ROBERTO ROSSELLINI IS CURRENTLY ENGAGED in a film project of unparalleled ambition, “to trace a good part of the history of human progress, [to) give a cultural orientation, in a general way, to vast masses of the public” (1972).1
Already completed are: The Iron Age (5 hours, 1964); The Rise of Louis XIV (95 minutes, 1967); The Acts of the Apostles (6 hours, 1968); Socrates (2 hours, 1969); Man’s Struggle for Survival (12 hours, 1970); Blaise Pascal (2 hours, 1972); Augustine of Hippo (2 hours, 1972); The Age of the Medici (252 minutes, 1973); Descartes (2 hours, 1974).
In preparation are: The Messiah; Denis Diderot; Niepce and Daguerre; The American Revolution; The Industrial Revolution (12 hours); Science (10 hours).
Related
FRANZ KLINE’S ROMANTIC ABSTRACTION
ROBERT CUMMING’S ECCENTRIC ILLUSIONS
His project poses a number of questions: What is he really doing? Why is he doing it? How does it all relate to the younger Rossellini, and to Italian neorealism?
These questions are interrelated.
Rossellini’s Reply to the Corruption of Modern Art
In a manifesto issued in 1965, and in numerous interviews, Rossellini has said that art and science have lost touch with one another. On one hand, the amelioration which science has brought to our lives has provoked “agitation, violence, indifference, ennui, anguish, spiritual inertia, passive resignation. Men today in developed countries seem no longer to have a sense of self or of things.”2 Our civilization, as we know it, is already dead. We are in a state of crisis, and are totally unprepared to meet the challenges of a (thus ominous) future.
Art, on the other hand, has “in the last hundred years turned into complaining. It is the expression of moral discomfort, unhappiness, incomprehension, but that is all. This complaining is based on a refusal to know the wodd; we are complaining because we are confronted by a world whose architecture we cannot grasp.”3
A civilization, always, bears its art as its fruit. A bee flies onto a flower, takes the pollen, transforms it, and it becomes honey. At the same time, the bee fertilizes other flowers. Its activity is multiple, complete: here we have the true function of the artist. If an artist does not fly, if he stays seated, if he complains that the flowers around him do not please him, then nothing will happen, flowers will no longer reproduce, it will be simply death. We will reach the aridity of death. But art, I think, is not death, it is life. It is the way of perpetuating life. It is the way of giving a reason to things. It is the way of exalting enthusiasm. It is the way of giving emotions. When art delights in killing emotions, in depriving life of everything vital, it is no longer an art [1962].4
Rossellini goes further. He believes that we no longer possess even the basic elements of a language for art, even the alphabet for an art. Our “art” has become increasingly infantile and corrupt. In his description of his planned film on Niepce and Daguerre, he wrote that the figurative arts had “searched, over the centuries, for truth. After the advent of photography—which is the truth as it appears to our eyes—figurative art pulls away from accurate depiction with enormous rapidity, and reaches every form of abstraction. And in this movement, many other intellectual activities are implicated” [1972].
In place of art for art’s sake, he seeks a Renaissance concept of art, one which reveals the truth of man’s world and which is dedicated to serving the needs of human progress. “Art has the capacity of doing things, no more than that” [1974].5
I don’t think that man’s problems, not his real problems, are problems only of non-communication—nothing so subtle. . . . Problems of non-communication are problems for psychiatry, not for mankind. They are limit cases, envisioned by dilettantes—let’s call a spade a spade. Man discovered how to make energy, an immense conquest, amazing, a victory. But while technique and science continue to develop (in the true, deep sense of the word: knowledge: positive statements full of human resonance), art surrenders to fantasy, which is the most irrational thing in existence, fantasy that always turns round on itself and turns into complaining, which actually limits fantasy.
[Today] an artist is more important or less important according to whether he complains more or complains less. Now they call it denouncing. The truth is that it is still complaining . . . [1965].
The immediate postwar Italian neorealism was, for Rossellini, “above all, a moral standpoint from which to view the world; what we needed was a cinema of the Reconstruction” [1954].6 It is still a question of Reconstruction.
We’re in a tremendous crisis. I think the main thing is to have a new kind of conception of the human being, more respect for the human being. We think the world is full of idiots and a few geniuses. I think that is totally wrong. Everybody can be very intelligent, if he’s properly informed. We have not exploited that natural resource which is the human intelligence. [1974].
At a given moment there arises a need to trace an outline, to identify the horizons of what lies around us as precisely as possible. If we are truly aware of things, they can begin to take on a new sense. I think that art has always basically had an aim which is as much one of summing things up as it has been of passing things on [1965].
Thus, for many years now, Rossellini has been engaged in a private course of study, sleeping little, reading six or seven books at a time (never fiction). Everywhere he goes, he buys cartons of books. “I had to fix up a garage so I could store the ones I’d . . . let’s say: used up.”7 He makes notes on the margins: “everything that comes into my head; it takes a certain amount of guts.” Then he makes out bibliography cards, arranging them by subject: “love, friendship, myth-making capability, fear, and so on. Later on these cards will help me put together a certain kind of man.”
