Roberto Rossellini | Stromboli | Paisà / Paisan | Francesco giullare di Dio | India Matri Bhumi | Socrates
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Rossellini's films are as much documentaries as they are fiction. They were a major influence on the semi-documentary film movement. One can find an interesting discussion of Rossellini's films by Fred Camper at his web site: http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Rossellini.html.
Stromboli (1949) is a film of great pictorial beauty. It takes place on the title volcanic island north of Sicily, near the same islands Antonioni employed for L'Avventura (1959 - 1960).
Stromboli resembles Rossellini's later The Rise of Louis XIV (1966). Both deal with outsiders who get involved with and try to transform a complex society. In both films, the locals engage in fantastically complex, but often pointless rituals. These rituals dominate their whole social lives. Both take place in beautiful settings, which contain endless corridors down which characters wander, as in a dream. Both films end up with the hero alone, facing major thoughts about his place in the universe. The two films differ in that Louis is the creator of many of the complex rituals in the second film, whereas the inhabitants of Stromboli have inherited theirs from time immemorial.
The entrance into Stromboli is one of the major sequences in Rossellini. This is as much an entrance to another world as Alice's trip down the rabbit hole. Although there is nothing supernatural about Stromboli, the film is about a mind changing journey to a completely other mode of experience. In addition to Rossellini's superb staging, these scenes are greatly aided by Renzo Rossellini's music, one of the best parts of his film score.
Rossellini's images during this sequence often have a common architecture. There is a horizontal band going across the upper portion of the screen. This band has most of the imagery showing the meaningful aspects of the location. It can be called the zone of information. Inside, in the church this zone shows the altar and the religious images. Outside, a similar zone typically contains the buildings of Stromboli, with their unique construction and appearance. The zone contains what is most striking and unique about the image currently on the screen.
In front of the zone of information, there is a large empty area taking up a huge region at the base of the screen. This is where the people tend to walk and move. This area tends to be almost empty, except for the humans. Outside it can be a yard or roadway. Inside the church, it is the empty space where the congregation moves and assembles. Towards the end of the shot, the people can walk up to and actually enter the zone of information, standing in front of small portions of it.
The zone is not at the absolute top of the screen. Instead, there is an upper band going across the top of the screen, sometimes narrow, sometimes quite large. The region is completely empty of people. It tends to have very meaningful objects in it. These objects are small in number, but profoundly significant. On Stromboli, this is where we see the volcano itself. It is a huge triangle, rising up over the horizontal zone of information, which contains the unusual buildings of the island. In the church, the upper region contains the statue of the Madonna, presiding over the church. The Madonna is draped from behind by curtains, which form a triangle similar to the volcano of Stromboli itself. The visual echo is appropriate. The volcano is where Bergman's character will find God, at the end of the picture. It is a place where the divine mystery and presence in the universe is made manifest. It presides over the island as a reminder of spiritual grace, just as the Madonna's statue presides over the church.
Bergman's character will have conflicts with both. She is understandably upset by and terrified of the active volcano. And she will later take down her husband's pictures of the Madonna in their house.
Rossellini's three part image construction is very easy to follow. We see a mighty symbol in the top horizontal region, otherwise nearly empty. We see a horizontal zone, densely packed with information - often rectilinear information, such as the altar pictures or the buildings. Finally we see the people moving around down below, doing their actions. Such images have great pictorial complexity and beauty. Yet the information they convey is easily seen and grasped. They seem logical. And yet full of new, complex information and visual imagery.
The people often move in organized processions. This begins with Bergman's wedding procession, which moves throughout the internment camp and church. Later, on the island, there is a procession of inhabitants of the island, who are carrying the couple's luggage. The two processions echo each other. Just as the wedding procession is a public recognition of a major ceremony, that of marriage, so does the procession on the island tend to give meaning to the entrance into Stromboli. This entrance also seems like an almost religious ritual, fraught with significance and meaning. Both processions tend to go down straight line paths. On the island, these are down the often narrow paths between buildings, and walled lanes between narrow stone walls. These echo the prison camp we have just left. They make it seem as if Bergman has traded one prison for another.
Rossellini shoots these narrow paths in several ways. One key shot is from above, at around a 40 degree angle or less. It has the typical three part construction of these scenes. But the empty area for the people down below is not entirely empty. Instead, it contains a walled path, seen from above, that goes from the lower right hand corner of the screen, almost to the upper left. It is a striking diagonal line. Bergman and her husband traverse this path.
