Roma · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A tunnelling machine grinds through rock under Rome and breaks into a room. The engineers stop talking. Their lamps swing across a painted wall and find faces, Roman ones, looking back with the composure of people who always expected to be looked at. Then the modern air gets in. The colours lift off the plaster while everyone stands there watching, and the faces go. It is the only quiet passage in the whole film.

Hold that sequence, because everything Roma knows is inside it.

Fellini's premise is that Rome is not a place with a history behind it but a body of sediment in which every layer is still present and still pressing. Gilles Deleuze has a name for images built this way: the stratigraphic image. Ordinary film time runs forward, and the past arrives as a flashback, clearly labelled and safely over. A stratigraphic image asks to be read downward instead, like a core sample. The past is not gone. It is underneath, and it can be struck. Rome's Metro Line A really was being dug in these years, and really was being stalled by the archaeology the diggers kept hitting. Fellini takes that municipal nuisance and makes it a theory of memory: the past survives only while sealed, and dies at the moment of contact.

Once you have the villa and the tunnel, the film's structure stops looking careless. The 1930s material does not precede 1972 here. It underlies it. Deleuze calls this the sheets of past: the past as an order you move around inside, rather than a line you travelled along to get here. Watch Ruggero Mastroianni's cutting. No dissolves for memory, no fades, no titles. A provincial boy in the Thirties, a shrieking pensione in 1939, a crane platform in the rain on the ring road in 1972 — the joins are flat cuts, so the decades read as adjacent rooms rather than as then and now. This is why the film can feel on first viewing like a shaggy grab-bag, which was exactly the 1972 charge against it: self-indulgence, virtuosity without discipline. But the looseness is the argument. A film about strata cannot be shaped like a staircase.

Now the part that reorganises everything on a second viewing. Almost none of this was photographed in Rome. The ring road at night, with its trucks and mounted police and cattle and burning car, was staged on a stretch of highway built for the purpose on the Cinecittà lot, with rain towers and wind machines. The brothels, the palazzo, the tunnel: sets. And nothing was recorded live, because Italian cinema still worked without synchronous sound, so every shout, every horn, every “interview” was assembled afterwards, voices chosen for timbre and dubbed onto faces chosen from photographs.

Deleuze would call this the powers of the false, and he means it as praise. The point is not that Fellini lies. It is that he makes true and false undecidable and then works that seam as a creative principle. Finer still is what Deleuze calls crystalline description: a description that builds its object and then takes its place. Fellini's Grande Raccordo Anulare does not record the real ring road. It supplants it. Ask anyone who has seen the film what Roman traffic looks like in the rain at night.

That matters because cinema had signed a contract. André Bazin argued that the photographed image carries a piece of the world's actual being, and neorealism was that argument in practice: real streets, untrained faces, sound off the pavement. Fellini keeps every visible sign of the contract, a crew on screen and a director interviewing citizens, and quietly voids what stood behind it. His defence is in the film. Rome is already a confection of self-images, imperial and papal and touristic and cinematic; to photograph the actual streets would be to record somebody else's fabrication and call it evidence.

He settles the account face to face. Fellini co-wrote Rome, Open City, and here he puts Anna Magnani, that film's face, on a Trastevere doorstep at night, as herself. His voiceover calls her the symbol of the city. She refuses the compliment and shuts the door on him. Magnani died the following year. Citation and farewell in one gesture — and the doorstep she is standing on was built at Cinecittà.

There is a young man in the film, arriving from the provinces at Termini in 1939, played by an American newcomer as almost pure watchfulness. Deleuze's word for that figure is the seer, the voyant: someone who no longer acts on what he sees, only registers it, because no available action would change anything. Fellini's real audacity is to abandon him halfway through. He builds a surrogate and then declines to follow him, because the subject was never a life. What is left is a dispersive situation, many loosely linked figures with no protagonist and causality slackened to almost nothing, plus one signature gesture: the scene that stops rather than concludes. The fashion show, the pensione dinner and the brothel parades build by accretion of faces until they tip into hysteria and are abandoned mid-crescendo.

The crowds are never background. Fellini stages in layers, grotesques at the front, business in the middle, arrivals at the back, so the eye can never settle and no figure holds the frame. Deleuze calls a mass treated as one feeling-unit a dividual: the crowd as a single affective body rather than a sum of persons. The caricaturist's eye Fellini trained at the satirical weekly Marc'Aurelio is doing that work; Danilo Donati's workshop realises it in fabric and prosthetic.

The ecclesiastical fashion show is the film's other great set piece and its coldest. Roller-skating priests, nuns in vast winged headdresses, vestments wired to glow, and at last a skeletal papal apparition, all paraded before an audience of aristocrats and prelates whose ancient faces watch from the dark. There is no dialogue that matters; meaning rides entirely on silhouette and light. Deleuze has a precise term for an ordered, aristocratic world rotting from inside while it continues to perform itself: crystal-decomposition. Nothing here is denounced. The procession simply keeps going after it is obviously already dead.

Then Fellini ends on motorcycles, tearing past the monuments and out of frame into the dark. A balade in Deleuze's sense: a trip that transforms nothing and refuses to summarise.

What did this do to film? It descends plainly from the 1920s city symphony, from Ruttmann's Berlin, where a metropolis is organised by rhythm and hour instead of plot, and it corrupts that inheritance by manufacturing the metropolis. It takes the plotless nocturnal chain of La dolce vita and removes the journalist who held it together. It takes the unmarked transition 8½ perfected, memory and present joined inside a single camera move, and stretches it across four decades. It takes the designed, coloured night of Toby Dammit and builds a whole Rome from it. And it answers Bicycle Thieves on its own ground, recruiting the same untrained physiognomies and then using them as typage, re-voiced in a studio.

Forward, it turned the essay-film into spectacle and proved a picture could be organised by strata instead of story. Amarcord is its provincial mirror. Sorrentino's La grande bellezza reworks its nocturnal Rome and its exhausted observer outright; The Young Pope runs on the fashion show's current, which has since drained into fashion imagery and music video as stock grammar.

Watch it again and try to say, at any given cut, what year you are standing in. You often can't. That is not the film failing to orient you. That is the film telling you what a city is.