Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 34, October 2002
John Bleasdale
The Unrealistic Rossellini
Tag Gallagher _The Adventures of Roberto
Rossellini: His Life and Films_ New York: Da Capo Press,
1998 ISBN 0306808730 802 pp. It is a consistent irony
that one of the founding fathers of Italian neo-realism
should himself have led such an unrealistic life. His
biography traces a familiar trajectory: from the
groundbreaking beginning full of initial promise, then
dissipated by his own actions and/or the hostility and
misunderstanding of his contemporary audience and the
critical establishment, to a state of final recognition and
(almost) respectability. Along the way there are stories of
betrayal and excess, the speed of cocaine and the speed of
delivering a print by sports car from Rome to Paris in 48
hours. There are the ambitiously conceived and fascinatingly
innovative films that never get shot. There are films begun
and abandoned, sometimes to be finished by somebody else.
There are films butchered by the editors of unimaginative or
jealous Hollywood tycoons. And there is the marriage to the
Hollywood actress and the divorce. Much of this brings to
mind a figure such as Orson Welles and the two have much in
common, with their reputations for innovation and the
self-made myths of genius and failure. They are both
fantastic fabulators, table-talkers who construct their own
legends, spin their own yarns, amusing and charming, but
only occasionally reliable. However, whereas Welles has
posthumously achieved an iconographic figure so great as to
tempt not only a myriad of biographers but also other
film-makers to paint his portrait, Roberto Rossellini has
been relatively overlooked, despite his aforementioned
reputation as one of the founding fathers of Italian
cinema. Rossellini was born into one
of the richest and most vivacious Roman families, which
alongside its fortune and eccentricities could also boast
the possession of a piece of Garibaldi's beard. Rossellini's
wealth was nothing exceptional among the neo-realists.
Visconti was a Milanese aristocrat who could finance his own
films regardless of whether anyone went to see them, and De
Sica could earn healthy sums as an actor or singer whenever
money to make films was difficult to find. From the pampered
child whose occasional ill-health saw an end to any attempt
at formal schooling, Rossellini graduated smoothly to the
playboy, driving fast cars, going to parties and brothels,
and knocking about town with an enthusiasm somewhat at odds
with the austerity and solemn fascism of the period.
Filmmaking was fallen into during the pursuit of an actress.
Or at least this is what he told Truffaut, and it might be
true. As Gallagher rather crassly puts it: 'Even at seventy,
Roberto would devote more time and energy to making women
than to making films -- which in his circle was considered
merely good taste.' (39) There is a condescending chumminess
to this statement, as well as an uncomfortable lack of
interrogation. One wonders how Tag evaluated time/energy
expenditure. Alongside a couple of
experiments in underwater and nature documentaries,
Rossellini's first feature film work was pursued on fascist
orientated themes. _Luciano serra pilota_ (Luciano Serra
Pilot), _La nave bianca_ (The White Ship), _Un pilota
ritorna_ (A Pilot Returns), and _L'uomo dalla croce_ (The
Man of the Cross) were all filmed under the supervision of
the fascist regime, most involved to a varying extent
Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator's son, and all of them
dealt with military subjects. Gallagher argues convincingly
for a re-appraisal of these films as non-fascist, if not
anti-fascist, citing the comparatively slack censorship and
Rossellini's eel-like evasions of authority. However, at
times Gallagher spoils his argument by engaging in a
senseless polemic: 'How do we assay
Rossellini's moral responsibility in the Fascist period? Do
we condemn Rossellini for participating in a film like
_Luciano serra pilota_, in which the sins of Italy's
imperialism in Ethiopia are never mentioned? Do we condemn
Gary Cooper for white-washing British imperialism in _Lives
of a Bengal Lancer_ or Cary Grant in _Gunga Din_?'
(50) Well, yes and no. These
films aren't necessarily condemned, but the gaps and the
culpability of Hollywood's rewriting of history has hardly
gone unnoticed. The clatter of straw men being bashed
resounds. This false opposition between the apparent
condemnation of fascist Italy's cultural production and the
allowance of all sorts of wickedness when it comes to
English speaking cinema becomes more disturbing as Gallagher
broadens his scope to provide a view of fascism and its
foreign policy: 'Still today Ethiopia is
cited as evidence that Fascism was evil. Less cited are the
Philippines where 600,000 Filipinos died on Luzon alone
during the American conquest' (51) Unlike other world leaders,
Mussolini, we are told, 'never amassed an estate nor even
collected his salary' (49). The Spanish Civil War is
conflated into 'Spain was becoming a Soviet satellite' (61),
and so Mussolini generously sends in the troops. There is in
all of this a defiance of easy stereotyping and the drawing
of vapid conclusions but, as with his exasperation
concerning Gary Cooper and Cary Grant, Gallagher suggests
that he is a lone voice when in fact he is in good company.
