Film Forum

Roberto Rossellini entered Italy’s film industry as a sound effects man before becoming a screenwriter. Summing up his time writing for others, Rossellini declared, “I was their slave.” He maintained his disdain for scripts in a career that swerved between fiction and documentary, cinema and television, present-day reality and the lessons of history.

Rossellini’s breakthrough came with ROME, OPEN CITY, the film that revitalized Italy’s battered industry, brought a new frankness to the screen, introduced moviegoers around the world to the legendary Anna Magnani, and helped prove that international films could be big box office in U.S. arthouses. His next two films, PAISAN and GERMANY YEAR ZERO, became classics of “Neorealism” in their own right. Rossellini’s iconoclasm would later prompt François Truffaut to famously cite him as the father of the French New Wave as well.

Following his neorealist trilogy, Rossellini moved on to L’AMORE, a two-part film starring both Magnani and OPEN CITY co-screenwriter Federico Fellini, the latter in a controversial episode (“Il Miracolo”) that spurred a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case; the dark satire THE MACHINE TO KILL BAD PEOPLE; and THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, a loose biographical film of Saint Francis of Assisi.

After receiving a fan letter from Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini cast her in his next film, STROMBOLI, a visceral character study shot on location on the Sicilian island. The film’s artistry was overshadowed by the tabloid-fueled scandal provoked by Rossellini’s affair with Bergman and their protracted divorces. The couple made four more features together: EUROPE ‘51, FEAR, JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE and the masterpiece of the collaboration, VOYAGE TO ITALY. A new 4K restoration of the latter by Cinecittà labs will have its New York premiere as part of the Rossellini retrospective.

“I have never been able to do what I wanted to do from beginning to end,” Rossellini once lamented in an interview. “In cinema, my desire to speculate has been stronger than my desire for survival.” Rossellini actually wound up doing both, speculating and surviving, crafting a body of work that evolved alongside an industry whose assembly-line method he so vehemently rejected. Tossed together, shakily financed, and often refined during shooting to conform to an obscure plan Rossellini kept in his own head, the films retain a sense of dangerous spontaneity.

Co-presented by Cinecittà and the Ministry of Culture of Italy.

 

Program text by Kyle Westphal

Download Festival Flyer

Trailer

Films in this Series