In between the production of his films, Rossellini travels extensively in the Third World—without a camera because, he says, the camera is “an instrument of torture” [1974].
Rossellini Past and Present
In these films, I show the customs, prejudices, fears, aspirations, ideas and agonies of an epoch and a place. I show a man—an innovator—confronting these. And I have a drama equal to any other drama ever conceived, or ever to be conceived. I always avoid the temptation to exalt this personality; I limit myself to observing him. Confronting a man with his time gives me enough material to construct action and incite curiosity. Shakespeare said: “Action is eloquence. The eyes of the ignorant are more learned than their ears” [1972].
The recent films of Rossellini may be conveniently termed “Historical Neorealism,” which Michelet has (rather pessimistically) defined as “a search of a quite uncertain contemporaneity, of an impossible integral resurrection of the human past.”8
According to Rossellini, “There is no rupture between my early films and my late ones. It’s an evolution. You change your mind. The ideas are vague first of all, later they are less vague. Someday they become more clear” [1974]. But, at the same time, he has reacted against his early films. “They are still part of complaining and that makes me shudder” [1965].
Looking back today on the Rossellini films with Ingrid Bergman, we can see that they do not possess, to the same degree, faith in the individual, positive attitudes toward man’s capabilities, toward his ability to know and to will; nor do these films exalt human progress: they denounce without indicating an alternative. Nonetheless, their dramatic structure and their esthetic method lead into historical neorealism, and may serve to clarify what Rossellini is doing presently.
Themes
Rossellini has often been quoted to the effect that the little gestures are as significant as the grand gestures (e.g., in Viva L’Italia [1960], Garibaldi peels an orange for the Bourbon generals surrendering Palermo). But, significant of what?
It would appear to be one of the principles of Rossellini’s neorealism—equally strong in historical neorealism—that an individual is part of a milieu and that thus, given certain basic facts, the “drama”—the interaction of individual and milieu—is predetermined. Individuality and free will are problematic, but they may exist in the tiny actions as well as in the great actions. Though the moment of free will is, for Rossellini, rare and circumscribed, it is the heroic moment, man at his greatest.
In the Bergman films, he searches for free will in the moments of instinctual nudity. Stromboli, Land of God (1949), offers the paradigmatic Rossellinian schema: a dialectic between an individual and a milieu, both seized in their immediate subjectivity. Karin (Bergman) is a strong and decisive Northern European woman who marries a brute to escape a DP camp, only to find herself pregnant and trapped on a barren island whose populace is equally unquestioning about its medieval religious superstition, its social structures, and its primitive mode of existence. The clash between these two “cultures” (Karin and the Strombolians) allows a critical analysis of each of them. The outsider becomes alienated from her present milieu while, deprived of her former milieu, she at the same time becomes alienated from the props of her selfhood. Rossellini is uninterested in the choice she makes regarding her problem: he leaves her on top of a volcano crying out to God, a cry which may be mechanical or may be a valid religious awakening. (Thus the Italian land authentic] version. In the mangled American version [RKO] many changes are made, including a different ending: Karin returns to her husband.)
In Voyage in Italy (1953), the dialectic occurs between an upper-class British couple and Naples. Shorn of their London milieu, they become estranged. The instinctual moment reunites them, but whether this is good or bad, or whether they will stay together or not, is not in question. In Europe ’51 (1952), a choice is made: to persevere in a selfhood found, even when this consistency entails a willing imprisonment in an insane asylum. Is the Bergman character a saint or a fool? The question is left open. What is important is the portrait of Europe, 1951, portraying noncommunication, a false dialectic, a general inability by anyone to come to terms with reality.
As André Bazin says of these films, “the heroine must resolve for herself an essential moral problem, must find the answer to the question which will give the world its esthetic meaning.” But the heroine does not find satisfactory answers.
The theme of alienation continues into historical neorealism, but Rossellini no longer concentrates on dead-end situations. Historical neorealism attempts to analyze progress, to reveal its successes and foibles; neorealism attempted to draw a portrait of a relatively static situation.
Methods
The Bergman films are impressive, in the verb-sense of the word: they impose their milieux forcibly upon an audience. Voyage in Italy imposes not only the earth of Italy, but the feel of its air, water and light, while in Stromboli the anthropological element—i.e., the subjective consciousness of the Strombolians—constitutes a forceful milieu. The feeling of actuality, in terms of things and emotions, is, I think, so forceful that the wrenching transition felt between the final moments of these films and the moment after the end, when the houselights come on, is among the most jarring effects of anything in cinema.
It is worthwhile emphasizing the esthetic power and the compulsive beauty of Rossellini—and of Italian neorealism in general. Because the term “neorealism”came into fashion during Italy’s Reconstruction, its attributes were often wrongly identified with street realism, populist themes, newsreellike photography, and contemporary themes. The careers of Antonioni, Visconti, and Fellini contradict these attributions, which arise from the writings of Zavattini. Zavattini’s opinion was that the purest example of neorealism would be a film of 90 consecutive minutes of a worker’s life. Not even Zavattini’s own films (in collaboration with DeSica) attempt anything remotely like such “purity.”
