Roma città aperta posters

Roma città aperta can be considered one of the most identifiable works of neo-realist cinema, as well as the manifesto par excellence of Rossellini’s cinema. The first poster production is dated 1945 and signed by Anselmo Ballester, one of the most prolific Roman movie poster artists ever. Despite the recognizable style that made Ballester one of the most popular movie poster artists of his time, hardly the author’s signature was physically displayed on his works of that decade.
According to some unverified theories, this was due to the small series of political posters signed by Ballester at the time, which in the following period persuaded him not to sign productions that could affect the market and the network of customers he had so hardly built up.

Among the various subjects painted by Ballester in 1945, the most successful is the one depicting a close-up of roman actress Anna Magnani.  Behind the woman, in addition to the dome of St. Peter’s, stands a crown of bloody thorns, a metonymy of her martyrdom on film. French and German productions of the movie kept Ballester’s painting almost unaltered, limiting themselves exclusively to typographical interventions.

With Anna Magnani, the concept of divism underwent a radical change of course: increasingly away from the Hoolywoodian idea of the term and the mythification of the actor and increasingly toward a neorealist idea of divism that in Magnani’s impatient expression, pronounced dark circles under her eyes, and disheveled hair found the value of the autencity with which viewers increasingly identified.

The poster was only the last phase of Ballester’s work, and he was able to work on as many as three posters a week. The design would begin with several dozen proposals delivered to the client in the form of a sketch on sheets of about 10 x 15 cm. After the sketch was approved, the sketch work would begin, which could vary in size from 40 x 70 cm to 50 x 70 cm. Only after the sketch was approved would the work of designing the actual poster begin, on an even more spacious format of up to 100 x 140 cm.

In another subject from the Roma città aperta series, Ballester uses double perspective with the leading actor in the foreground and one or two salient scenes from the film in the background. The whole followed a surrealist color logic with each hue meticulously selected to represent an emotion in the film.

Dual perspective in movie poster art is still recognized today as a key feature of Ballester’s work: a mode of narrative representation by principle that in many cases tended to anticipate the ending of a film or the death of a character, the main reason why it is increasingly being abandoned by modern cinema.