Other shots during the entrance involve Rossellini pointing his camera straight down the long paths between buildings. These paths extend deep into the distance of the shot. They are almost archetypal images, showing the audience what it is like to stare into such long corridors. These interesting shots temporarily abandon the three part zone construction, giving some visual variety to the sequence.
There are occasional tracking shots here. One of the best follows the couple down the staircase outside their home, after their first trip inside their house. The tracking is very graceful and surprising. One wonders how the camera can float so smoothly down the outside of the staircase.
More often, Rossellini pans. The finale of the entrance into Stromboli consists of one of Rossellini's best panning shots. This is the one that starts off with the characters on a path by the ocean surrounded by volcanic rocks, and which ends with an ominous shot of the volcano. Rossellini's pans anticipate those of Antonioni. Rossellini's seem to be a little bit faster. They also tend to be anchored to a series of intermediate compositions, what I've labeled as "rest stops" in the panning shots of Richard Fleischer.
One of the best scenes in the film shows a maze-like group of buildings from which Bergman is trying to escape. She wanders a great deal through them, and never does find her way out. But she gets some emotional relief from a large cactus plant in the background at one point. Later, she will have a similar plant inside her house: an innovation never heard of by the local islanders.
The maze scene is shot from above, so viewers can actually see the whole structure of maze like buildings at once. The idea is to inform the viewer, and to allow them to understand. The viewer gets an insight into the unique maze like architecture of Stromboli. Like many of Rossellini's images, it is both visually beautiful, and a clear exposition of the environment of the story.
Rossellini is notable for the exceptional logic and clarity of his exposition. His films look as if they were created by Mr. Spock, the logical Vulcan of the Star Trek shows. Part of this lucidity is related to his visual style. Many of the scenes in his films are staged in a rectilinear manner, one designed to make clear all the relationships and events taking place. They often show typical events of these locales. The films are expositions of complete, standard processes.
When the boat leaves for Stromboli in the opening scenes, we see it actually leaving the dock. The dock structure is a rectangle surrounding the boat. Rossellini shoots it face on, so we see the rectangle in pure form. It is a striking rectilinear composition. It also makes clear the entire process of leaving the dock. It is an inclusive image: it shows both the boat, and the dock machinery, all in one shot. All of this is typical of Rossellini. He wants to inform his viewers as much as possible, to show them entire processes, whenever he can. Similarly, we see the boat leaving the harbor, and shots of the train with its railroad bridges. All of these try to show complete processes, both an object and its background. There is both an educational and a documentary aspect to all of this.
In the fishing scene in Stromboli, the fishermen are all lined up in a row in their long boat. Rossellini shoots them frontally, with the plane of the image parallel to their line, thus emphasizing this linear arrangement. Behind the fishermen in their boat is a trough, running parallel to the line of the fisherman. This is where the tuna are dumped after being caught. Rossellini frequently cuts to this trough, showing the placement of the tuna there. His camera is now at an exactly 90 degree angle to the fishermen, showing the trough straight on against its long length. Other aspects of the staging are also rectilinear. Bergman's boat approaches along the fishing boats on a straight line, parallel to the boat itself. Later, she leaves the fishermen and watches them; the pier she is on is at a straight perpendicular to the line of the boat. The whole staging is designed to make clear the fishing process. Its rectilinear quality is visually fascinating in itself. It also helps the film exposition seem logical and clear - Rossellini's paramount qualities.
The politics of Stromboli recall those of Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema (1948). Both deal with Sicilian fishermen. Both films express great pity about the extreme poverty and primitiveness of the life style of the fishermen; both are manifestos demanding improvements in their lot. Yet both films are deeply critical of the fisher society, and the way its inhabitants cling to their traditions. Both films suggest these people are greatly to blame for their own fate, by not taking actions that would improve their lives. Both films' characters are utterly resistant to any changes. In Visconti's film, this is treated as bleak tragedy. But Rossellini portrays this resistance with black comedy.
Stromboli does not tip its hand on its beliefs. Both of the characters have traits that hurt their sympathy. The hero is a relentlessly close minded man, who clings to his traditional way of life. Like everyone in his town, he has all the answers, and thinks everyone else from the outside is just stupid. He and the other islanders are as close minded as a bunch of cartoon characters. The heroine is a bit of a tramp, with a life history of opportunistically using men to make her way in the world. Getting a job herself never seems to be an option for: she expects men to support her. Yet, I have to honestly admit that the life on Stromboli would drive me crazy too. Like most modern people, I couldn't stand it, and I think she is right to rebel against it. With two such less than heroic people on screen, it is hard to know what to think about the characters, or their situation.
