Rossellini, Roberto (1906–1977)

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ROSSELLINI, ROBERTO (1906–1977)

Italian filmmaker.

Roberto Rossellini was born into a well-educated, vivacious bourgeois family in Rome. His self-proclaimed "zest to understand" the world around him was first cultivated by a salon of artists, writers, and musicians who filled the Rossellini family home each Sunday during his childhood and early adolescence. Curiously, a similar atmosphere of passionate intellectual and political discussion was re-created amid the desperation and poverty of World War II Rome, when refugees and political dissidents in hiding whiled away the time talking. In both instances, Rossellini gleaned a crucial education in ideas of history, culture, and truth, all of which would emerge as obsessive themes in his filmmaking. Throughout his early life, Rossellini loved and was deeply influenced by the movies he saw from directors as varied as Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor, and F. W. Murnau.

Yet Rossellini was equally affected by the historical and political moment he lived in: while his father was a brazen antifascist, Rossellini was ambiguous about his allegiances before and during World War II. Many admirers of Rossellini's later films have tended to "forget" that one of Rossellini's first experiences on a film set was Luciano Serra Pilota (1938), supervised by Mussolini's son, Vittorio. Rossellini's own first features—The White Ship (1942), The Pilot Returns (1942), and The Man with the Cross (1943)—can all be interpreted, at least superficially, to be fascist propaganda, commissioned as they were by the Fascist-controlled government. But some critics have interpreted these initial films as compromises made "by any means necessary" during wartime and have argued that they nonetheless contain the seeds of a fierce individualism in the face of crumbling societal and political edifices, a vision that Rossellini explores more deeply in three films that followed the war and that catapulted him to international fame: Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948).

Rome, Open City tells the story of Italy's capital in 1944, toward the end of the war. Open City' s depiction of the bit players experiencing major historical events—the partisan who decides to fight against the Nazi tide, the people who try to protect him, the children who suffer the daily deprivation and danger of living in an occupied city—was revolutionary in its ability to render the war close and intimate. When the soldiers rushing to round up the opposition pause to look up the skirts of the young girls above them on the stairwell, we feel as if we have become witness to life as it happens rather than life merely represented. Thus Rossellini became known as the "father of neorealism." He used nonprofessional actors on location (as opposed to re-creating scenes in the studio), but at the same time consistently experimented with different film stocks (depending on what he could find during the war) and available lighting. Perhaps most important, he displayed a strong inclination toward melodramatic narrative elements.

So what do we mean when we use the term neorealism, and why is Rossellini considered its "father"? The films that followed Rossellini's postwar trilogy may provide some insight. Germany Year Zero is the heartbreaking story of a little boy so overwhelmed by the aftereffects of war that he ends up poisoning his father and then killing himself. It was filmed amid the actual rubble of postwar Germany. After it was completed, Rossellini entered into a personal and professional relationship with the Swedish-born actress and Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982). Bergman and Rossellini's relationship caused an international scandal, since they were both married when they began seeing each other romantically. An unofficial boycott of their films ensued, which was ultimately detrimental to both their careers. They eventually married and had three children together, including the actress Isabella Rossellini, star of Blue Velvet (1986) .

Bergman and Rossellini made a number of films together, including Stromboli (1949) and Voyage in Italy (1953). Voyage inspired the members of the French new wave to name Rossellini the "father of modern cinema," widening the scope of his supposed paternity. The new wave's adulation did not stem primarily from his direct reproduction of reality (again, this is the common misconception about "neorealism"). Instead, the writers at Cahiers du cinéma admired his pioneering use of narrative "gaps and fragments," by which he told stories much closer to reality as we experience it.

Although Rossellini continued to make films and television programs until his death in 1977, none achieved the acclaim of the films from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Rossellini seemed despondent about the future of the modern cinema he was said to have spawned: in 1963 he called a press conference and very dramatically proclaimed cinema "dead." During the 1960s and 1970s, Rossellini worked primarily in television, creating historical programs with an educational aim. Some were re-creations of the remote past, such as Acts of the Apostles (1969), Socrates (1970), and The Age of the Medici (1973), while others were biographical features, such as Year One (1974), about Alcide de Gasperi (1881–1954), the Christian Democratic politician and first postwar Italian premier—another pater patriae of the postwar world.

See alsoCinema; Italy.