Roberto Rossellini is probably best-known in this country as the "Latin Lover" who seduced Ingrid Bergman, precipitating one of Hollywood's most notorious and scandal-ridden love affairs. Yet, as Peter Brunette attempts to prove in this, the first full-length study of his film career, Rossellini is "perhaps the greatest unknown director who ever lived." Andrew Sarris has accorded him "the top position in the Italian cinema." And Vincent Canby claims that "when the history of the cinema's first hundred years is recollected in tranquility...Rossellini's films will be seen as the seminal works of what...can be called the New Movie." The precursor of such filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, whose films were popular during the 1960s, Rossellini was a man before his time. Often called "the father of neo-realism," he began making starkly realistic films just after World War II. The films he made during this period--including Open City and Paisan --received wide critical attention and catapulted him from obscurity to international fame. Rossellini next turned his attention to the individual, lost in post-war alienation, and made films which, given his reputation for realism, were surprising expressionistic. The culmination of this phase were the films made with Ingrid Bergman--notably Stromboli, Europa 51, and Voyage to Italy --"failures"in Hollywood's eyes yet, as Brunette argues, perhaps his greatest achievements. There followed a spate of overtly commercial films and, finally, the brilliant and courageous made-for-television series documenting epics in human history. With this book, Brunette brings to American filmgoers an appreciative critical study of a great Italian film director. He considers each film separately, proceeding chronologically--from his so-called "fascist films" to his lengthy epic series--and employing post-structuralist and other analytic techniques to point up the films' technical innovations and subtle messages. Brunette looks not only at the films themselves, but at the mind behind the films and incorporates into his study the numerous intellectual debates spawned by Rossellini's works. Based on 7 years' research, during which the author viewed all the existing Rossellini films, interviewed members of the director's family, and read an enormous body of European and American criticism, and more than 50 interviews in which Rossellini talks about his work, this is a landmark book--the first in any language to study Roberto Rossellini's entire film career.
