ROSSELLINI

What is it that man sees, when he looks at a horse? What is it that will never be put into words? For a man who sees, sees not as a camera does when it takes a snapshot, not even as a cinema-camera, taking its succession of instantaneous snaps; but in a curious rolling flood of vision, in which the image itself seethes and rolls; and only the mind picks out certain factors which shall represent the image seen. That is why a camera is so unsatisfactory: its eye is flat, it is related only to a negative thing inside the box: whereas inside our living box there is a decided positive.

D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places.

Of all living major directors (certainly in the western world), Roberto Rossellini remains the most neglected and inaccessible outside his own country. And with no other director is there such a discrepancy between the estimate of his achievement by a handful of experts and the apathy or scorn of non-specialist critics and the public at large. Yet not only has he made great films; he also belongs, with Eisenstein, Murnau, Welles, Godard, among the key figures of film history. Much of his oeuvre (especially his recent work for Italian television-THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, SOCRATES, AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO) is unlikely ever to gain widespread popular acceptance. Despite the fact that they were conceived for the most "popular" of mass media, the deep appeal of these films is to the specialist in their historical subjects or to the student of film style and method, though (with their intensive explorations of key phases in the development of western civilization) they might provide a useful antidote to the culture-made-easy popularizing of Sir Kenneth Clark and his "Civilisation."

It is ironic that it is precisely those films which would seem-through the immediately recognizable universality of their concerns-to stand the most chance of general acceptance, and which arguably represent the summit of Rossellini's achievement, which were responsible for his rejection by press and public after the generally enthusiastic response to OPEN CITY and FAISAN: the series he made with Ingrid Bergman during the early Fifties. STROMBOLI, EUROPA 51, VOYAGE IN ITALY, deserve recognition as classics of the cinema, works that, though the experiences they...