1. While the Italian version of the film is in many ways different from the version released in the United States, the mood and themes have generally not been as disturbed in the translation process as they were in Stromboli . In the European version of Francesco , there are no frescoes to set the historical scene; rather, it opens directly with the famous long shot on the road of the monks being drenched by rain. A voice-over explains that they have been granted approval by the Pope to form a new order. In this version, the initial scene is also much longer than in the American version; abstruse medieval debates about the best way to preach and Rossellini's increasingly characteristic accent on temps mort give the Italian version a greater feeling of "authenticity," but since the entire film is so deeply marked by the aleatory and the fragmentary, unlike Stromboli , the American version has not been unduly harmed by the "streamlining."

The most important changes are the two scenes omitted from the American version. In the first, Francis is lying on the ground, crying. He hears bells, looks up, and encounters a leper who tries to avoid him. Francis forces himself on the leper, finally kissing him on both cheeks. The leper moves away, and Francis falls to the ground again, crying. No words are spoken throughout the entire scene. The other scene missing in the American version concerns Francis' search for letizia , or "perfect joy." Walking along, he complains to his companion that he can perform miracles, but he has not yet achieved perfect joy. They arrive at a well-appointed house and begin badgering its owner to "serve the Lord"; when they refuse to give up, he throws them down the stairs and violently beats them. Francis then tells his companion that he has now found perfect joy. Clearly, this complex scene, delicately poised between the comic and the spiritual, must have been omitted as being too offbeat.

In addition to these two major omissions, sequences presumably considered "unmotivated" or too grossly physical were omitted from other scenes that, in the main, have been preserved. Thus, in the final scene, the monks' visit to a small church has been cut, and in the long scene in the tryrant's camp, a sequence of a man trying to fill an entire cup with blood from his nose has been removed, as well as a sequence of Brother Juniper being dragged along the ground by a horse.

2. Also like Stromboli, Francesco opens with an epigraph. In this case, it is taken from Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians (1:27-28): "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are." In this film the struggle toward God, which seems to erupt so suddenly at the end of Stromboli , has already been achieved, or, better, is continually in the process of being achieved.

3. Rossellini's manner of speaking about the monastery sheds light, I think, on his intentions in both films:

I was very moved by their innocence. It was magnificent. A very wise old monk, Fra Rafael, who was a servant, not a real priest, said he was a poet. I asked him what kind of poetry he was doing. He said, 'I wrote a poem about a rose.' I asked him to tell it to me. He closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the sky and said 'Oh, Rose!' and that was the whole poem. How can you have a better poem than that? It was also a sign of tremendous humility. I became very close friends with a number of the Franciscans and I thought of making a film about Saint Francis.

(Victoria Schultz, "Interview with Roberto Rossellini, February 22-25, 1971 in Houston, Texas," Film Culture , no. 52 [Spring 1971], 12-13.)

4. Brunello Rondi, "Per un riesame del Francesco di Rossellini," Rivista del cinema italiano , 4, no. 1 (January-March 1955), 89.

5. Mida, Roberto Rossellini , p. 73.

6. Jose Guarner, Roberto Rossellini , p. 48; Giorgio Tinazzi, "Per un riesame di Rossellini," in Mario Verdone and Giorgio Tinazzi, Roberto Rossellini (Padua: Centro cinematografico degli studenti dell'università di Padova, 1960), p. 34.

7. The shift from coralità to an active questioning of the group, which we saw in operation in these two earlier films, continues in Francesco . Critics who welcomed it as a return to coralità forget that this quality is seen only in terms of the values of the tiny group of equally "crazy" people. In the terms of the larger social group, which is here barely seen, these religious figures are as marginal as Karin, Nanni, or Irene in Europa '51 .

8. It can be argued, of course, that Rossellini always shows those who are striving, incomplete, imperfect creatures to be women, and the ones who have already attained peace, rest, and happiness to be men (the Franciscans). This depiction, however, seems to have been the result of a return to the historical beginnings of the search for joy and simplicity, rather than an argument for the spiritual superiority of men over women. Furthermore, the scene in which Saint Clair and a few nuns visit the friars clearly indicates that the women have reached the same spiritual level as the men.

This distinction is important in light of the extensive attack on Rossellini, on ostensibly feminist grounds, by the editors of the British Film Institute dossier on the director. They rely on the scurrilous article by Marcel Oms, "Rossellini: Du fascisme à la démocratie chrétienne," for their "ammunition." Thus, they quote approvingly from the essay:

Rossellini's misogyny had two possible conclusions: the first one was to destroy the woman, that is to say, to make a film of Honegger's and (above all) Claudel's oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake . The second way of despising woman was to ignore them. What could have been more logical in Rossellini's oeuvre than the filming of that monument to stupidity which is Francis, God's Jester . Never before have Christianity and cretinism been so close to one another. . . . To the film's credit is its testimonial value. Because of its realism, Francis remains an objective and irrefutable document about those who are in need of wits. Also there remain a few images of masochism when Francis gets himself trampled on by his brothers or when Ginepro faces the tyrant. . . . Unfortunately, it is not by humiliating oneself in front of them that one brings down tyrants (ellipses in BFI citation, p. 14; Oms, pp. 15-16).

It is bad enough that as late as 1981 the editors choose to rely so heavily on Om's article, which they call "violent but fair." The more egregious choice is to elide in their citation from the article the few sentences in which Oms displays that he is perhaps talking about his own problems more than about the film. This is the part in which he fantasizes about how much better the film would have been if Saint Francis and Saint Clair "discovering passion, would have shut themselves up in the little hut or would have made love in front of the brothers. . . . Then Francis would have sung the praises of the flesh, and given up preaching in order to live. . . . But I'm dreaming, because the film is far from having this grandeur" (p. 15). Clearly, Oms is not the best source for a critical judgment concerning this film.

9. "Un cinema diverso per un mondo che cambia," interview in Bianco e nero , 25, no. 1 (January 1964), 14.

10. Henri Agel, Poétique du cinéma , p. 83.

11. Henri Agel, Le Cinéma et le sacré (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1961), pp. 76-77.

12. Brunello Rondi, Filmcritica , nos. 147-48 (July-August, 1974). Quoted in Lo splendore del vero: Quarant'anni di cinema di Roberto Rossellini , ed. Giuliana Callegari and Nuccio Lodato, p. 73.

13. Tinazzi, "Per un riesame di Rossellini," p. 34.

14. Pio Baldelli, "Dibattito per 'Francesco' di Rossellini," Rivista del cinema italiano , 3, nos. 11-12 (November-December 1954), 60.

15. The forever "otherness" of God does not challenge the tenets of the metaphysics of presence, as one might expect, but in fact enables it. As Jacques Derrida has said,

The infinite alterity of the divine substance does not interpose itself as an element of mediation or opacity in the transparence of self-relationship and the purity of auto-affection. God is the name and the element of that which makes possible an absolutely pure and absolutely self-present self-knowledge. From Descartes to Hegel and in spite of all the differences that separate the different places and moments in the structure of that epoch, God's infinite understanding is the other name for the logos as self-presence ( Of Grammatology , p. 98).

Francesco 's need for the discontinuous, marked clouds to represent a continuous, unmarked heaven recalls Shelley's poem "The Cloud" (1820), which ends with the following lines, told from the cloud's point of view:

For after the rain, when with never a stain,
        The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
        Build up the blue dome of Air—
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
       And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
        I arise, and unbuild it again.—