Although there is scholarly unanimity about the imprint of neorealism on Italian postwar cinema and on the European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, there continues to be disagreement about its treatment of the Fascist past, its politics and style, and its relation to neorealism. In this essay, I examine Open City as a test case for rethinking the premises of neorealism through examining its emphasis on and treatment of cliché, particularly in relation to representations of gender and sexuality. Usually regarded as a mode of habitual recognition and as common sense, chichés in Open City are detached from their context and, in their now-ambiguous status, have the potential to produce attentive recognition and thought through invoking new associations and new ways of seeing. The image becomes “mental” or “philosophical” rather than action oriented, thus violating conventional modes of perception.

As I adopt the term clicheés are tied to habitual perception and to the secure parameters of the predictable world. They function more broadly as an automatic response to events, providing in sound and visual images a sense of commonly shared beliefs in the world.