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Roberto Rossellini (b. Italy, 1906–1977) is a key artist of the mid-twentieth century whose contribution to cinema—particularly in his stunning adaptations of Neorealist strategies (Rome Open City [1945], Paisan [1946])—is inestimable and whose influence on other directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese, is profound. Over his forty-year career Rossellini’s films took several broad turns, from his Neorealist masterworks of war and its immediate aftermath to the extraordinary melodramas he made with Ingrid Bergman to “didactic” works made for television about men whose ideas altered the course of civilization (Jesus, Socrates). Rossellini’s films are characterized by their inflection of “actuality” (shooting on location and casting everyday people alongside professional actors), recognition of the mystery of human behavior, belief in spiritual transcendence, and desire to stimulate audiences’ curiosity. All films directed by Rossellini and from Italy, unless otherwise noted. An accompanying exhibition in the Titus 1 and Titus 2 lobby galleries is Rossellini on Paper (November 15, 2006–April 7, 2007).
Co-organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film; and James Quandt, Senior Programmer, Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto.
Roberto Rossellini is presented in collaboration with Cinecitta Holding and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and is made possible by generous grants from Fendi and Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro. Additional support is provided by The Italian Cultural Institute (New York) and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency. Presented with the support of the Cineteca Nazionale (Rome), the Menil Collection (Houston), National Film and Television Archive (London), Kino International (New York), Harvard Film Archive, Swedish Film Archive, New Yorker Films, Miramax Films, The Criterion Collection, Kramsie (Gibraltar), Tag Gallagher, and Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese on Rossellini. Excerpted from Il Viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy). 1999. USA. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Rossellini is given pride of place in Scorsese’s documentary about his relationship with Italian cinema. Scorsese discusses Neorealism and Rossellini’s early films, illustrating his ideas with numerous film clips. Approx. 100 min.
Wednesday, November 15, 5:00. T1
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Roma città aperta (Rome Open City). 1945. Screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini. With Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi. An emotional bombshell when first released, Rome Open City was shot on Rome’s streets shortly after the German Occupation and pieced together from the bits of 35mm film that Rossellini was able to scrounge up. The action takes place during the final desperate months of the Occupation, rendering the title somewhat ironic. New restoration by the Cineteca Nazionale. In Italian, English subtitles. 106 min.
Wednesday, November 15, 7:30 (introduced by Ingrid and Isabella Rossellini); Sunday, November 19, 3:30. T1 |
Open City. 1945. Italy. Directed by Roberto Rossellini
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Paisà (Paisan). 1946. Screenplay by Sergio Amidei with Rossellini, Klaus Mann, Federico Fellini, et al. Paisan includes six stories, all shot on location, that move from Sicily and the 1944 Allied landing to the north of Italy as the Germans gradually retreated. Some of the narratives capture the traumatic and murderous process of liberation (Sicily, Florence, the Po Valley) while others capture the confusions of a newly liberated but devastated society (Naples, Rome, Romagna). Print restored by MoMA. In Italian, English, German; English subtitles. 116 min.
Thursday, November 16, 6:00; Sunday, November 19, 5:30. T1
Deutschland im Jahre Null (Germany Year Zero). 1947. Italy/Germany. Screenplay by Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpet. With Edmund Moeschke, Ernst Pittshau. Shot among the ruins of postwar Berlin, this rarely seen film recognized the infectious power of Nazi ideology that lingered after the physical destruction of Germany. A twelve-year-old boy, one year younger than the Third Reich itself, commits a horrendous crime. Rossellini: “Whether he excites pity or horror I do not know, nor did I wish to know.” In German, English subtitles. 73 min.
Thursday, November 16, 8:15; Friday, November 24, 4:30. T1
Francesco giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis/Francis God’s Jester). 1950. Screenplay by Rossellini, Federico Fellini, et al., based on I fioretti de San Francesco and La vita di Frate Giampro. With Aldo Fabrizi, Arabella Lemaître, and Franciscan monks. “It was important for me then to affirm everything that stood against slyness and cunning… I believe that simplicity is a very powerful weapon… The accent is entirely on Saint Francis’s whimsical, unruffled approach to the crudities and trivialities of everyday life” (Rossellini). In Italian, English subtitles. 75 min.