His view of Italy during the fascist period is one widely
accepted in Italy today, not least by one of the leading
members of the government coalition, the Alleanza Nazionale,
the leader of which party, Giancarlo Fini, went so far as to
describe Mussolini as the century's greatest statesman.
[1] In attempting to cut through the myths of
demonisation, Gallagher falls for the original and fascist
myth of Mussolini as the down-to-earth leader of the Italian
people who got caught up in the romantic dreams of that
people, the Fatalita' Italiana. [2] If fascism trained the
novice filmmaker, it was in fascism's destruction that
Rossellini fulfilled his promise and showed what would
widely be considered a genuinely new type of film. _Roma,
citta aperta_ (Rome, open city) tells a simple story of the
resistance during the German occupation of Rome. The moral
delineations are simply drawn: the good side is represented
by the children, the pregnant Sora Pina, the communists and
the catholic priest. The villains are the Nazis and the
drug-taking lesbian. The emotional moments of the film are
likewise simple and immediate: a series of martyrdoms, the
brutal and senseless machine gunning of Sora Pina, the
torture and death of the then Christ-like communist
resistance leader, and the quiet and understated execution
of the priest, witnessed by the children. All we have left
is the band of children, who walk off in a possibly
communist solidarity towards the cupola of St
Peter's. The innovations Rossellini
introduced are sometimes invisible to us now. Showing a
pregnant woman with a visibly large belly for instance was
considered unconventional at the time. It was usually enough
to state that the character was pregnant, and Rossellini had
difficulty persuading Anna Magnani to dispose of convention.
The film retains an improvised and immediate look, from the
actual destruction of the city in which the film is shot, to
the movements of the camera, which seems to be forever
catching up with people like a surveillance camera whose
batteries are running down. However, Rossellini exaggerated
the extent of his 'realism' to foreign journalists. His cast
was made up of unknowns picked from the street, he insisted,
despite the fact that two of the leads were played by famous
Italian actors, paid considerable sums. The
cinema-from-the-street was shot to a large extent in a
professional studio with designed sets. The improvisation
followed a script which had gone through many careful
revisions. When Aldo Fabrizi wanted to use a method-like
approach to his emotional scene, Rossellini stood by
patiently with the bottle of glycerine that was ultimately
employed to gain the same effect. But neo-realism was never
about having a documentary methodology. It is almost a
commonplace to acknowledge that all 'realisms' have no
privileged claim to transmit unalloyed reality. Rather,
realism is a genre, an artistic convention that looks like
something but isn't something. _Paisa_ (Paisan) would again
contribute to the myth, but at this point Rossellini was
beginning to move towards a freer way of making films. The
script would be rewritten on the spot and actors cast from
faces in the crowd, but there were still professional actors
and there was still the original script. So far Rossellini had
achieved a magnificent success. Both _Roma, citta aperta_
and _Paisa_ were hailed critically and commercially
successful. Both films significantly contributed to the
emergence of a post-war Italian identity, not so much for
the Italians, who would begin to complain that _Paisa_
showed Italy in too negative a light (too many prostitutes),
but for Europe and the Americans. New York and Paris hailed
Rossellini as an authentic and acceptable Italian voice.
