This is an excellent audiovisual essay (although I note all its references are to the visual – visual essay, optical unconscious, etc – and never to the audio dimension of cinema, alas!), arguing both a specific analytical case in relation to Rossellini’s Rome Open City, and a general championing of ‘videography’ as a vibrant form of ‘liquid theorising’.
 
The montage of the piece is crisp and suggestive, and the multi-screen technique is well used to display the evidence (a little in the style of the video-essay-artist Kogonada). Although the accompanying statement asserts that the images are left to ‘speak for themselves’, this is not really so: the voice-over text is still quite dominant as a ‘guide track’ for our understanding and interpretation of the images. All the same, the voice-over is well scripted and nicely delivered, and enters into a good back-and-forth with the video montage. The point is well made and well demonstrated that videographic analysis can bring us fresh perspectives on ‘canonical’ films (like Rome Open City) that seem to have been exhaustively analysed in print. The choice of the door motif is excellent for this work of demonstration. I also appreciated the architectural analysis of the three-room layout, complete with the floor-plan transformed into a helpful video ‘grid’. And the little ‘grabs’ of critical quotations, from Agee to the present, are well deployed on screen.
 
My only comment of critique or disagreement with this essay relates to a single statement of the voice-over text, to the effect that the doors in Rome Open City ‘do not have an aesthetic function, but are a vector of meaning’. For me, this draws too sharp a distinction between aesthetics and meaning-making – are not the two always (or, at least, often) fused? Aesthetics is not more ‘decoration’, after all – and certainly not in the many film history examples lined up in the video. I do appreciate that, in relation to Rossellini’s film, a particular point (of a Benjaminian ‘materialist’ sort) is being made: that aesthetics = cultural treasures, which is a horrible, accumulated, Nazi legacy as shown by Rossellini in the movie. However, in that voice-over sentence I have just quoted, the commentary seems to be sliding from a specific analytical point (about this film) to a general, and to my mind misguided, evaluative comment on aesthetics tout court. Nonetheless: although one can disagree with the sentence and its stated sentiment (vigorously!), it is not something that needs to be revised in the video. It can stand on its own feet and invite a robust response, which is all to the good.

Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece, Rome Open City, has a fragmentary and somehow elusive nature, a nature that makes this film, thus, always worthy of further investigations.

As Viano and Tyne recall in the first part of the video essay Frames of Minds, previous readings and analyses of the film have especially addressed two different, even opposite aspects of the work: its urge of giving a passionate, plausible account of a tragic historical context, but also its not very cohesive structure, its debts with Fascist cinema and, more generally, with more conventional narratives, and the stereotypical depiction of its characters. The compelling video of Tyne and Viano, instead, succeeds in suggesting new analytical intuitions.

From the beginning it is possible to appreciate both the thoughtful, meditated choice of clips and stylistic features, and the precise construction of their argument. The explanatory mode and the scholarly approach to the subject are particularly evident in its structure: the first, introductory part discusses the possibility of reframing “Rome Open City’s relationship with Neorealism”; the second part introduces the doors’ recurrent subtext, focusing afterwards on the analysis of a specific sequence – the torture and murder of Manfredi while Don Pietro and Marina are in the Gestapo’s headquarters. Finally, the video’s conclusion is devoted to a further reflection on both the doors’ subtext, identified as the film’s “optical unconscious” and, self-reflexively, on the importance of videographic film studies as an instrument to realize the hermeneutic potential of images. A potential that the video does not just affirm, but visually demonstrates with the formal strategies it carries out.

The voiceover guides us with clarity through the different stages of the argument; the recurrent use of split and multiple screens serves the purpose of comparison, but also gives the sense of resonating visual motives; the use of a Gestapo headquarters’ map ensures that the viewer can immediately visualize and follow  what the voice is stating about the mise-en-scène. The way of the characters through the rooms, to finally face reality and confront with the moral responsibility of their actions, mirrors our path through the many passageways to discover that, as Sandro Bernardi also has argued, “Realism […] is just one aspect of Rossellini’s works. […] Rossellini looks at the reality that surrounds us considering always its symbolic aspects, according to the original meaning of the word symbol (syn-ballein), that means the connection of every single element with its whole” (Bernardi, 2003: 97). This realization is significantly accompanied by a more poetical turn in the use of images: the mirrored image of Marina’s body, and especially the superimposition of a crying Don Pietro over its calm expression right before his execution seems to render exactly, to use Benjamin’s words, that “indiscernible place in the condition of that long past minute where the future is nesting.” (Benjamin, 1980: 202) Every threshold, then, leads us towards the facing of History, in that final, open field in which no doors are interposed between the killing of Don Pietro and the look of the children.

To conclude, the video succeeds in its attempt to raise new insights about Rome Open City, both using verbal language and images. It is, indeed, a stand-alone video, and not just because of the expository narration, but also because of its visual strategies: images do not just accompany the voice, they add further elements to the argument. The only minor amendments I would suggest consist in adding more bibliographical references at the end of the video – it is clear that there is an in-depth bibliographical research, and I felt the desire to have more details about it –, along with an indication in the credits of the specific role of each author.