Friday, November 17, 6:00; Sunday, November 26, 4:00. T1
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Il Messia (The Messiah). 1975. Italy/France. Screenplay by Rossellini, Silvia D’Amico Bendico. With Pier Maria Rossi, Mita Ungaro. Never released in the USA and shot in part in Tunisia, Rossellini’s vision of Christ, born a Jew to a young mother, is that of a courageous, socially disobedient man whose words and actions, not necessarily his miracles, were revolutionary. “But he who said ‘the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ has made a political discourse of fundamental importance” (Rossellini). In Italian, English subtitles. 145 min.
Friday, November 17, 8:00; Saturday, November 25, 4:30. T1
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The Messiah. 1975. Italy/France. Directed by Roberto Rossellini |
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Stromboli. 1949. Screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, et al. With Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale. Bergman, impressed by Rome Open City and Paisan, wrote to Rossellini that if ever “he needed a Swedish actress who spoke English well,” she was ready to work with him. Rossellini responded with Stromboli, about an Eastern European refugee who quits a postwar displaced persons camp by marrying an unrefined fisherman from the titular small volcanic island, and soon falls into despair. 105 min.
Saturday, November 18, 2:00; Friday, November 24, 7:30. T1 |
Stromboli. 1949. Italy. Directed
by Roberto Rossellini |
Voyage in Italy/Strangers. 1953. Screenplay by Rossellini, Vitaliano Brancati. With Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders. An estranged married couple returns to Naples to close their home, and a miracle, of sorts, occurs. “It is a very bitter film basically. The couple take refuge in each other in the same way as people cover themselves when they’re seen naked, grabbing a towel, drawing closer to the person with them…” (Rossellini). 75 min.
Saturday, November 18, 4:00; Friday, November 24, 6:00. T1
Europe ’51 (The Greatest Love). 1952. Screenplay by Rossellini. With Ingrid Bergman, Alexander Knox. A neglectful mother of some social standing begins to care for the poor when her son’s suicide attempt exposes the emptiness of her life. However, her intense involvement in charitable work alarms her husband and friends. Rossellini told Bergman, “I am going to make a story of St. Francis and she’s going to be a woman and it’s going to be you.” 100 min.
Saturday, November 18, 6:00. T1
Second episode of La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza (Man’s Struggle for Survival): "The Civilization that Was Borne from a River." 1967–69. Directed by Renzo Rossellini Jr., Roberto Rossellini. Screenplay by Roberto Rossellini. For three years Rossellini and his son worked on a twelve-part series for Italian television about man’s search for food and the subsequent development of civilization. The first episode deals with man as a hominid; the second follows the shift from wily hunter in the fourth ice age to the subsequent birth of agriculture. English voice-over, no dialogue. 55 min.
Followed by a 1971 conversation between Rossellini and a Rice University anthropologist about the first appearance of agriculture in what is now Iran. 10 min.
Saturday, November 18, 8:00; Monday, November 20, 6:15. T1
Rossellini: Early and Late
ll était une fois… Rome Ville Ouverte (Once Upon a Time… Rome Open City). 2006. France. Directed by Marie Genin, Serge July. A chronicle of the making of Rome Open City, featuring interviews, excerpts, and archival footage with, among others, Roberto Rossellini, Isabella Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman, Vittorio Mussolini, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and Anna Magnani. In Italian, English; English subtitles. 54 min.
Footage from the unfinished multi-episode film project Science. c. 1973. USA. Under the patronage of Dominique and Jean de Menil, Rossellini conducted a series of 16mm interviews with scientists at Rice University. Excerpts show Rossellini explaining his project to scientists and an interview with the de Menils. Approx. 40 min.