Selznick opened his cheque book and a certain Swedish
actress wrote a letter. _Deustschland im jahre null_
(Germany in year zero) dealt with a similar postwar
landscape to _Roma, citta aperta_, but Berlin wasn't Rome
and the grim zero that the film runs down to was not the
grim hope of new beginnings born of sacrifice that closed
the earlier film, but rather despair and suicide. Audiences
were no longer prepared for this type of realism. Rossellini's final rejection
of Selznick and acceptance of Ingrid Bergman brought neither
success nor complete disaster. Rossellini continued to make
unique and challenging films, almost all of which were
critical and commercial disasters. From _Stromboli_ in 1949
to _Fear_ in 1954, he directed Bergman in magnificent
performances as their marriage failed. It was in the theatre
with _Joan of Arc at the Stake_ that the partnership finally
achieved commercial and critical acclaim, but by then their
partnership was over. Rossellini's career had
reached its nadir. The almost universal critical antipathy
towards him was relieved by one exception, Francois
Truffaut. However, Truffaut was becoming almost a school in
his own right. His championing of Rossellini, as well as
personally vindicating for Rossellini himself, also led the
way to a total reassessment of films, some of which had been
born already neglected. After a chaotic stay in
India, Rossellini returned and, unpredictable as ever, made
a critically and commercially successful film, _Il generale
della rovere_. The sixties also saw new possibilities open
up with a move into television -- dramatic productions such
as _La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV_ (The Rise of Louis
XIV) which, originally made for French television, was then
granted cinematic release -- and documentaries such as
_L'eta del ferro_ (The Iron Age). With this later
production, and up until his final film, Rossellini emerges
as a great educator, someone who wishes to show us the
greatness and the humanity of civilisation. His final film
_The Messiah_ was an attempt to humanise Christ, an attempt
difficult to accomplish in the wake of Pasolini's _Gospel
According to Saint Matthew_. The next film was to be a life
of Karl Marx. The final uncompleted
dualism is a key to understanding Rossellini as a thinker.
In the end the communists and the catholics argued over who
should bury him and this seems to be a fitting tribute to
someone who managed to maintain an openness to the war-time
alliance between the church and the party that we see traced
in _Roma, citta aperta_ and which for the next thirty years
would struggle for the body and soul of Italy. Gallagher's book is a
boisterous defence of Rossellini, which at the same time
recognises why a defence might be needed. It reassesses many
of his films, while allowing Rossellini himself to remain
the complicated figure that he is. At times, partisan
support can become unfair. Italian critics are likened to 'a
herd of lemmings' because they preferred Fellini's _La
strada_ to _Viaggio in Italia_ (439). I am not even sure if
this image makes sense. The historical analysis is both
detailed and comprehensive, but there is the occasional
drift into the usual banalities about Italy, the country of
dreamers, etc. (7). The style with which Gallagher writes is
immensely readable. Following his own contention that
'biography is fiction' (x), _The Adventures of Roberto
Rossellini_ is really a picaresque novel: ''Imagine! A murdered woman
who revenges herself immediately afterward! Ha!' Almedia
exclaimed. 'But it's perfect for the film!' exclaimed
Roberto.' (124) His life is easily made to
look like fiction. One of the paradoxes any realism has to
overcome is that people in 'real life' follow the models
stylised fiction presents us with. At their most real, they
act like film stars, or sometimes bad actors. Gramsci and Croce both
informed Rossellini's intellectual development and Gallagher
is precise and clear in delineating these influences.
Rossellini, however, has an essential passivity throughout
despite the energy and the adventures. He absorbs ideas like
'a sponge', we are told more than once (30, 110).
Notwithstanding all the arguments and the reading and the
manifestos, Rossellini films in a haphazard way, often
employing a method not because of the filmed result, but
because it is easier or it takes less time. The most extreme
manifestation of this laziness comes with Rossellini's
increasing tendency to delegate the role he ought to take,
or in the ultimate case to simply abandon the film and leave
it incomplete. Rossellini emerges as at times inspired in
his ambivalence, even heroic, but throughout Gallagher's
account there is also the suspicion that the master
filmmaker was still the dabbling playboy, frustratingly
fickle and easily bored. On inventing a remote control for
the zoom of his camera, we are told: 'Friends were quick to
note he had found a new way to be lazy. He was in heaven.'
(513) This ennui extends to cinema in general: 'By 1960,
watching movies bored him, with rare exceptions'
(553). To access Rossellini's
cinema is difficult to do now. Many of his films are scarce
and the some of the versions most often seen were not edited
under his supervision. However, in this timely intervention,
Tag Gallagher begins the process of seriously understanding
the maddeningly but entertainingly unrealistic
Rossellini. University of Ca'
Foscari Venice, Italy Footnotes 1. Quoted in _La Stampa_, 1
April 1994. 2. Alessandro Campi's
_Mussolini_ (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001) provides a
comprehensive review of the fascist and antifascist myths
surrounding Mussolini. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 John Bleasdale, 'The
Unrealistic Rossellini', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 34,
October 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n34bleasdale>. Read Gallagher's
Reply: Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to
Bleasdale', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 35, October 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n35gallagher>.
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