Sunday | June 7, 2015 5:00 pm

Days of Glory
(Giorni di gloria)

Screening on Film

Directed by Giuseppe de Santis, Mario Serandrei, Marcello Pagliero and Luchino Visconti.
Italy/Switzerland, 1945, 35mm, black & white, 71 min.
Italian with English subtitles.
Print source: Cinecittà Luce

Rarely seen in the United States, Days of Glory remains a uniquely significant film because of both the history it records and the turn in Italian cinema it portends. In the wake of the liberation of Rome by Allied troops in the summer of 1944, a group of four filmmakers—including Luchino Visconti and Giuseppe de Santis—took to the streets with 16mm cameras to document what they could of the toll that Nazi occupation of the city had taken and the fury visited upon collaborators both in the courtroom and beyond. The result is a documentary counterpart to Rome Open City (1945): like that film, it helped establish a template for on-the-spot filmmaking that gave birth to the famed neorealism movement.