Writings of Jean-Marie Straub on Roberto Rossellini

The two texts are taken from Straub-Huillet Writings (Translated and edited by Sally Shafto).

 FIVE NEW FILMS BY ROSSELLINI 

Five films by Rossellini will be released in Paris in their first run this season. These five films are L'amore (1947), Doư'è la libertà...? (Where Is Freedom?, 1953), Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953), Giovanna d'Arco al rogo Joan of Arc at the Stake, 1954) and La paura (Fear, 1954).'

L'amore (Una voce umana [The Human Voice] and Il miracolo (The Miracle]): An extraordinary recital by Anna Magnani shot by Rossellini in 1947, L'amore is made up of two medium-length films, Una voce umana, after Jean Cocteau, and Il miracolo, after a screenplay by Federico Fellini, which shocked certain American Catholics.

Dov'è la libertà..?: Rossellini's first comic film with the Italian star Totò, who, after twenty years spent in prison, escapes and, disgusted by the life "free" people lead, returns to his cell by employing the same subterfuge he used "to escape."

Journey to Italy (for the French title, La Divorcée de Naples was for a long time considered but L'Amour est le plus fort has finally been chosen!): Starring Mrs. Rossellini— Ingrid Bergman-the film promises us, according to Robert Lachenay writing recently in Arts, a nice fight, because the private screening of this film on the Champs-Elysées violently divided more than a hundred filmmakers and critics, some seeing in it "one of the worst films ever shot," while others "one of the best."

Joan of Arc at the Stake, after the oratorio by Claudel and Honegger, is Rossellini's first film in color, in Gevacolor: Opening and closing on a circle of angels in the sky and on earth, the film is the heir of both Méliès and Murnau (the nonrealistic sequences in Faust), and provides proof that only the cinema can so fully express the cosmic poetry of Claudel's Catholicism, and much more... The French version of this film has just been shot by Rossellini himself, with Ingrid Bergman dubbing herself with a wonderful accent that adds even more to the film!

Finally, Fear, Rossellini's most recent film, shot in Germany, where it's already been released, freely adapted from Stefan Zweig's novella: "I have been criticized," Rossellini tells me, "for not having given enough relief to the lover's character. It's intentional: what to me was the wife's lie and her confession, her release after having confessed..." Also with Ingrid Bergman.

HIS PROJECTS

Currently, Rossellini is preparing Carmen (after Mérimée), which he is going to shoot in the near future in Spain. He greatly admires Murnau's Faust and would like, as well, to be able to shoot one day a Faust with Gérard Philipe and Fredric March. He is also thinking about an amazing Sicilian comedy that he's told me about at length. And he's also musing about a film on Italy during the Renaissance, in the manner of Stendhal's Italian Chronicles. The subject is still rather vague: the story of a woman married to a gentleman whom she doesn't love at all at first. Little by little she takes pity on this cruel tyrant, and even sacrifices herself…

•   An effective sacrifice for her husband or that was done in vain?

•   "A sacrifice is never in vain," Rossellini replies, "... Compare the humanity of the Renaissance to that of today: humanity's today is nonetheless less cruel."

J-M.S.

DOES ROSSELLINI’S WORK HAVE A CHRISTIAN MEANING?

Beyond the appearance of "neorealism," doesn't Roberto Rossellin's work seem to have a clear Christian meaning, even more deeply than the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson?

The perspective of everyone who wants to limit Rossellinis genius to Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City) and Paisà (Paisan) is based on a misunderstanding because as early as Rome, Open City, Rossellini was expressing a Catholic vision of the human condition. "The presence of a priest in this film," writes Henri Agel accurately, "is not only valuable for its cultural accuracy (there is almost always a priest in Italian films). It spiritually articulates the drama." In Rome, Open City, Rossellini confirms through the mouth of the card-playing German officer that whatever the ruthlessness of the hatred, malice, and cruelty of men, "the same one always wins," which is to say the Crucified Man with whom the partisan identifies while being tortured to death without having committed treason, “correctly on the correct path and who, fighting for justice, walked in paths of the Saviour, which are infinite,” Rossellini says. In this sense, Rome, Open City is as much a film about the resistance as La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) is a film about a witchcraft trial.

NON-PARTICIPATION IN THE FILTH OF OTHERS IN PAISAN

Henri Agel is undoubtedly right to say that the final images in Paisan “cry out the horrors of a world where evil has been unleashed" and that they have "an apocalyptic grandeur." But Rossellini says that he also wanted to express "an extraordinary innocence, purity and non-participation in the filth of others” that, in his opinion, is “the miraculous thing."

You'll recall [he says] in Paisan—I apologize for quoting myself but it is for me an enormously important line of dialogue-when the Negro is falling asleep, the child says to him, "If you go to sleep, I'll steal your shoes. The Negro goes to sleep and the kid steals his shoes. It's correct and normal. It's this extraordinary game where the limits of morality lie.

And it is also absurd to see a "newsreel" in Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero). "This film," writes Abbot Ayfre, "would be a failure if it were only a documentary. This film is something else. It unfolds within another dimension, and depth ..." Abbot Ayfre is right in interpreting Germany Year Zero as:

The testimony of a world where God's immense love cannot find any way through the bloody and sad play of human passions except in the shape of a figure kneeling over a dead child. |....] It is fantastically original to have made this child not a symbol-the word is too empty-but the effective sign, almost the sacrament, of a humanity which, beyond all progress, seems constantly obligated to return to zero and to ask itself the same question about its meaning.

STROMBOLI: A KINGDOM OF BODIES AND SPIRIT

As for Stromboli, allow me to quote an important text by Maurice Schérer that applies to this film as well as to Francesco, giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis) and Europa ' 51:

Just as we are only sensitive to the beauty of Gothic art through the intermediary of religious sentiment— proving, thereby, the genius of the idea that inspired it-Rossellini's latest films allow us finally to glimpse the limits of the affable atheism to which contemporary cinema generally owes its most admired works. [...] Like the religion he references, Rossellini's genius is being able to discover such a direct union—and, at the same time, such an infinite distance —between the kingdom of bodies (its material and the spirit (its object) so that the most tested effects of an already old art-which it uses with such authority and refinement! —attain a dignity of such a new, rich and profound significance.

And yet, Roberto Rossellinis films are less frequently shown in France than those of Vittorio De Sica, even in film clubs of a Catholic persuasion.

J-M.S.

B.