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
Web resources:
http://www.italia-online.co.uk/article.php?story=Roberto_Rossellini