[A Tribute By
Carletto di San Giovanni:]
myspace.com/giancarletto
www.directorspotlight.com
Roberto Rossellini (center) with De Sica and Fellini
with Ingrid Bergman, 1949, Stromboli
with Ingrid Bergman, 1953
We all, film critics, filmmakers, film buffs, moviegoers, Western people and even people whose culture has been 'influenced', 'transformed' or 'modernized' by the West, we are all condemned to Rossellini. Needless to say, since all major directors transform our conception of film, this statement roughly applies to any of them. But the truism finds a particular shift here, being about work which dramatically changed not only the way films were (made), but also the place and sense of cinema as a whole within Western culture.
The son of a prominent Italian architect, Roberto, together with his brother Renzo and his sisters Marcela and Micaela (the three of them younger than him), had the comfortable but not too ostentatious upbringing of children of bourgeois homes in a social environment where aristocracy, though completely ruined and decadent, still held a prestigious and not only decorative status - as a mummified ideal of excellence. Raised pre-War World II, in a society whose Christian traditionalism somehow 'delayed' the effects of the modernization process, Rossellini as a child and teenager lived out the same process portrayed by Proust along his youth and middle age - though with the Italian particularities depicted by Rossellini's contemporary Luchino Visconti in Il Gatopardo (The Leopard, 1963). He developed thus under this 19th century bourgeois conception of the world, its heritage clearly evident in his lifelong practical and active interest for invention.
His ideological horizon - regardless of his personal interests or beliefs - was the closest possible to the one in which cinema as an apparatus had its roots - the generation whose grandparents witnessed the arrival of photography, the generation that invented cinema. Yet his work is neither a sequel nor a return to Lumière, but an important testimony to the conflicts this tradition faced when all its dreams equating technological progress with human welfare broke down. From that moment on, not only was the social idea of technology entirely altered, but also cinema's place, function and bonds to society.
--written by Hugo Salas, film professor in Buenos Aires, Argentina