There are diverse currents of neoreal ism today, and there were in 1948; but all neorealism has its roots in an attempt to propagandize antifascism. André Bazin was to see this search for an alternative as a desire to confront reality, to “trap” it. When neorealism began to evolve out of its newsreel style, Bazin redefined neoreal ism as an attempt at a moral (and esthetic) confrontation. Bazin was a Catholic, and the mystic bent in his writing underestimates the urgently searching agnostic quality of the movement. It was a search for a fresh consciousness, it springs from a revolution, a revolution originally against the Italian Fascist State, later against all forms of deterministic structures or corrupting influences in the world.
In keeping with their doctrine, neorealists generally concentrate on the exteriority of things. A person, for example, is inviolate; neorealism denies us the facile omniscience over a character’s psyche which we find in many Hollywood films. Rather than construct scenery in order to have beautiful sets, neorealism tries to stare hard and to discover beauty. These are differences of degree: neorealism is no less calculated than any other approach to filmmaking. And though it may seem paradoxical, neorealism seeks even more strongly than Hollywood to engage the spectator in the “realism” of cinema. But neorealism assumes a moral responsibility for what it is presenting; and it lays claim to a degree of ontological validity. It capitalizes on a tension between the reality which can be seized, the exterior, and the reality which the exterior implies but which remains always just beyond reach. One might call this other reality the interior, but neorealism would reject any term or definition.
There is a despairing, existential quality to many neorealists; others have a Marxist faith for the future, if not for the present. A neo-neoreal ist I ike Francesco Rosi directs his ire against particular evils, such as corruption in public housing. Rossellini stands out as an avowed agnostic, who is a “categorical optimist,” and as one who seems close to identifying that unnameable”other reality” with man’s rational capabilities. He is trying to “trap” those capabilities, and to represent them as beacons for the salvation of mankind.
This rationalism gives Rossellini’s films a certain coldness. That is, I do not get the feeling during a Rossellini film that there is a personal consciousness regarding a character, or a milieu, projecting specific emotions. With a Ford or a Renoir, one feels their objectivity is always (or almost always) defined within their love for their material. The gaze of a Mizoguchi might be likened to a zen stare, but as such there is a sense of conscious awe, which in Rossellini is replaced by a rationalist refusal to be awed. Rossellini’s personality manifests itself in the selection of what is shown. Hispersonality has an unselfconscious consciousness directed at an objective wodd which is revealed as inherently ecstatic: the awe is entirely in the image.
In the historical films, scenes are not lit for effect, but rather for clarity of the essential (in Italian meaning also “simple”) image. In keeping with his desire to perfect the reproductive capabilities of cinema, Rossellini’s researches into optics have enabled him to perfect a remarkably smooth 25–250mm zoom lens. Most zoom lenses have the disadvantages of distorting perspective and producing less sharp images. Accordingly filmmakers often prefer to move the entire camera rather than to zoom. The remarkable quality of Rossellini’s zoom lens is that, when used carefully it preserves perspective and sharpness. His camera, one might say, becomes the eye of history, as dry as that of a purportedly objective history book, and yet an eye seeing images that have an actuality which verges on the deliriously exciting.
The dialectic between Rossellini’s “eye” and his images prompts a corresponding dialectic in the audience: we “question” the film, and thus ourselves.
In historical neorealism, moreover, his remote-control led camera roves freely within the scene. In contrast to the self-contained fantasy world, the fiction, of the Bergman films, it is apparent in the historical films that he is constantly selecting segments of a world whose factual existence was quite independent of the confines of filmic fiction. In his neorealistic period, Rossellini’s camera did not analyze, because it necessarily contained everything already: the fiction. But in the later films the camera is constantly engaged in a dialectic with the images of history Rossellini has chosen.
Rossellini Pedagogue
“I abandoned commercial, traditional cinema in the late 50’s,” wrote Rossellini, “and have ever since dedicated myself to developing new educational methods through the use of visual images. Images used for education must have the appeal of entertainment, yet maintain the rigor of the document” [1972]. Virtually all of these films have been produced for television, in order to fulfill their purpose.
Traditional educative methods are “castrating” because they impose a model and a method. Rossellini cites Comenius, “the great 17th century Moravian pedagogue,” on the superiority of a teaching method permitting one “to see with one’s own eyes.” Such a method (“autoptic”), must take into account the three basic learning impulses: fear (of castration), desire (and thus entertaining), and “pretending to know” (Omar Moore): “one must take this into account and invent a way that makes the didactic element appear to be a nod between ’those who know’ ” [1972].
I have realized suddenly that what we call images are illustrations of a way of thinking that is purely verbal. Now, if we can go back to what was for us, the human being, the image before language developed, surely the images would have another value. Because through the images you get the revelation of everything. The problem is to get rid of that system which is purely verbal. We can theorize as much as we want, but in fact we are making illustrations of a mental process which is purely verbal. If we can get rid of that, most probably we can find an image that is essential. To see things as they are, that’s the main point. It’s not easy to reach that point. I’m searching for it. I’ve not found it yet [1974].
