Roberto Rossellini (8 May 1906 – 3 June 1977) was
an Italian
film director. Rossellini
was one of the directors of the
Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as
Roma città aperta (
Rome, Open
City 1945) to the movement.
Early life
Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where
Benito Mussolini had his first
Roman
hotel in 1922 when
Fascism obtained power in Italy.
Rossellini's father built the first cinema in Rome (a theatre in
which films could be shown), granting his son an unlimited free
pass; the young Rossellini 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. Rossellini had a brother,
Renzo, who later
scored many of his films.
On 26 September 1936, he married Marcella De Marchis (17 January
1916, Rome – 25 February 2009, Sarteano), a costume designer. This
was after a quick
annulment from Assia
Noris, a
Russian actress who worked
in Italian films. De Marchis and Rossellini had two sons: Marco
Romano (born 3 July 1937 and died prematurely in 1946), and Renzo
(born 24 August 1941). Rossellini and De Marchis separated in 1950
(and eventually divorced).
Career
In 1937 Rossellini made his first
documentary,
Prélude à l'après-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. In 1940 he was called
to assist
Francesco De
Robertis on
Uomini sul Fondo. His close friendship
with
Vittorio Mussolini, son of
Il Duce, has been
interpreted as a possible reason for having been preferred to other
apprentices.
Some authors describe the first part of his career as a sequence of
trilogies. His first
feature film,
La nave bianca (1942)
was sponsored by the audiovisual
propaganda centre of Navy Department and is the
first work in Rossellini's "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 (
Rome, Open City 1945). Fellini assisted
on the script and Fabrizi playing the role of the priest, while
Rossellini self-produced. Most of the money came from credits and
loans, and film had to be found on the black market. This dramatic
film was an immediate success. Rossellini had started now his
so-called
Neorealistic Trilogy, the second title of which
was
Paisà (1946), produced with
non-professional actors, and the third,
Germania anno zero
(
Germany Year Zero,
1948), sponsored by a French producer and filmed in Berlin's French
sector. In Berlin also, Rossellini preferred non-actors, but he was
unable to find a face he found "interesting"; he placed his
camera in the center of a town square, as he
did for Paisà, but was surprised when nobody came to watch.
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
script 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.
After his Neorealist Trilogy, Rossellini produced two films now
classified as the 'Transitional films':
L'Amore (1948) (with
Anna Magnani) and
La macchina
ammazzacattivi (1952), on the capability of cinema to portray
reality and truth (with recalls of
Commedia del Arte). In 1948, Rossellini
received a letter from a famous foreign actress proposing a
collaboration:
- :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
With this letter began one of the best known love stories in film
history, with Bergman and Rossellini both at the peak of their
careers.
Their first collaboration was Stromboli terra di Dio (1950) (in the
island of Stromboli
, whose volcano quite
conveniently erupted during filming). This affair caused a
great scandal in some countries (Bergman and Rossellini were both
married to other people); the scandal intensified when Bergman
became pregnant. Rossellini and Bergman had three children,
Isabella Rossellini (actress
& model) and her twin,
Ingrid
Isotta, as well as a son Roberto Ingmar Rossellini.
Europa '51 (1952) and
Journey to Italy (1953),
La paura (1954) and
Giovanna d'Arco al rogo (1954)
were the other films on which they worked together.
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 Bergman, he had an affair with Sonali Das Gupta,
a screenwriter, who was helping develop vignettes for the film.
Given the climate of the 1950s this led to a huge scandal in India as well as Hollywood. Nehru
had to ask Rossellini to leave.
Rossellini married Sonali Das Gupta in 1957 and
adopted her young son Arjun, renamed
Gil Rossellini (23 October 1956 – 3 October
2008). Rossellini and Sonali had a daughter together, Raffaella
Rossellini (born 1958).
In 1971,
Rice University in Houston, Texas
, invited Rossellini to help establish a Media
Center.
Death
In 1977, Roberto Rossellini died of a
heart attack, aged 71.
Legacy
Rossellini's films after his early
Neo-Realist films — particularly his films with
Ingrid Bergman — were commercially unsuccessful, though
Journey to Italy is well
regarded in some quarters. He was an acknowledged master for the
critics of
Cahiers du Cinema in general and
André Bazin,
François Truffaut,
Jean-Luc Godard in particular. Truffaut
noted in his 1963 essay,
Roberto Rossellini Prefers Real
Life (available in
The Films In My Life) that
Rossellini's influence in France particularly among the directors
who would become part of the
nouvelle vague was so great that he was
in every sense, "the father of the French New Wave".
Martin Scorsese has also
acknowledged Rossellini's seminal influence in his documentary,
My Voyage to Italy (the
title itself a take on Rossellini's
Voyage to Italy). An important point
to note is that out of Scorsese's selection of Italian films from a
select group of directors (
Federico
Fellini,
Luchino Visconti,
Vittorio DeSica,
Michelangelo Antonioni) Rossellini's
films form at least half of the films discussed and analyzed,
highlighting Rossellini's monumental role in Italian and world
cinema. The films covered include his Neo-Realist films to his
films with Ingrid Bergman as well as
The Flowers of St. Francis,
a film about
St. Francis of
Assisi. Scorsese notes in his documentary that in contrast to
directors who often become more restrained and more conservative
stylistically as their careers advance, Rossellini became more and
more unconventional and was constantly experimenting with new
styles and technical challenges. Scorsese particularly highlights
the series of biographies Rossellini made in the 60's of historical
figures and, although he does not discuss it in detail, singles out
La Prise de
Pouvoir par Louis XIV for praise.
Filmography
Television credits
- L'India vista da Rossellini (miniseries) (1959)
- Torino nei cent'anni (1961)
- L'Età del ferro (1964)
- La Prise de
pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966)
- Idea di un'isola (1967)
- Atti degli apostoli (miniseries) (1969)
- "La Lotta dell'uomo per la sua sopravvenza" (series)
(1970)
- Socrate (1971)
- Blaise Pascal (1972)
- L'Età di Cosimo de Medici (1973)
- Cartesius (1974)
- Concerto per Michelangelo (1977)
Notes
- Serri, Mirella From the Odeon to the Odeon: The Experience
of Roberto Rossellini from Fascism to Antifascism, Kenneth
Lloyd-Jones (translator) TELOS Vol. 139 (Summer 2007): pp.
70-78.
- 1950s marital scandals
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