A wartime bread-riot at a Roman bakery: Pina(Anna Magnani) stoops to pick up a loaf. "You?" a man asks."Should I starve?" she asks. Then she gives him the bread...heshouldn't starve either. The raw courage, and raw terror, of individualscaught up in the implicit violence of everyday life under a facisttyranny is made explicit in Open City, a film as moving and agonizingtoday as it was forty-five years ago. Magnani's portrait of a humanbeing-proud, plebian, sardonic, and very beautiful-somehow struck achord around the world; it was as if a human being had never beencaptured on film before. Pina is the pregnant lover of a resistanceworker, Francesco; they take in another resistance leader, Manfredi, whois wanted by the Gestapo. The priest who is to marry Pina and Francesco"tomorrow," Father Don Pietro, runs errands for theunderground. Tomorrow never comes. In the film that put neorealism onthe map, Rossellini seems to have removed the "screen" fromthe cinema-the screen that comes between us and experience-leaving uswith a kind of immediacy unknown in the fiction film. In this kind offilmmaking, our heroes are not spared-they don't even get close-ups fortheir death scenes. The sequences in Pina and Francesco's apartmentblock have the quicksilver elegance of their poverty; and in AldoFabrizi's Don Pietro, and the little boys who whistle a resistance songto comfort him as he awaits a firing squad, this sad film has aredemptive power that is overwhelming. Note: Ourprint, in Italian with English subtitles, lacks subtitles for certainportions of German dialogue spoken between the Nazis portrayed in thefilm's second half. A transcription of this dialogue will be handed outat the screening.