Method and Bias of Historical Neorealism
An historical event is an historical event. It has the same value as a tree or a butterfly or a mushroom. I don’t choose the tree. I must get the tree which is there. There is not a choice of the tree. Not at all. I’m totally refusing all sort of aesthetic preconceived ideas, totally, totally, totally. That’s the point. When you want to talk about something, you must know the thing. That’s the point. When you know the thing well, you can say what is essential. When you don’t know it well, you are lost in the middle of a lot of things which are impressive. I try to express the things which I think are essential. I refuse to accomplish any creative act [1974].
It is difficult to assess the accuracy of Rossellini’s historical treatments unless one knows a great deal of history. Yet, other considerations of objectivity aside, the bias introduced by “the things which I think are essential,” and the position of these films within an outline of what Rossellini regards as human progress, is obviously critical. Extracts from his descriptions of his films bear witness:
Socrates: We show his method of developing logic and intelligence.
The Acts: We show the change in ethics in our history when the Hebrew idea of nature—a gift of God which man must use to distinguish himself from the animals—spreads, thanks to Christianity, through the Greek-Roman pagan wodd, which had regarded nature as something inviolable which men, through rite and ritual, tried to render benign [1972].
Augustine: We show a man promulgating the Christian way of life during difficult times, not the thinker and theologian [1972].
Pascal:Shows us the drama of a man who develops scientific thought which is in conflict with the dogmatism of his deep religious faith [1972].
Descartes: Represents the advent of a method in which human thought becomes more rational and definitely moves toward the age of technical and scientific development [1972]. He was a son of a bitch [1974].
Louis XIV: His main goal is to be a little bit more of a son of a bitch than the others [1974].
Man’s Fight for Survival: A sort of spinal cord to which I would attach the other productions . . . . It is an educational series incorporating the ingredients of the entertainment film, with characters, actions, dialogue and comic situations, accurate reconstruction of ambients [1972].
Nearly all of the dialogue used is taken from contemporary texts.
His synopsis of Man’s Fight for Survival Throughout the Ages concludes: “Finally, the contemporary age: the space adventure, student revolution, the hippies, the bewilderment in which we writhe” [1972]. In Augustine, which shows “the end of one civilization and the birth of another,” the decadence of the former is illustrated by transvestism and transsexuality. In Socrates, the Allegory of the Cave and everything relating to metaphysics are significantly missing: instead we are shown Socrates drinking the hemlock in a cave full of shadows, and discoursing philosophically on the immortality of the soul, and remembering to offer a cock to Asclepius. In Pascal, the mysticism of a dying Jansenist is adorned with religious ritual. Socrates, Augustine, Pascal and Descartes rate films, but not Plato or Kant (“In the map that I am trying to draw Kant doesn’t fit,” [1974]). In Louis XIV, wars are left out: Versailles is the spectacle through which Louis achieves power (a sort of ultimate P.T. Barnum).
Historical neorealism could, at least at this stage, be considered as a critique of spectacle. In a general sense, this means that uncritical fantasy is always a negative step in man’s progress, that it has frequently duped mankind, and that art has always been as critical an element in human advancement as politics, economics, or anything else, and has been equally subject to corruption. “Our camouflage is a way to escape a clear identification, a clear orientation.” More specifically, the critique of spectacle has as its goal the purification of cinema. Rossellini feels that the achievement of an “essential” cinema is a critical step toward saving mankind. “In real life everything is spectacular. What is very bad is to make an effort to be spectacular” [1974].
Historical neorealism has its moments of pageantry as pageantial as that of Hollywood, and it has its melodramas too (e.g., the witch trial in Pascal), but in general t his creates no disturbance amid the theorems of Rossellini’s esthetics. But at the same time, these films aim to entertain, and I am not sure how Rossellini’s showmanship is always reconcilable with his announced intentions. There is, for example, in The Medici a beautifully moving moment when Cosimo returns home from exile. A girl leans out of a small, high window, and exclaims, “It’s Master Cosimo!” The camera zooms out to its fullest extent, and in extreme long shot shows a gorgeous red terra-cotta palace, its yard and landscaping, and Cosimo riding in on a white horse. His wife and daughter come to the door to greet him. Rossellini even adds some Renaissance recorder music to the sound track, completing one of the two or three loveliest shots in the history of film. Similady, he acids timpani beats throughout the witch scene in Pascal; he adds drums over the soldiers marching through Florence, and an organ to a sermon. When he wishes to, he can be as spectacular as Hollywood.
These effects undoubtedly interpret. But one could produce elaborate arguments to show that they are in every case merely supplements to invigorate the “essence” of the image, or to engage it in a dialectic: we pose ourselves questions about the epoch, and about cinema. In turn, these supplements are justified by a simple decision about what is essential. When such moments do occur, infrequently, they pull us into the film as part of Rossellini’s didactic method.
The jokes in The Medici are also part of this method. A concordance could be made showing virtually identical views on esthetics between Alberti and Rossellini. Alberti is intensely serious when he speaks, and enthralled by the greatness and vision of his own ideas. His style of declamation (the film was made and mouthed in English) is often pompous. Rossellini (no doubt tempted to feel guilty of the same faults) deliberately satirizes Alberti on a couple of occasions. Since the whole of the sound track (dubbed) is declaimed with the precision of a history book, Rossellini mocks this too, when he has a cream-covered man in a barbershop discourse while the barber holds the man’s nose.