Sunday, November 19, 1:15; Monday, November 20, 8:00. T1
Blaise Pascal. 1971. France/Italy. Screenplay by Rossellini, Marcella Mariani, Luciano Scaffa, Dominique de La Rochefoucauld. With Pierre Arditi. Tag Gallagher writes in
The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini (1998): “Blaise Pascal is so much a horror movie… Everything is drenched in suffering, torture, fear, superstitious dread; everyone is writhing in desperate faith, self-mortification and pain… Such was Jansenism from the Roman point of view… We follow Pascal from age seventeen, as he emerges out of his father’s shadow, until his death at age thirty-nine in 1662…” In Italian, English subtitles. 130 min.
Saturday, November 25, 2:00. T1; Thursday, November 30, 6:00. T2
India Matri Buhmi (India/India ’58/India Mother Land). 1958. India/Italy/France. Screenplay by Rossellini, Sonali Senroy Das Gupta, Fereydoun Hoveyda. In this magisterial four-part film, Rossellini slyly assumed a documentarian’s approach to fiction based on observation. The film explores centuries-old ways of life, the rhythm of everyday domesticity, the changes progress brings to the natural environment,
and “intelligence in the behavior of animals.” In Italian and various Indian dialects; English subtitles. 90 min.
Saturday, November 25, 7:30. T1; Thursday, November 30, 8:30. T2
Dovè la Libertà? (Where Is Liberty?). 1954. Adapted from an idea by Rossellini. This dark satire starring Toto, a comic actor much beloved in Italy, is according to Rossellini, Europa ’51’s inverse: an innocent copes with the meanness and ruthlessness of postwar society. A mild-mannered man, having served twenty years for slitting the throat of a friend who seduced his wife, is released from prison. What he finds on the outside is so disheartening and discouraging he attempts—with little success—to return to jail. In Italian, English subtitles. 91 min.
Sunday, November 26, 2:00; Monday, November 27, 7:45. T1
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La Macchina Ammazzacattivi (The Machine that Kills Bad People). 1945–52. Screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, et al. With Gennaro Pisano, Giovanni Amato, and the people of Amalfi. A photographer in Amalfi discovers his camera can petrify his subjects. “Perhaps my most original film” (Rossellini). Peter Brunette, author of Roberto Rossellini (1966) finds this comedy “particularly interesting because it stands the conventional view of Rossellini as an ultra-realist on its head.” In Italian, English subtitles. 83 min.
Sunday, November 26, 5:45; Wednesday, November 29, 6:15. T1 |
The Machine that Kills Bad People. 1945–52. Italy. Directed by Roberto Rossellini |
Desiderio (Desire). 1943–46. Directed by Rossellini, Marcello Pagliero. With Elli Parvo, Massimo Girotti. In the spirit of Visconti’s early and influential Neorealist melodrama Ossessione (1942), Rossellini in 1943 began shooting a dark drama of illicit passions, Freight Yards, with Ossessione’s screenwriter, Giuseppe de Santis, and its star, Massimo Girotti. Although Allied bombers interrupted Rossellini’s shoot, after the war his colleague Marcello Pagliero completed this fatalistic narrative about a call girl under the new title Desire. In Italian, English subtitles. 79 min.
Monday, November 27, 6:00;
Wednesday, November 29, 8:15. T1
Fear (Angst/La Paura). 1954. Germany/Italy. Screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, Franz Graf Treuberg, based on a story by Stefan Zweig. With Ingrid Bergman, Mathias Wieman. Shot in both English and German, Fear was the last film Rossellini and Bergman made together. A bourgeois melodrama of infidelity and emotional cruelty inflected with expressionistic moments, the film was made because Rossellini was interested in the idea of Germany’s reconstruction (both material and moral) ten years after Germany Year Zero. English version. 82 min.
Saturday, December 2, 8:00. T1
Viva l’Italia (Garibaldi). 1960. Screenplay by Sergio Amidei, Rossellini, et al. With Renzo Ricci. Celebrating Italy’s centennial, this spectacle, a dry run for Rossellini’s subsequent didactic works, witnesses Giuseppe Garibaldi’s liberation of the south from the Bourbons and the Risorgimento (Italian unification). “Of all my films I’m proudest of Viva l’Italia. I consider it important as a work of research, the most carefully done of all my films” (Rossellini). In Italian, English subtitles. 129 min.
