Sonego, who put a lot of himself): the novel of a nation in the making, the epic story of a partisan betrayed by a peace that is not as imagined, the story of the left disappointed by the new course. Full of unforgettable sequences. Palmiro Togliatti loved him very much. “Pigeon Shooting” by Giuliano Montaldo (1961) While Italian cinema was beginning to tell the story of the Resistance, Montaldo began “on the wrong side”: from the novel by Giose Rimanelli, a gloomy coming of age about those who sought the “beautiful death” ” in Salò. The public ignored him, the critics were cold: yet it took a certain courage to speak of the Italians, violent, cowardly but also disenchanted, who made that choice. “The Four Days of Naples” by Nanni Loy (1962) The most beautiful and important of the director’s films: an extraordinary popular tragedy that brings into play the drama and Brechtian elements, the historical chronicle and the pathos of the mother scenes. Recited anonymously in homage to the population, dedicated to Gennarino Capuozzo, the child who died during the insurrection that liberated the city.

“The girl from Bube” by Luigi Comencini (1963) From the novel by Carlo Cassola, the love story between a girl (Claudia Cardinale, for the first time not dubbed) and a partisan (George Chakiris, Oscar for a few months). On her side, against the fury and extremism of post-Liberation Italy, and always profoundly anti-fascist in her gaze and passion. “The Terrorist” by Gianfranco De Bosio (1963) Made by the cooperative of Ermanno Olmi and Tullio Kezich, a gloomy first work that recalls the most dramatic days of the Venetian Resistance. Today we would call it indie, at the time an example of political and resistance cinema, in balance between long discussions and moments of tension, which struck for its ideological rigor and narrative dryness. “Woman in the Resistance” by Liliana Cavani (1965) Documentary made by RAI twenty years after April 25, directed by the director before her feature film debut (Francesco of Assisi), is a journalistic investigation which has the merit of give voice to runners, partisans, political leaders who played a decisive role in the struggle for liberation. Witness and excite, celebrate and move.

“The Seven Cervi Brothers” by Gianni Puccini (1968) It is true, the theme dominates everything, moreover the massacre of Agostino, Aldo, Antenore, Ettore, Ferdinando, Gelindo and Ovidio, peasants from the Reggio area, Catholics and anti-fascists, is printed in the popular imagination (even today their house is a sacred place of the April 25th celebrations). And the film, perhaps, is a little too shy and scholastic, but the testimony is worth it, and how. “Giovinezza, giovinezza” by Franco Rossi (1969) Our Jules and Jim, one of the most neglected and secret masterpieces of Italian cinema: between evocations of Antonioni and omens of De Sica’s Finzi Contini, from the province under the regime to the escape for the freedom, a harrowing bildungsroman on anti-fascism as a path to maturity and on the consequences of war in private lives.

“We loved each other so much” by Ettore Scola (1974) One of the masterpieces of all Italian cinema, a monument that improves over time. Story of a short friendship that is worth a lifetime (three partisans who know each other in the mountains: “Peace divided us”), an allegory of the left at the height of love (Stefania Sandrelli epitome of Italy), a compendium of a season that disappears with the work of a madonnaro. “The last day of school before the Christmas holidays” by Gian Vittorio Baldi (1975) Independent, border and battle cinema (direct shooting, dirty photography), buried by time: three republicans take the passengers of a bus hostage and cruelly kill them by accusing them of treason. Brazenly metaphorical, painful with all its fragility, powerful despite the didactic system. “Free, my love!” by Mauro Bolognini (1975) A ”cursed” opera (filmed in 1973, opposed by censorship and released two years later) yet one of the director’s most heartfelt, empathetic and successful. Dominated by the best Cardinal ever, portrait of an irreducible anarchist, who exceeds twenty years, helps the Resistance, celebrates April 25th but can’t stand the backlash of the worst past.

“L’Agnese goes to die” by Giuliano Montaldo (1976) From the novel by Renata Viganò, a compendium of the Resistance that focuses on a more unique than rare character, of an almost mythological dimension (maternal and strong-willed, Ingrid Thulin in great form) : it is she who characterizes the story, to restore something that belongs to the ancestral values ​​of a land and to the civil passion of a season. “Novecento” by Bernardo Bertolucci (1976) The most epic of our films, the most extreme of classics, the most political of melodramas: not a fable on united Italy but a profoundly regional novel, a sumptuous saga that brings together communism and Hollywood: from Verdi’s death to Liberation, with red flags announcing a new world (which remains a broken promise).

“The night of San Lorenzo” by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (1982) Perhaps the brothers’ film most loved by the public. At the center is the San Miniato massacre of 1944, attributed to the Nazi-fascists and instead accidentally caused by the Americans. But what matters is the gaze of the poor people, the admirable synthesis between emphasis and memory, intimacy and realism, chorus and solitude, epic rethinking and poignant lyricism. “Nights and mists” by Marco Tullio Giordana (1984) From the novel by Carlo Castellaneta, a screenplay of cinematic quality in Milan torn apart by the civil war. Decadent to the point of being ghostly, lowered into the abyss at times hallucinated rather than hallucinating, it stages April 25 on the side of the defeated: Umberto Orsini masterful in giving life to the fascist republican voted to die. “The Little Masters” by Daniele Luchetti (1999) Not the director’s best, Luigi Meneghello’s novel translates into the painful and melancholic account of an experience destined to turn life upside down: the partisan choice of a small group of university students from the Party of Action that runs into reprisals, roundups, shootings, humiliations, sufferings. “The man who will come” by Giorgio Rights (2010) The massacre of Marzabotto (i.e. the massacre of Monte Sole, a roundup that led to the death of about 1830 people) returned without rhetoric or sentimentality in a rigorous, civil, severe drama , touching of Olmean matrix: moral purity, the modesty of pain, evil as an abstract corruption of man, the miracle of life despite death.

“A private matter” by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (2019) Time was a gentleman with Beppe Fenoglio, the one who best of all told the Resistance, reworking his own experience through a shattered and polyphonic language. From the partisan novel par excellence, waiting for the spring of beauty, a ghostly coming and going between past and present wrapped in fog, crossed by blood. “Bella ciao – For freedom” by Giulia Japanese (2021) Precious and surprising documentary, which goes to the roots of a song with a mysterious genesis, and which at a certain point became the anthem of the partisans, reinventing itself in recent times as a song of struggle of the new generations from all over the world (also thanks to La casa di carta).