The dubbed dialogue in The Medici elongates both word and image. The clear, flat delivery offers ideas for their own sake, engages us in a dialectic on that level, while at the same time, the separation of this delivery from the image creates a tension between the images and the words the people speak, and again promotes a dialectic between audience and film.
The Age of the Medici
The Renaissance is an immense fact in the history of mankind! Artists knew how to plunge themselves into a scientific reality, to appropriate it to themselves, to rethink it, and to make it accede to the rank of superior art [1962].
The Age of the Medici is the crowning achievement to date of Rossellini. It treats an age outstanding for its beauty, pride and enlightenment in a film outstanding for identical qualities. It comes close to fulfilling the promise/threat he made back in 1962:
I propose to be not an artist, but a pedagogue. And there will be in that a heap of things so extraordinary, which will give you so great a quantity of emotions, that I, I shall not be an artist, but that I shall succeed, I am sure, in leading someone to art.
The Age of the Medici is astonishing for its optimism. It is a burst of strength, of faith in human dignity. “Today,” says Alberti in a speech that concludes the film, “anyone who cannot recognize what he holds within himself is not a man . . . If the world wishes slaves, very many will become slaves, and when the world wishes intelligence, then many, very many will become geniuses . . . Men have, knowledge, because they want to know.”
Here is a compilation of other things Alberti says during the film:
I have sought knowledge, for without it one can do nothing for oneself or for others . . . Art and knowledge are interwoven . . . There can be no fine art today unless it is as well fine science . . . The careful analysis of a work of art never destroys my appreciation. It increases my wonder . . . Certainly art has the divine ability to make dead men and their times live again . . . With Donatello one can enter into the fantasy of things . . . We must study nature to know what truth is . . . To those who insist they don’t want so much science, that the practise of depicting natural things is enough, I answer that nothing is more conceited than trusting our own judgement without other knowledge . . . Science and art have hope in common: the progress of mankind . . . Action is only an extension of knowing. Propria vobis humani generis totaliter accepti est actuare semper potentiam intellectus possibilis. [I wish to tell you, it is characteristic of the human race, taken as a whole, to actualize always the potentiality of possible intellect.]
The Age of the Medici principally covers events in Florence from 1429 through 1439. As much as upon Cosimo, the film focuses on Leon Battista Alberti, (1404–72) the prototypical Renaissance humanist. “Humanism,” wrote Rossellini, “stands for order and intellectual synthesis, after the confusion of degenerate pedantic scholasticism.” We are thus placed at the dawn of the Renaissance.
Gone are all the neurotics who have haunted previous Rossellinian canvases, and in their place stand highly strung, ardent and ambitious men who almost never speak without epic heroism.
Once planned as two separate films, The Medici is divided into three parts, each 84 minutes long, of which the third is subtitled, “Leon Battista Alberti: Humanism.” In Part I, Cosimo becomes head of the family upon the death of his father Giovanni (1429). We see how the banks and guilds of Florence operate. Cosimo, opposed by the warrior aristocracy, is condemned to death, but succeeds in bribing himself into a ten-year exile in Venice (1433).
In Part II, Pope Eugene IV, the Council of Basel, and Alberti, a curial, all arrive in Florence. A new signory is elected. Cosimo returns, and the pope’s intervention prevents a civil war (1434). Cosimo takes power, rewarding his friends, punishing his enemies, enriching Florence, and patronizing the arts lavishly. Brunel leschi wins the commission to construct the cupola on the cathedral. Alberti, an active observer of everything, initiates a poetry contest (Latin vs. the vulgate). Florence, which has “made plunder into a system of ethics,” is hailed as the center of the world.
In Part III, Cosimo appears seldom. Alberti researches perspective and measurement, praises the humanism of Masaccio’s Christ, hears Nicholas of Cusa and Gemistus Pletho introduce the Western world to Plato and Plotinus, chats mathematics with Toscanelli, and architecture with Michelozzo. The Churches of Rome and Constantinople are unified. Alberti begins the reconstruction of Rome, and constructs a cathedral and war machines in Rimini. The film ends with a long monologue by Alberti to the young Lorenzo de Medici in 1471, in which Alberti praises Classical architecture, the city and urban design, the family, a noble future for one’s children, and man’s destiny: To know.
The dialogue throughout the film is supplied from contemporary texts which Rossellini has edited and staged. For example:
Alberti: I should like this work that we have just finished to serve not only as an example, but also as a stimulus for the future generation. The human being, who is externally in search of himself, can find himself reflected in his own works; each one represents for him his limits and his own invention.
For these lines, Rossellini photographs Alberti and a companion standing in long shot in front of the church of San Francesco in Rimini. Presumably, we need not assume that the words used here or elsewhere were actually spoken on the specific occasions.