Sunday, December 3, 5:30; Monday, December 4, 6:00. T1
Tag Gallagher on Roberto Rossellini. An illustrated lecture by Tag Gallagher, author of The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini: His Life and Films (1998, Da Capo Press, New York).
Monday, December 4, 8:30. T2
L’uomo dalla croce (The Man of the Cross). 1943. Screenplay by Rossellini, Asvro Gravelli. With Alberto Tavazzi, Roswitha Schmidt. Dedicated to “the heroic chaplains fallen among the Godless in barbaric lands,” this last of the three features Rossellini made during WWII is based on an incident on the Russian front. Father Reginaldo Giuliani, an Italian army chaplain, tends to a wounded soldier and takes shelter on a farm along with soldiers, Russian peasants, and a Soviet commissar. In Italian, English subtitles. 77 min.
Wednesday, December 6, 8:30. T1; Friday, December 8, 3:15. BA
Jeanne au bûcher (Giovanna d’Arco al rogo/Joan of Arc at the Stake). 1954. France/Italy/Great Britain. Music by Arthur Honegger; text (poem) by Paul Claudel. Rossellini’s first color feature, shot in a Neapolitan opera house, is a motion picture adaptation of his successful staging of the eponymous oratorio. It is “not at all filmed theater, it’s cinema and I’d even say Neorealism, in the sense I’ve always intended” (Rossellini). 80 min.
Friday, December 8, 6:15; Saturday, December 9, 1:00. T1
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Fantasia sottomarina (Underwater Fantasy). 1938. The earliest extant Rossellini film. Undersea creatures shot through an aquarium. 10 min.
La nave bianca (The White Ship). 1941. Screenplay by Rossellini, Francesco De Robertis. Rossellini’s first feature film is a patriotic one, a documentary (with added love story), shot on “true locations,” about wounded Italian sailors and the admirable nursing care given them on “white” (hospital) ships. In Italian, English subtitles. 71 min.
Friday, December 8, 8:15; Saturday, December 9, 3:00. T1 |
| The White Ship. 1941. Italy. Directed by Roberto Rossellini |
Agostino d’Ippona (Augustine of Hippo). 1972. Screenplay by Rossellini, Marcella Mariani, Luciano Scaffa. With Dary Berkani. Less a biography of the fifth-century theologian than a lens on the period in which the sacked Imperial City (Rome) gradually became the Heavenly City via the words and deeds of the early church father. Photographed among the Roman and Greek ruins of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum. In Italian, English subtitles. 117 min.
Saturday, December 9, 5:00. T1; Wednesday, December 20, 1:30. BA
Era notte a Roma (It Was Night in Rome). 1960. Italy/France. Screenplay by Sergio Amidei, Rossellini, et al. With Leo Genn, Giovanna Ralli. This rarely revived melodrama is set toward the end of the Nazi occupation. Three escaped Allied POWs are hidden by a female trader on the black market—much to her unease. Notable for Rossellini’s extensive use of the Panicor zoom lens. In Italian, English; English subtitles. 142 min.
Saturday, December 9, 7:30; Thursday, December 13, 6:00. T1
L’amore. 1947–48. L’amore comprises two films starring Anna Magnani: Una voce umana (A Human Voice), adapted by Rossellini from Jean Cocteau’s one-act monologue, and Il Miracolo (The Miracle), written by Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Tullio Pinelli. In Italian, English subtitles. 80 min.
Sunday, December 10, 1:00; Monday, December 11, 6:00. T1
Vanina Vanini. 1961. France/Italy. Adapted by Jean Grault, Rossellini, et al., based on a story in Stendhal’s Chroniques Italiennes. With Sandra Milo, Laurent Terzieff. In the 1820s, a Roman princess falls in love with a young revolutionary determined to free Italy from papal rule. Interference by the producer, who imposed his mistress on the film and removed scenes with other actresses, caused Rossellini to denounce the film, but many Rossellini admirers claim there remains enough of the artist for this period melodrama to be of interest. In Italian, English subtitles. 118 min.
