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Product DescriptionRoberto Rossellini is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. And it was with his trilogy of films made during and after World War II — Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Ground Zero — that he left his first transformative mark on cinema. With their stripped-down aesthetic, largely nonprofessional casts, and unorthodox approaches to storytelling, these intensely emotional works were international sensations and effectively launched the neorealist movement. Shot in battle-ravaged Italy and Germany, these three films are some of our most lasting, humane documents of devastated postwar Europe, containing universal images that encompass both tragedy and hope.Rome Open City This was Roberto Rossellini’s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with a bit more melodramatic flair than the other films that would form this trilogy and starring well-known actors — Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member — Rome Open City (Roma città aperta) is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work was an international sensation, garnering awards around the globe and leaving the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake. Paisan Roberto Rossellini’s follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan (Paisà), which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley. With its documentary-like visuals and its intermingled cast of actors and nonprofessionals, Italians and their American liberators, this look at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances is equal parts charming sentiment and vivid reality. A long-missing treasure of Italian cinema, Paisan is available here for the first time in its full original release version. Germany Year Zero The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin shown through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with a sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black-market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher. Germany Year Zero (Deutschland im Jahre Null) is a daring, gut-wrenching look at the consequences of fascism, for society and the individual. The Allies had barely driven the Nazis out of Rome when Roberto Rosselini went to work on Open City, considered by most to be his greatest work. Shot on bits and short ends of scavenged film, this film helped define Italian neorealism. Audiences were convinced that the actors were all amateurs (they weren't) and the whole film was improvised (it wasn't; the three screenwriters included Federico Fellini). With its semi documentary camera style and use of actual locations, the film does feel very real. Of course, so does the opening half-hour of Saving Private Ryan, and like that film Open City is at its heart a classic war yarn any Hollywood studio would feel at home with. The story involves members of the Italian underground trying to smuggle badly needed cash out of Nazi-occupied Rome to partisan fighters in the mountains, while the Nazis are hunting down one of the underground, a notorious freedom fighter and seditionist. Anna Magnani (an actor well established in her own country who became an international star with this film) is often singled out for her portrayal as the pregnant, unwed woman who gets caught up in the action on her wedding day, but the entire cast is topnotch. The sparse subtitles are both a blessing and a curse--there is less to read, which allows the viewer to concentrate on the visuals, but there are times when non-Italian-speakers will feel like they're missing out on some juicy dialogue. --Geof Miller Most Recent Customer ReviewsDate : 2010-03-12 Summary : WW2 Excellent ! A perfect collection of the war that I was in. Robertto Rossellini captured the human side of the WAR. A must have collection. Date : 2010-02-04 Summary : Is It Too Early to Nominate A Best DVD Set of the Year? Wow, a week after this has been released there's still no reviews. I'd like to think that's because this set is jammed with such great content--movies and extras--that even the early adopters are still absorbing it. It seems that Criterion thought long and hard about release #500. And it shows. These are three extraordinary movies. They're all over 60 years old, but they still pack an emotional and cinematic wallop. "Open City" is the most familiar and revered title here. It has lost little of it's power or immediacy. Maybe the melodrama is a bit more obvious to our jaded 21st century sensibilities, but that doesn't mean you won't get caught up in the story. Short, plump Aldo Fabrizi plays one of the least unlikely resistance heroes imaginable, and Anna Magnani is nothing short of iconic. This may not be the birth of Italian Neo-realism, but it's certainly a precocious infancy. "Paisan," here in its first US DVD release, was Rossellini's follow-up to "Open City." It seems to beg the question, how imperfect can a movie be and still be great? The acting is uneven to say the least (arguably the amateurs are more convincing that the professionals), not all of the six short story-like episodes are equally compelling, and most of them end with an unsatisfying abruptness. But on some very basic level, these imperfections just don't matter. In one of the special features, Martin Scorcese makes a very telling distinction between "realism" and "authenticity" and this film never feels less than authentic, often chillingly so. "Germany Year Zero" is the most problematic of the films, if only because it's so heartbreaking, few people will want to sit through it more than once. It's nonetheless an amazng feat of sympathetic imagination, as Rossellini brings neo-realism to the ravaged streets of post-war Berlin. It's almost as if he's apologizing for depicting the Germans in "Open City" as so single-mindedly villianous. I've blathered on and on yet I've barely scratched the surface. Virtually all the extra features are worthwhile, especially Adriano Apra's comments on each film. Picture quality, though imperfect, is far superior to the previous releases of "Open City" and "Germany Year Zero." Sadly, only "Open City" includes a commentary track, but more so than a lot of great movies, these films speak for themselves. An essential purchase for film buffs.   |