The extreme openness of the style of The Age of The Medici tends to discourage facile distinctions between the “goodies” and the “baddies.” The clarity of Rossellini’s analytic structure admits every ambiguity, refuses all judgment, and invites a range of speculation virtually as limitless as history itself. Nonetheless, interpretation, in the best sense of the word, is constant in his treatment. One may see this process at work in one of the broadest themes of the film: humanism vs. mystical philosophy. Alberti’s rejection of the latter is traced in three sequences.
1) A priest preaches a sermon against science, proclaiming the prime importance of the soul and of faith: “When man is born there is nothing left for him but to weep.” During this lengthy discourse, the camera shows the frescoes in the church: pictures of battles and tormented faces; choral music is added to the sound track. Alberti listens without comment.
2) Some years later, in Toscanelli’s house, Alberti listens to a long monologue by Nicholas of Cusa proclaiming a Plotinian cosmos of pluralistic unity, in which science is only conjecture and the universe unknowable. Rossellini adds organ music to the sound track. Alberti is impressed by Cusa, but, scratching his chin, he wonders whether this line of thought might not lead us “into the cloudy wodd of dreams.”
3) Sometime later, Gemistus Pletho is received in Florence. One Florentine questions Pletho’s preference for Plato: “I maintain that Aristotle liberated man’s intellect from Plato’s fables. To deny this means that wodd knowledge is back in a dark cave.” Another Florentine is impressed by Pletho. Alberti replies.:
Certainly he is a worthy philosopher . . . but he would remake the world with a science of philosophy which is all subtlety and quibbling. Apinto told me that in observing forces and bodies in nature he discovered more things than in all the heavenly measuring and charting of philosophers.
Alberti tells a story about an old man trying to comfort an upset Jove:
“Well, whom did you charge with giving order to the world?” asked the old man. “Ah, the philosophers,” said Jove. “Oh, I understand,” said the old man, “that’s why you have so much confusion down there. Ah, you made a big mistake, Jove. You should have put the order of the world in the hands of an architect, for his profession does not depend on subtle quibbling.”
Rossellini in no way underlines his disagreement with the philosophers and mystics. No labels, such as those which I have supplied (e.g., “Plotinianism”), are given to the various arguments. (In fact, throughout the film, dates are almost never supplied and characters are never introduced; we learn their names, when we do, only in thrown-away lines.) His treatments of the priest and of Cusa, particularly in the use of gesture and declamation, tend to support the appeal of their words. It is only when we consider the analytic sequencing of the film as a whole that Rossellini’s position becomes apparent. If as spectators of the film, we immerse ourselves into the fantasy of cinema, our suspension of judgment will find the hellish frescoes an incitement toward faith; if we choose to watch critically, we may feel that what the frescoes depict illustrates a horrifying approach to life which we would prefer to do without. I think we are expected to adopt both positions, and to appreciate the grandiloquence of his representation of Nicholas of Cusa. Stinting no one his due, the director expects us to feel, and to reason, that the counterposilion of Alberti (humanism) is a more luminous consciousness, that the intelligence of it makes it more beautiful. This is teaching by a non-“castrating,” autoptic method.
Among the “essential” biases of the film, it is significant that one of the few things which Rossellini does not even bother to allude to about Alberti, is that Alberti was considered one of the finest organists and musicians of his day. One dominant theme of The Age of the Medici is the unity of art and science, and the dependence of these two upon economy. Art is chiefly the art of design, with a nod given to poetry, and loving respect paid to books. Design is based upon measurement and perspective. (It should be repeated that the film never says these things; it shows them directly.) Alberti experiments with mathematics and with mirrors in order to analyze perspective. He proclaims: “Painting is the intersection of the visual pyramid, according to a given distance, a predetermined center, and a construction of angles on a certain surface.” One might well employ the same definition to cinema, with the addition of the fourth dimension. A good film would be one making cogent use of these angles. This definition is employed in the style of The Age of the Medici; the compositions discovered by Rossellini’s peripatetic lens are a never-ending suite of inventions in perspective.
Confronted with his images, our eyes move toward the center of the frame, following the lines of perspective with which each is constructed. This moves us into the data of the drama, but a bit away from the design of the composition. It would seem to be part of Rossellini’s didactic dialectic that he exploits this phenomenon: as with a painting, one must consciously back off to the borders and view the whole.
The employment of perspective, as Alberti’s definition of painting makes clear, stresses the importance of choice and consistency at every stage of construction. Selection, as a method of creating a perspective, occurs in the “essential” choices made by Rossellini in his attempt to make art have “the divine ability to make dead men and their times live again.” His didactic intentions are exercised within the neorealistic doctrine of the moral responsibility of the artist.
When Alberti ends the film with a Latin quotation, it is clear that the Renaissance looked backward as strongly as it looked forward. As part of his crusade to stop people from complaining and to sketch a map of where we are, Rossellini is seeking to show a glorious crescendo of intellect through the course of history.
