Rossellini's Pictorial Histories Author(s): David Forgacs Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 64, No. 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 25-36 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2011.64.3.25 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Quarterly This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:52:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms R OSSELLINI’S PICTORIAL HISTORIES DAVID FORGACS FOLLOWS THE ITALIAN DIRECTOR’S PATH FROM NEOREALISM TO TELEVISION DRAMA The release by the Criterion Collection of two DVD boxed cluding an interview with Pierre Arditi, who played Pascal, sets—Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy and Rossellini’s History and introductions by film scholar Aurore Renaut, but they Films: Renaissance and Enlightenment—reminds us of an are skimpier than those that Criterion has attached to the important fact about the shape of Rossellini’s career, namely neorealist films. that he moved from making films about the present or the If we try to define the essential differences between the very recent past to films about the distant past. His last com- early and late Rossellini we cannot really pin them down to pleted feature was The Messiah (1975). It also raises a ques- the change of subject or genre, the move from contemporary tion about that move: what do the late historical films, made stories to costume films or from black-and-white to color. mainly for television, have in common with the neorealist Many American and British directors who, like Rossellini, films on which his international reputation was founded? made war features or propaganda films, also went on, as he The later films still generally tend to be treated, as they did, after 1945 or 1946, to make other kinds of film, including were by most critics when they first appeared, like poor cous- comedies, melodramas, and costume pictures. If anything, ins of the early ones. The difference of treatment is reflected Rossellini was unusual in sticking with World War II for as in these two DVD packages. Open the War Trilogy box and long as he did. At the beginning of Stromboli (1949) Karin you find beautiful transfers ofRome Open City (1945), Paisan (Ingrid Bergman) is in a Displaced Persons camp. In Europe (Paisà, 1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948), together with ’51 (1952) Irene, played again by Bergman, whose young son the cornucopia of extras one has come to expect from Cri- Michel has died after throwing himself down the stairwell, is terion. These include a forty-page booklet, original interviews, told by her Communist friend Andrea that the real cause of and video essays as well as copies of already existing docu- Michel’s action was the war and bombing that had scarred mentaries and rarely seen archive film of Rossellini talking to his infancy. Rossellini would return several times to the war students at Rice University in 1970. Peter Bondanella’s audio in his later films:Il Generale Della Rovere (1959—also avail- commentary to Rome Open City, originally recorded for the able in a new transfer from the Criterion Collection and in 1995 laserdisc, is also included. In short, this is by far the best Italy in a two-disc set from Minerva Classics), Era notte a edition of these three films now available anywhere. By con- Roma (Blackout in Rome, 1960) and the early part of Anno trast, the History Films set, consisting of The Age of the Medici Uno (1974). In other words, he never really let go of the war, (three episodes, 1972), Blaise Pascal (1972), and Cartesius or it never quite let go of him. (1974)—all of them made for television—is released in Crite- rion’s more economical Eclipse series, with no video extras, D IFFERENCES even though each disc has excellent sleeve notes by Rossel- The most visible difference between early and late Rossellini lini’s American biographer Tag Gallagher as well as subtitle lies in what seems to be a striking switch of style. The early and audio options. The same three films are released in postwar films, particularlyPaisan and Germany Year Zero, are France by Carlotta Films in the set Une encyclopédie histo- characterized, above all in their final parts, by a radical strip- rique de Rossellini, together with a fourth, Augustine of Hippo ping out of dialogue. Spoken interactions between characters (1972). The Carlotta box does include some video extras, in- are replaced by a camera that observes isolated individuals moving silently across a landscape: panning to follow a dead Film Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3, pps 25–36 ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s partisan floating in a life belt down the Po river, tracking Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2011.64.3.25 alongside the boy Edmund (Edmund Möschke) as he walks FILM QUARTERLY 5 2 This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:52:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Filming Germany Year Zero in Berlin Courtesy of Fondazione Rossellini, Rome. past the rubble of Berlin before leaping to his death from an sheet of glass.” He told the critic Mario Verdone in 1951 that empty building. In both cases the places in which these fig- it was sequences like these that constituted “the decisive ures move are also sites of memory. Rossellini recalled that moment” in his films and he claimed that the “narrative” the bodies of real partisans had remained afloat in the Po for parts were of much less interest to him. This spareness, the weeks. The ruins of Berlin were a reminder of the terrible suspension of dialogue, and the concentration on a photo- devastation wreaked by strategic bombing on the cities of graphed landscape is repeated in the films he made with Germany and of the death of over half a million German Ingrid Bergman: in Karin’s slow walk up the volcano at the civil ians, but they were also a visible sign of the internal dam- end of Stromboli, Irene’s first encounter with the bleak hous- age done to the minds of the survivors. These shots, in which ing project in Rome in Europe ’51, Katherine’s drives around the images of the city are offset by a minimal music written by Naples and her walks through Pompei or among the smoking Rossellini’s brother Renzo, seem to bear out Fellini’s claim craters of the Phlegraean Fields in Journey to Italy (1954). (in Fare un film, 1980) about Rossellini at this time having If we now compare the style of The Age of the Medici or “an enormous trust in the things photographed.” The camera Blaise Pascal with these earlier films everything seems to records but it cannot explain. André Bazin wrote in his re- have changed. Although large parts of the television films view of the film in 1949 that if we know anything about were shot, like Rossellini’s earlier films, in real locations, they Edmund “it is never from signs that are directly readable on are locations that have been dressed up, as in a living mu- his face, not even from his behavior.” Rossellini made Ger- seum, with period costumes and details: furniture, everyday many Year Zero while he was still grieving the death in 1946 objects, wall hangings in the interiors, horses and straw on the of his nine-year-old son Romano, to whose memory it is roads. This is true also of his later reconstructions of World dedicated, and he described the film in an interview with War II. Whereas the bomb damage we see in Rome Open Fernaldo Di Giammatteo in November 1948, as “cold as a City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero is real, that in Il Generale 62 SPRING 2011 This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:52:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Rossellini sets up a Schüfftan mirror shot for Socrates (1971) Photo: Gianni Assenza. Courtesy of Fondazione Rossellini, Rome. Della Rovere, shot entirely at Cinecittà, or in Anno uno is re- graphed parts of the image is very noticeable. The painted constructed. Moreover, in several outdoor scenes in his later scene is eerily cradled in the real landscape. films Rossellini uses what is known as a glass shot or Schüfftan The later films, finally, are in many scenes heavy on dia- mirror shot—an optical trick devised by cinematographer logue, and indeed on monologue delivered by the central Eugen Schüfftan and first used in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis characters, usually to one or more bystanders on screen, and (1927). The technique is illustrated by Tag Gallagher in his they are deliberately instructional. Rossellini referred to his wonderful video essay on Rossellini’s The Taking of Power by television films as didattici and, although the word in Italian Louis XIV (1966), also released by Criterion.