Devotion to good works (Europa 51), and acceptance of imperfect love (Voyage to Italy). Later, he celebrates the great artists, inventors, and philosophers of the western world (Socrates, 1970; Blaise Pascal, 1972; The Age of the Medici, 1972; Descartes, 1974).
However forthright Rossellini's message may have been, his manner of treatment repeatedly led him into modernist ambiguities. His penchant for mixed tone, episodic narratives, ellipses, and open endings often makes the films more evocative than their straightforward themes might suggest. By comparison with Visconti's elegance, Rossellini's style seems awkward. But his simplest effects, in context, often yield complex results, as in his use of temps morts, "dead time." Rossellini punctuates his stories with empty intervals of characters simply sitting or walking or thinking. The spectator must infer the characters' attitudes. In Voyage to Italy, Katherine pretends to be asleep when her husband returns from Capri, and Rossellini suggests a welter of emotions merely by intercutting shots of each partner.
Like Visconti, Rossellini also came to rely on a pan-and-zoom style after the early 1960s. But Visconti's scanning frame unrolls an endless spectacle, while Rossellini
Uses the pan-and-zoom for its simplicity and cheapness and for its ability to present the action neutrally, freeing us from any character's consciousness (Color Plate 16.2).
In the last fifteen years of his life, Rossellini launched a series of television films that would introduce the great figures and forces in history. This vast enterprise brought forth La Prise du pouvoir par Louis XIV (The Rise to Power of Louis XlV, 1966), the Pascal and Medici films, The Messiah
(1975), and other works. As costume dramas, these films are remarkably unspectacular. Full of talk and dominated by static long takes, they dwell on daily life in each era. Whereas Visconti imagines history as a vast opera, Rossellini dedramatizes it.
Visconti became a model for other Italian directors of an operatic turn, such as Franco Zeffirelli, Francesco Rosi, and Liliana Cavani. Rossellini's version of cinematic modernism, in the name of realism, humanism, and education, centrally influenced the new generation of the 1960s. "Here is our cinema," wrote Jacques Rivette, "those of us who are in our turn preparing to make films (did I tell you, it may be soon)."12
Child alone. In Francesco, giullare deDio (“Francesco, God’s Juggler,” aka The Little Flowers of St. Francis), Saint Francis of Assisi and his scampering, childlike disciples become models of gentleness and charity in a corrupt world.
In the films starring Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini presents a woman’s gradual discovery of moral awareness: A selfish and calculating war refugee comes to quiet acceptance of her husband’s love after a mystical experience on the edge of a volcano (Stromboli). A mother shattered by her son’s suicide devotes her life to relieving the suffering of others; her charity can only seem mad, and she winds up imprisoned in an asylum (E u - ropa 51). And an emotionally numb Englishwoman finds Italy frighteningly alive, even in its catacombs. Only after the accidental passing of a religious procession does she—perhaps—begin to love her husband once more (Voyage to Italy; see box).
Rossellini concentrates on the extraordinary person who can rediscover time-honored values in the postwar world. By contrast, Antonioni’s films focus on how ambition and class mobility make individuals lose their moral sensitivity. In Story of a Love Affair, for example, the heroine and hero accidentally caused the death of a friend years ago. Now, she is the wife of a wealthy industrialist, while he is an itinerant car salesman. Her husband’s curiosity about her past leads him to hire a detective, and eventually his investigation reunites the former lovers. As their passion takes hold once more, they begin to plot to murder the husband.
Narratively, many Italian art films of the early 1950s draw on such Neorealist conventions as ellipses and open endings. In particular, the focus on individuals’ psychological states led Rossellini and Antonioni toward a dedramatized approach derived from Neorealism’s concentration on mundane events. Now a film’s plot might mix scenes of banal conversation with scenes showing the characters reacting to their environment or simply walking or driving through a landscape.
The canonical example of the dedramatized tale is Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, in which the bickerings between Katherine and her husband alternate with scenes of her excursions to tourist sights around their villa. The excursion episodes suggest her romantic yearnings, her uncertainty about the role of physical pleasure, and her wish for a child (16.27), and she gradually recog-
16.27 The celebrated museum scene of Voyage to Italy: Katherine comes face-to-face with the striking physicality of ancient statuary.
16.28 La Strada: as Gelsomina sits by the roadside, a carnival band strolls out of nowhere.
Nizes the sterility of her marriage. Voyage to Italy pointed toward a filmmaking that would build scenes not around an intricate plot but around episodes in which casual, “undramatic” incidents would reveal characters’ passing moods and barely articulated problems. The museum scene in Voyage to Italy is notable for its lengthy camera movements, and in this respect it is characteristic of a stylistic development in Italian films of the early 1950s. More and more, directors used slowly paced tracking shots to explore characters’ relations within a concrete environment.
After the early 1950s, much of Italian “quality” cinema would center on individual problems. Instead of documenting a historical moment by depicting group struggles, filmmakers probed middle-class and upper-class characters for the psychological effects of contemporary life.
Alternatively, the filmmaker might treat middle and lower classes in a rather poetic way, as Federico Fellini did in a series of films beginning with Variety Lights (1950, codirected with Alberto Lattuada). In Fellini’s works of the 1950s, Neorealistic subject matter is given a lyrical, almost mystical, treatment. In La Strada (“The Road,” 1954), for instance, Fellini’s tale of victimized innocence has the simplicity of a parable. The itinerant entertainers Zampano and Gelsomina live in the grim countryside, but occasionally this realm overlaps with a more mysterious one (16.28). Marxist critics attacked Fellini for deviating from Neorealism, but he claimed that he remained true to its spirit of “sincerity.” 13 In any event, Fellini’s work, no less than that of Rossellini and Antonioni, turned Italian filmmaking from the verisimilitude of Neorealism toward a cinema of imagination and ambiguity. (For discussions of the careers of Fellini and Antonioni, see Chapter 19.)
World History