Criticisms of the Renaissance are evident. They show failures in perspective. One cannot help being horrified when an assassin’s hands are cut off: the mise-en-scène partakes of the melodramatic. Cosimo is never more impassive than in his harsh banking decisions. A silk-maker, who has fled to Avignon and continued to manufacture Florentine silk, is murdered along with all of his family, and his house is burnt, by men dispatched from the Florentine silk guilds. Analytically implicit in the film is the failure of Renaissance man to recognize the dignity and potential of the “commonfolk.” They are vain people and show no sensitivity toward their economic aggrandizement. Alberti constructs war machines and says, proudly, “This is a Machine!” He designs a fortress-city for the tyrant of Rimini, to protect him from his own citizenry. Brunelleschi reduces his workers’ wages, and fires their spokesman, when they question his design of the cupola.
And the great men of Florence are contentedly hypocritical. A Marco-Polo-like Venetian eulogizes the greatness of Florence, and concludes, to general merriment:
You elevate the spirit while filling your purses with gold. You’ve made plunder into a system of ethics. You’ve made avarice a philosophy. And to aggrandize it all, you’ve maintained that gold florins are a gift of God. You’ve commissioned monuments and cupolas and statues and frescoes to portray yourselves as humble, God-serving men.
There are only a few occasions in the course of The Age of the Medici when Rossellini, with sound and image, presents a glorious spectacle of the Renaissance in traditional cinematic fashion (a shot of Venice, some paintings with music, Cosimo’s return home, Alberti gazing at his completed church). The concluding sequence of Alberti speaking amid some stones in the Roman Forum is one of the least spectacular shots of the entire film. But the beauty and spirit of the Renaissance come through in every frame through the design of the sets and the gestures of the actors.
Rossellini, as customary, has used a cast of nonprofessionals. Marcello di Falco (Cosimo), for example, is a cashier in a Roman nightclub; he had never acted before. Nor does he act now. But with every muscle pull, we feel that he is Cosimo, and within this gauntly mysterious character we can feel, as powerfully as we did with Ingrid Bergman, all the subjectivity of a personality and of a milieu. Though stylized, I do not feel that we are intended consciously to remind ourselves that we are watching performances—except occasionally. It is in the gestures that the “realism” of neorealism is founded, for by their agency, the subjectivity of an era is communicated.
By his characterizations, Rossellini shows himself an heir to Stendhal: the contradictions and motivations of his people are not explicated, but emerge, in true neorealistic fashion, as a result of the simple representation of fact. Like Stendhal’s, additionally, Rossellini’s people are pieces of their epoch, and serve analytically. But he might also say, as Stendhal does in his Journal, “I shall almost always be wrong when I think of a man’s character as all of a piece.”
If the modernistic cleanness of his representations may be likened to the precision of Stendhal, these representations also suggest, predictably, influences both from Renaissance portraiture and from 19th-century naturalism. As such they are almost polar opposites to the relatively undisciplined behavior generally associated with early, postwar neorealism. The style of gesture employed by Rossellini in the historical films is the plastic equivalent of the style of speech. Gesture and speech have not simply been stylized (reduced to their essential particles), but, as with the other aspects of The Age of the Medici, have been subjected to a perspective, through which the clarity of their inner resonances heightens their reality and eventuates in an analysis. Rossellini is quite correct in denying that he is performing a creative act; like his Renaissance artist, his art is merely an analytic technique:”a refulgent image, a sublime beauty, summoning our age to knowledge and utility.
Today men want to be free to believe in the liberty which is imposed upon them; there is no longer anyone who seeks for his own truth. The world has made some steps forward when true liberty has existed. This liberty has appeared very rarely in History, and yet people have always talked about liberty [1954].
Anna Uno
Rossellini’s film on Alcide De Gasperi, titled Anna Uno (Year One), 1974, is very much in the style of his other recent films, although its subject matter lies outside the “map” of the historical series. Produced as “a commercial film” rather than for television, its sole concession in this respect is a wider screen; if anything, it is probably less entertaining than the television films. But, in dealing with relatively contemporary events, the parti pris of his method becomes more evident.
Though covering the period 1945–53, Anno Uno makes only a superficial attempt at analyzing the issues of the time, or the disparate policies advocated by Italy’s various political factions. Nor does it offer a critical biography of De Gasperi: there is virtually no analysis of the wisdom or shortsightedness, either of his policies or of his character. What unfolds instead is an ideal portrait, a portrait, in my opinion, of what Rossellini finds most admirable—and thus most to be emulated—in De Gasperi’s career.
De Gasperi wished to unite without coercion. At one point, he is asked how he is able to ignore the walls dividing the parties; he replies that he pretends they don’t exist, in order to get across them. (That is: man can compel the world to conform to his will; he need not be a servant to Confusion.) Time and again, the theme preached by Rossellini’s De Gasperi is: the primacy of the individual conscience; respect for the right intentions of those who oppose you; facing reality; and, above all else: Unity. When De Gasperi defines what Christian Democracy is supposed to be, it emerges as an idealized Democratic Christianity— a definition as far away from the actual governing party of Italy as Pius Xll’s encyclical on The Mystical Body was from the terrestrial Catholic Church.