The politics of Open City (1945) date badly. A film whose hero is a heroic Communist, and whose villains are a pair of Evil Lesbians seems to me to be the exact opposite of the actual historic record of the two groups. In the real world, Communists have murdered tens of millions of people, whereas homosexuals have killed no one. Rossellini actually has his Communist give a noble speech about the better world they were building for their children. By this time, of course, Communists had murdered millions of people in the Ukraine, and Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union was in full swing. The far Left has always had a fanatic hatred of homosexuals. Such overrated turkeys as Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) suggests that Fascism was rooted in homosexuality, while Gregory Nava's El Norte (1984) contrasts its noble peasant heroes with gay waiters in the USA. Such truly bad films have been promoted relentlessly by critics, who share their politics. The international effort to achieve civil rights for homosexuals, which I support, is now making people have a much more realistic and sympathetic look at this group.
Paisà / Paisan (1946) consists of six episodes, each set in a different location, during the Allied invasion of Italy. It takes place in a moment of major social change: the fall of Fascism in Italy, and the rise of the post-war world. This is typical of Rossellini's interest in major social forces, and people who try to effect social transformation.
Fred Camper listed a number of climaxes in Rossellini where the lead experiences a revelation, such as the finale of Stromboli. One more: the end of the Naples segment in Paisan, where the black American soldier realizes for the first time how desperately poor the Italians are after war. Ending stories on a revelation seems so avant-garde. It is a bit like the quiet endings to come in prose science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, which sometimes end on a body posture.
The monastery episode ends in a banquet, as in The Rise of Louis XIV. The lead characters are on a central dais or table, in both films, and the banquets take place in special large, high-ceilinged rooms reserved for that purpose: they are part of a daily ritual. Both films show worlds engulfed in rituals, and there are special regulations which govern dining.
Rossellini likes to create on-screen mazes out of buildings, walkways, etc. There are paths through yards and walls in the village in Stromboli; in the mill where the heroine takes the Americans in the opening of Paisan; in the ruins through which Bergman and Sanders walk in Strangers. Another example of this: the Florence episode of Paisan. Florence is turned into a giant maze of roofs, tunnels, courtyards, and even corridors of the Uffizi Gallery! Quite beautiful and imaginative. Both here and in Stromboli, Rossellini seems to have used real locations to create his mazes - these do not seem to be studio sets. Both mazes have a 3D quality: Rossellini takes advantage of roofs, staircases, and the way the villages of Stromboli are built on hills and in several levels to give a vertical dimension to his mazes. Mazes are often seen as a comic or joyful aspect of life. They certainly have a bit of this same playful effect here - but they are also employed in the grimmest of scenes. In Paisan, the Florence episode shows partisans battling the Nazis. This gives an odd counterpoint to the use of the maze.
Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) has similar scenes wandering all over the zone near the aunt's house, which show the strong influence of Rossellini. The exteriors here seem delightfully maze like, an intricate procession of paths, waterways, fences, yards, walls, hollows and rises, alleys and roads. The characters wander through all of these. Godard's effect is more tongue-in-cheek than Rossellini's. It is something deliberately done for effect, as a matter of pure visual style, as are several other sequences in Godard's avant-garde film. In contrast, Rossellini embeds his maze as a part of a movie plot - the characters in Florence are taking a roundabout route to evade the Nazis.
Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, 2000) also reminds one of Godard and Rossellini. The young characters are often wandering through city wall areas and old building yards which bear a resemblance to these earlier filmmakers.
Rossellini continuously criticizes the Italians as bigoted, and suggests they are less developed in this manner than the Americans. The Naples episode shows a puppet play in which blacks are depicted as inferior to whites, and the monks are anti-Semitic. By contrast, Americans are shown as a more integrated society. This pro-American stance is really unusual in works of world cinema. Rossellini seems to be engaged in self-criticism, one of the most important of all activities. He is looking for ways to improve Italian society.
Rossellini has always been interested in outsiders. Here, we see large numbers of Americans, plus some English characters as well, intermixing with the Italians. Rossellini has never depicted Italy as racially homogeneous - rather, it is full of foreigners of every stripe. This makes a welcome contrast with, say, Rohmer, who tends to depict France as consisting of nothing but the ethnically French.
Francesco giullare di Dio (1950) tells the story of St. Francis of Assisi, and the friars he organized.