Sunday, December 10, 3:00; Tuesday, December 19, 5:00. T1
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Il generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere). 1959. Italy/France. Screenplay by Indro Montanelli, Sergio Amidei, Rossellini, based on an actual event. With Vittorio De Sica, Hannes Messemer. One of Rossellini’s most critically and commercially successful dramas is also one of his most traditionally realized. During the Nazi occupation of Rome, a swindler is arrested and forced in prison to impersonate General Della Rovere, the leader whom the Germans executed and whose soldiers they need to identify. In Italian, English subtitles. 130 min.
Sunday, December 10, 5:15; Wednesday, December 13, 8:45. T1
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General Della Rovere. 1959. Italy/France. Directed by Roberto Rossellini |
Socrate (Socrates). 1970. France/Italy/Spain. Screenplay by Rossellini, Marcella Mariani, Jean-Dominique de La Rochefoucauld, based on Plato’s dialogues. With Jean Sylvere. Rossellini covers the last five years of the philosopher’s life, from Sparta’s victory over Athens in 404 B.C. to Socrates’s state-mandated suicide. Rossellini recognizes that while society forgives murderers, it persecutes anyone who threatens it by thinking differently about the world. In Italian, English subtitles. 120 min.
Wednesday, December 13, 3:00; Thursday, December 21, 1:30. BA
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La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (The Rise of Louis XIV). 1966. France. Screenplay by Philippe Erlanger, Jean Grault, Rossellini, Dominique de La Rochefoucauld. With Jean-Marie Patte. This is the most acclaimed and extensively released of Rossellini’s “didactic” films, and one of cinema’s great political films. A timorous young man, the Sun King (Louis XIV), learns how to wield his power. “Louis uses the superficiality, coquetry, and vanity of the people, nothing else” (Rossellini). In French, English subtitles. New 35mm print. 98 min.
Thursday, December 14, 6:00 (introduced by Isabella Rossellini); Saturday, December 16, 1:00. T1
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The Rise of Louis XIV. 1966. France. Directed by Roberto Rossellini |
Atti degli apostoli (Acts of the Apostles/Les actes des apotres). 1968. France/Italy/Spain. Screenplay by Rossellini, Jean-Dominique de La Rochefoucauld, Luciano Scaffa, based on the New Testament. With Tunisia standing in for the Holy Land, and Osta Antica for Rome, Rossellini charts the early history of Christianity through the journeys and preachings of the apostles as they convert and baptize the people, argue the words of Christ, and interact with secular authorities. Made in five episodes. English version. 280 min., with one twenty-minute intermission.
Friday, December 15, 1:00. BA; Wednesday, December 20, 6:00. T2
Shorts By and about Rossellini
The Chicken (Ingrid Bergman). 1952. Screenplay by Cesare Zavattini. With Ingrid Bergman as herself. Episode from Siamo donne. 17 min.
Santa Brigida. 1951. Sweden. With Bergman. Footage shot for the Swedish Red Cross. 10 min.
Illibatezza (Purity). 1962. With Rosanna Schiaffino, Bruce Balaban. Episode from RoGoPaG. 33 min.
Le Centre Georges Pompidou. 1977. France. Cinematography by Nestor Almendros. No dialogue. 56 min.
My Dad Is 100 Years Old. 2006. Canada. Directed by Guy Maddin. Screenplay by Isabella Rossellini. With Isabella Rossellini. 17 min. Program 133 min.
Saturday, December 16, 8:30. T2; Tuesday, December 19, 7:30. T1
The Age of the Medici. 1972. Screenplay by Rossellini, Marcella Mariani, Luciano Scaffa. With Marcello Di Falco, Virginio Gazzolo. This three-episode television film was originally conceived by Rossellini as two separate films about the early Renaissance—one about subsequent arts patron Cosimo de’ Medici’s exile from and return to Florence, and the other about Leon Battista Alberti, the philosopher, mathematician, and architect whose ideas influenced Florentine arts. In English. 254 min., with one twenty-minute intermission.
Thursday, December 21, 6:00. T2; Friday, December 22, 1:00. BA
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Pictured at top:
Roberto Rossellini
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