To criticize Rossellini for failing to do much more than give vague suggestions of what is deficient in Italy’s government, her ruling party, or her founding father is perhaps to mistake Anno Uno for a film on politics, instead of seeing it as it is intended to be: a political film. He holds up an idealized political theory and method as a model for his nation (and the world) today. Italy’s political deficiencies are already sufficiently apparent.
Postscript
Earlier I tried to set forth the purposes of historical neorealism and to reconcile the apparent contradictions of Rossellini’s claims with what he has actually done. In conclusion, it seems important to stress three aspects of historical neorealism’s intentions, for it is within these limitations that might be justified whatever claims one would like to make about the beauty and profundity of the individual films.
First of all, Rossellini feels that cinema has a capacity to contribute to human progress, and this opinion, which may appear to be an obvious truism, takes on an almost revolutionary aspect when one considers how few American films there have been in recent years which have not depicted a despairing attitude toward life. No doubt, any portrait of our times has some justification for pessimism. In its own time, Europe ’51 was both pessimistic and accurate. Yet cinema has a propagandic function, and whether or not it suits our individual esthetic or political dispositions, we ought not to disregard the gross effect upon society that results when an individual is encouraged to despair and cynicism nearly every time he enters a movie house to see a new film. Rossellini’s films are made in opposition to the demoralizing effects of such films.
Secondly, Rossellini’s effort is only tentative. I do not think he was engaging in false modesty when he said, “I shall not be an artist, but I shall succeed in leading someone to art.” One must keep in mind that historical neoreal ism wishes to reject Godard’s famous dictum: “Cinema is not the reflection of reality; it is the reality of the reflection.”
Lastly, it has been remarked, quite justly, that Rossellini’s films are closer to being good (or mediocre) journalism than to being profound or novel historical accounts. Louis XIV, for example, explains relatively little about France or Louis. Yet Rossellini’s announced purpose is to educate the masses, to give them an optimistic look at where humanity is going, and to suggest how we ought to meet future challenges. It is the “map” which Rossellini is trying to draw which is important. His films are less interested in doing deep justice to a given historical era than in putting forth a prescriptive reading of historical progress.
One could read The Medici as an allegorical portrait of the world today. Cosimo could .even be read as Rockefeller (partially). His policies are harsh, class-interested, subversive; his wars are economic wars. In addition, he and his age impose an ideology upon mankind: specifically, that science must dictate art, and that we must relate to the world through mathematical perspective. Rossellini believes in progress, and thus appears to feel that mankind took a step forward with the introduction of science into his psychology. What strikes me as curious, however, is that when I compare Rossellini’s Renaissance to our own time, a great difference is that we look askance at social qualities which the Renaissance found overtly tolerable and efficacious, viz.: hypocrisy, deceit, economic aggrandizement, ideologicalization, dictatorship, elitism, and murder.
Throughout Rossellini’s historical films, only the Church preaches a “Love-Thy-Neighbor” theme. The Church is seen triumphant in The Acts of the Apostles, persevering in Augustine of Hippo, inconsequentially protesting in The Medici, and nonexistent in Louis XIV. Pascal’s Jansenism and science could coexist within the same man, but his aberrant religion is barren.
Cruelty is represented as most strongly opposed by the Church and by the individual (hero), but what the two have in common goes not much further than incipient respect for the potentials of the individual.
The Church appears to have a negative value, in that it encourages guilt, acquiescence, and myth.
When one puts together these diverse thematic currents (which are surely only a few of many streams), the result which Rossellini apparently sees, in his implied critique of the world today, is that mankind is enfeebled by its fixation upon self-disgust.
In contrast to Rossellini, the preponderance of current cinema (and the American cinema most especially) is advocating introspection. Rossellini is advocating critically considered outward action.
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NOTES
I. Unpublished 1972 letter at the De Menil Foundation, 1ll East 73 Street, New York City. Subsequent quotes from this source are indicated by the date.
2. “Manifesto” by Rossellini published in Cahiers du cinema, No. 171, October, 1965. Signed by Gianni Arnim Adriano Apra, Gianvittorio Baldi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Tinto Brass, and Vittorio Cottalavi.
3. Interview by Adrian Apra and Maurizio Ponzi, Filmcritica, April/May, 1965. Subsequent quotes from this source are indicated by the date.
4. Interview by Fereydoun Hoveyda and Erich Rohmer, Cahiers du Cinema, No. 133, July, 1962. Subsequent quotes from this source are indicated by the date.
5. Interview by Tag Gallagher and John W. Hughes, Changes, New York, April. 1974. Subsequent quotes from this source are indicated by the date.
6. Interview by Maurice Sherer, Erich Rohmer and Francois Truffaut. Cahiers du Cinema, No. 37, July, 1954.
7. Transcription by Michel Gall, “Louis XIV viewed through the eyepiece,” Paris Match, October 8, 1966, pp. 97–98.
8. Cahiers du Cinema, No. 181. August. 1966. p. 12.
9. Rossellini considers Shakespeare and Moliere to have been “scientists” rather than “artists.”
For references 3, 6, and , I am indebted to Sighting Rossellini, “A book of texts, with introduction and film lists by David Degener for the 18th film retrospective of the works at Roberto Rossellini—University Art Museum, Berkeley.”