Francesco giullare di Dio stands out today, because of its fervent support of traditional religious ideas. St. Francis and his followers are shown trying to help the poor, to comfort the sick, and to preach peace. These key ideas, which derive directly and faithfully from Christ's teachings in the Gospels, used to be core ideas in religion. But today's monstrous Religious Right has blasphemously replaced them with support for the rich and glorifying war. It is so depressing to live in an era, in which war propaganda comes constantly from far right wing men masquerading as religious leaders.
Peace is central to this film. The final line has St. Francis sending out his monks to preach peace to the world. The sequence with the tyrant is one of the great pro-peace scenes in film history.
Ginepro's path towards the tyrant's camp is another of Rossellini's mazes.
Rossellini's reconstruction of the Middle Ages would be influential with later filmmakers. Such works as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1955), Luis Buñuel's Simon of the Desert (1965), Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1965) and Robert Bresson's Lancelot du lac (1974), all seem to derive many of their approaches from Rossellini's film. Rossellini concentrated on outdoor filming. He showed primitive looking buildings, wooden constructions, and simple, crude looking ornamentation. Everything looks primitive and rudimentary. Aggregations of people, such as the tyrant's followers, seem barely organized, and dispersed through simple buildings, tents and bands. People seem to be simple farmers, or very crude and low brow rag-tag soldiers. Soldiers tend towards primitive brutality, and they commit appalling attacks on ordinary folks. It is a depiction of everyday life in the Middle Ages as "nasty, brutish and short" (Hobbes' summary of pre-civilized life in Leviathan.) One suspects that Tarkovsky got his ideas, not from Rossellini directly, but by using Bergman's film as a model. And Tarkovsky in turn seems to have influenced Sergei Paradjanov's Tsvet granata / The Color of Pomegranates (1969). By contrast, the ornamentation of the knights' helmets in Bresson, seems to echo similar sculptured ornaments on the tyrant's helmet in Francesco giullare di Dio.
India Matri Bhumi (1959) is a series of episodes, all with a common background in contemporary India. In this it resembles Paisà, which also was formed out of a series of thematically linked separate short stories. The film was shot in 1957, but not released till 1959.
The opening of the film stresses the tolerance of Indians, and their respect for all races, who live together in the subcontinent. This was a major theme of Paisà as well. India's heritage of peace recalls St. Francis in Francesco giullare di Dio, who preached peace. Rossellini is touching on his two chief political and social themes, here in the film's overture.
Both the opening, and the dam sequence, are full of Indians walking along, with the dam episode especially depicting rows of moving people. This recalls the processions in Stromboli. The elephant episode will also include a wedding, as in Stromboli.
The episode with the elephants resembles Francesco giullare di Dio (1950). The highly sympathetic elephants resemble the monks of the earlier film. Both are specialized groups, who live essentially outdoors, and who lead a communal existence. Both live in a geographically similar area, one with open spaces, bushes and forest, and shallow, easily forded streams. The scene where the elephants push over trees and gather logs, recalls the one where the monks break off and gather flowering branches. Both wind up carrying huge branches or logs back to the center of the group. Both films show the elephants and the monks collapsing into the stream areas, getting thoroughly wet. Both the monks and the elephants wind up lying down in the water. Both films show the simple preparations of the food, which is largely vegetable in both cases, and which requires a lot of work. The meal preparation scenes are broadly comic in both films. The elephants even look like the monks, with their dark skins recalling the monks' brown robes, and the elephants' huge ears somewhat resembling the monks' hoods. The elephants wear bells, with frequently ring, just as the monks' altarpiece consists of an arch of bells. The bells also recall the leper in the earlier film. The mahouts, the elephants' keepers, constantly express love and affection for the elephants. This resembles the affection the monks keep expressing for each other, one of their most notable traits. The expression is fully physical, with hugs and greetings.
Elephants always seem very special to humans. They seem to convey some astonishing message of nature. They are so big, and like the whales in Melville's Moby-Dick, seem like nature personified. Encountering them is a richly meaningful experience. So it seems profoundly right for them to be filmed in a way equivalent to the monks of the preceding film, who also had a special message for humanity. Both monks and elephants are a special, admirable group, with something important to convey. Both groups convey joy, with a bit of a sympathetically comic edge.
The shadow puppets here recall the puppet theater in Naples in Paisà. The shadow puppets also inevitably evoke cinema as a medium. The first shadow puppets we see all represent animals: India is depicted as a country so close to nature that even its stories have animal heroes.
