Article: Pina's pregnancy, traumatic realism, and the after-life of Open City.(Rome, Open City)(Critical essay)

This study attempts to account for the haunting power and the enduring legacy of the most wrenching shot-sequence in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City. I am speaking of the scene in which Pina is felled by Nazi gun fire as she chases after the truck carrying Francesco and his comrades seized during the raid on their tenement building in Rome's Prenestino neighborhood. This scene, whose power to shock and disrupt remains unabated over the years, even when audiences are amply forewarned of the serial deaths that will be visited upon Open City's resistance characters, has come to transcend its narrative context and to stand, by synecdoche, for the entire cinematic ...

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