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This year is being commemorated the 100th anniversary of the birth of
Roberto Rossellini. Rossellini, an Italian film director, born in Rome on
May 8 1906 in a well-off family, was one of the most important directors of
Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as
Roma città aperta to the movement.
Life and work
Rossellini's father built the first Roman "cinema"
(a theatre in which films could be shown), granting Roberto an unlimited
free pass; Roberto started frequenting the cinema at an early age. When his
father died, he worked as a soundmaker for films, and for a certain time he
experienced all the accessory jobs related to the creation of a film,
gaining competence in each field.
In 1938 he made his first documentary, Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'un
faune. After this essay, he was called to assist Goffredo Alessandrini
in making Luciano Serra pilota, one of the most successful Italian
films of the first half of the 20th century. Then in 1940 he was called to
assist Francesco De Robertis on Uomini
sul Fondo.
His close friendship with Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce and
responsible for cinema, has been interpreted as a possible reason for having
been preferred to other apprentices.
Early career
Some authors describe the first part of his career as a sequence of
trilogies.
His first feature film, La nave bianca (1941) was sponsored by the
audiovisual propaganda centre of Navy Department and is the first work in
Rossellini's so-called
Fascist Trilogy, together with Un pilota ritorna (1942) and
Uomo dalla Croce (1943). To this period belongs his friendship and
cooperation with
Federico Fellini and Aldo Fabrizi.
When the Fascist regime ended in 1943, just two months after the
liberation of Rome, Rossellini was already preparing
Roma città aperta (with Fellini assisting on the script and Fabrizi
playing the role of the priest), which he self-produced (most of the money
came from credits and loans). This dramatic film was an immediate success.
Rossellini had started now his so-called Neorealistic Trilogy, the
second title of which was Paisà,
produced with non-professional actors, and the third
Germania anno zero ("Germany
Year Zero") (1946), sponsored by a
French producer and filmed in Berlin's French sector.
As he declared in an
interview, in order to really create the character that one has in
mind, it is necessary for the director to engage in a battle with his actor
which usually ends with submitting to the actor's wish. Since I do not have
the desire to waste my energy in a battle like this, I only use professional
actors occasionally. One of the reasons of success has been supposed to
be the fact that Rossellini rewrote the
scripts according to the non-professional actors' feelings and
histories. Regional accent,
dialect, and costumes were shown in the film how they were in real life.
Transition and later career
After his Neorealist Trilogy, Rossellini produced two films now
classified as the "Transitional films": L'Amore (with
Anna Magnani
) and La macchina ammazzacattivi, on the capability
of cinema to portray reality and truth (with recalls of
Commedia del Arte.
1948 was the year of love: Rossellini receives a letter from a foreign
actress proposing herself for working with him:
Dear Mr. Rossellini,
I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much.
If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not
forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who
in Italian knows only "ti amo", I am ready to come and make a film with
you.
Ingrid Bergman
By this famous letter begins one of the most popular love stories in
cinema lore, with Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini both at the peak of their
popularity and influence. They started working together the following year
in
Stromboli terra di Dio (in the island of
Stromboli, whose
volcano quite conveniently erupted during filming), and, in 1950,
Europa '51
. In 1953 Viaggio in Italia completed the so-called
"Ingrid's Trilogy".
This affair caused a great scandal in some countries (Bergman and
Rossellini were both married to other people); the scandal intensified when
the two started having children (one of whom was actress and model
Isabella Rossellini
).
In 1957 Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister at the time, invited
him to India to make the documentary "India" and put some life into the
floundering Indian Films Division. Though married to Ingrid Bergman, he had
an torrid affair with Sonali Dasgupta, the beautiful wife of his assistant
Hari Dasgupta.
In the prudish '50s this led to a huge scandal in both Hollywood and
India. Nehru had to ask the Rossellini to leave. He eventually married
Sonali and adopted her young son, Gil Rossellini.
In 1971,
Rice University in
Houston, Texas, invited Rossellini to help establish a Media Centre.
In 1977, Roberto Rossellini died of a heart attack, aged 71.
Other filmography
-
Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950)
-
Otello (1952)
- I sette peccati capitali (episode: "Invidia") (1952)
)
-
La Gioconda
(Mona Lisa
,
(1953)
- Siamo donne (episode: "Una voce umana. Il miracolo",
(1953
)
- Dov'è la libertà? (1953
)
- La figlia di Iorio (1954
)
- La paura (1954)
)
- Giovanna d'Arco al rogo (1954
)
- Viaggio in Italia (1954)
- Amori di mezzo secolo (1954)
-
India senza limiti (1958)
- Il generale Della Rovere (1959)
- Viva l'Italia (1960)
- Uno sguardo dal ponte (1961)
- Torino nei cent'anni (1961)
-
Vanina Vanini
(1961
)
- Era Notte a Roma -
1961
- I carabinieri (1962
)
- Benito Mussolini (1962
)
- Anima nera (1962
)
- Rogopag (episode: "Illibatezza",
(1963
)
-
L'età del ferro
-
1964
- La presa del potere da parte di Luigi XIV
(1967
)
- Idea di un'isola.
Sicilia
(1967
)
-
Atti degli apostoli
(1968
)
-
Socrate
(1970
)
- La forza e la ragione: interview with Salvador Allende
(1971
)
- Rice University (1971
)
-
Blaise Pascal
(1971
)
- Agostino d'Ippona (1972
)
-
Cartesius
(1973
)
- L'età di
Cosimo de' Medici
(1973
)
- Concerto per
Michelangelo
(1974
)
- The World Population (1974
)
- Anno uno (1974
)
- Il messia (1976
)
-
Beaubourg
(1977
)
Web resources:
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