The shots of Benares evoke Rossellini's theme of the maze. We see paths between the buildings, leading down to the water in huge outdoor staircases. Individually, these recall the shots of Florence in Paisà. There is a difference. While the Florence shots blended together, to form a continuous path through the maze of the city, the shots of Benares seem instead like the separate ends of dozens of paths through the city. Still, the effect is still so maze-like that Rossellini seems born to shoot Benares. The year before, Satyajit Ray had shot Aparajito (1956) there.
Both the Ganges river in Benares, and the river in the dam sequence immediately following, are repeatedly linked to death and funerals. This recalls the River Po finale of Paisà, which opens with the murdered partisan in the river. The sequence also shows the rising waters of the dam submerging trees, a temple, and even a smaller lake itself. Water represents a barely controllable principle of destruction in these films. Rivers often stood for time in Greek thought, also often a destroyer.
The "building of the dam" sequence shows huge earth-moving equipment, digging vast holes in the ground. This subject is oddly beloved by small children. In fact, canny entrepreneurs in the 1990's have assembled and sold videos of construction equipment and projects, to keep little viewers happy. Three and Four-year-olds especially like this sort of material. Little kids are also crazy about big animals, such as dinosaurs, hippos - and elephants, the subject of the first sequence in India Matri Bhumi. Kids are also crazy about tigers and monkeys, who star in the film's last two episodes. Other Rossellini films focus on material that interests children. Volcanoes (Stromboli) are the passion of many kids. The Flowers of St. Francis, source of Francesco giullare di Dio, is a devotional work often read by young Catholics. The story of how Cardinal Mazarin left his fortune to the young Louis XIV appears in Alexandre Dumas' superb sequel to The Three Musketeers (1844), Twenty Years After (1845). I recognized this plot right away from my own childhood readings of Dumas, and was thrilled to see it in the film. It is one of the most gripping episodes in Dumas' novel. One also suspects that Socrates, Renaissance Florence, and Garibaldi are among the subjects studied in school by Italian children.
Rossellini's films are hardly designed for young children, and there is certainly nothing juvenile about their technique. However, there is an expression of child-like wonder, and even more importantly, child-like interest in the world around them.
At the beginning of the "old man and the tiger" sequence, the man's wife decorates pictures of her Hindu God with flowers. This ancient Indian tradition also echoes the way the monks gathered flowers to welcome St. Clare in Francesco giullare di Dio.
Jean L'Hôte wrote the narration for India Matri Bhumi. In college, read a novel by Jean L'Hôte, called La Communale. This was an autobiographical fiction, about his youth growing up as the son of two married schoolteachers in a small French town. We spent a whole term reading this in French class. The novel was endearingly comic, and gave a vivid and detailed picture of what French life was like in the 1930's, from the point of view of the boy-narrator. Jean L'Hôte's narration in India Matri Bhumi is recognizably similar. It is full of first person accounts by the characters, telling what their daily lives are like in traditional India. Both are gracefully packed with information.
The introduction to La Communale said L'Hôte was starting a career in the French film industry. A recent check of his credits showed he made 12 films as a director, mainly from his own scripts. One was a 1965 version of La Communale. Despite all this, he seems largely forgotten today. In fact, since most of his work was made for television, it seems as if it never received much critical attention at all. Although the French New Wave of the 1960's allowed over 100 young directors to make their first films, including Jean L'Hôte, most never achieved the slightest recognition
Socrates (1970) is a look at the life of the Greek philosopher. Most of the film is rough sledding, consisting of shots of people sitting around and talking. The dialogue is not hugely gripping, but then, I've never been able to enjoy Plato's dialogues. This is odd, because I love Greek drama and poetry, and have read all the extant Greek dramas in translation. But I've always found philosophy to be very uninteresting. The use of zooms in the film is also disconcerting. The zoom lens always made me unpleasantly conscious of the presence of a camera on a set; generally speaking, I usually regret its common employment in films of that era.
Socrates does have an unforgettable climax, however. Rossellini's camera tracks with Socrates, as he walks backward and forward in his cell after drinking the poison used to execute him. The image is overwhelmingly moving. This is an apparently simple image, but it is very dignified. It links Socrates to the most basic and familiar of human actions. It has an everyday quality, as if Socrates is participating in everyday life. The directness of Rossellini's tracking shot is also involving. It follows the most central sort of straight line motion, and is part of Rossellini's rectilinear style. Its logic and fundamental geometric and spatial quality make it into a central image of motion in the world.