1. Interview, Film Culture , 24-25.

2. Cited in Aprà and Berengo-Gardin, "Documentazione," 35.

3. Interview, Film Culture , 25.

4. Jean Herman, "Rossellini tourne India 57," Cahiers du cinéma , no. 73 (July 1957), 3. Ironically, many of the social problems mentioned by Herman, such as the nearly impenetrable Indian bureaucracy, are never taken up by Rossellini in the film.

5. New York Sunday News , May 26, 1957, p. 86.

6. See also Jean Herman, "Rossellini: L'Anti-digest défakirisateur," in Cinéma 57 , no. 21 (September-October 1957), 44-49. Mario Verdone, on the other hand, faults Rossellini for not really opening himself up to the country, and Ferdinand Hoveyda, a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma , even claims: "Leaving for India, Rossellini had taken the precaution of putting in his suitcase a scenario which he had written while still in Paris. But I don't think that this was a violation of his principles." He then goes on to specify the preparations that Rossellini had been going through since 1955: reading English-language Indian newspapers, novels, letters, books about religion and philosophy. When he finally got to India, according to Hoveyda, he shot over forty thousand feet of color footage. ("La Photo du mois," Cahiers du cinéma , no. 69 [March 1957], 35; cited in Aprà and Berengo-Gardin, "Documentazione," 36). Herman paints a daunting portrait of the hazardous conditions the company endured to make this film: ants everywhere, often no phones or electricity, cobras, pythons, wild elephants (one almost killed Aldo Tonti, Rossellini's cameraman), heat reaching 108 degrees Fahrenheit, and eternal mechanical problems with the equipment. At one point Rossellini found out that one of his close friends had been killed during an automobile race. Exhausted by driving the enormous distances between locations and upset about his friend's death, Rossellini told Herman: "It's just like the whales when they're in a big group and they throw themselves against the shore of an island and kill themselves. What pushes them to do it? I feel this whale so strongly in myself" (p. 8).

7. New York Times , February 10, 1957, II, 5.

8. Interview, Cinéma 59 , 51-52.

9. Herman, "Rossellini tourne India 57," 8-9.

10. Translated in Screen , 14, no. 4 (Winter 1973-74), 119-20.

11. Cited in Aprà and Berengo-Gardin, "Documentazione," 35.

12. Reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1968), pp. 238-39.

13. New York Times , February 10, 1957.

14. There is very little information available on the footage made specifically for television, though it is known that it was shot first on sixteen-millimeter film, while the footage for theatrical release was shot on thirty-five-millimeter stock later (with the sequence of the tiger and the old man blown up from sixteen-millimeter to thirty-five-millimeter). From all appearances, the final product assembled for television was very sloppily constructed and the episodes rarely hung together. The version shown on Italian television was somewhat different from that shown on the French (see Aprà's filmography in Le Cinéma révélé for titles of all the episodes, for both countries) and was rather poorly greeted due to an unsympathetic journalist who acted as "anchorman," and who very clearly had no idea what he was talking about. Renzo, the director's son, told me that the format consisted of this journalist and Rossellini commenting extempore on what was being projected at the moment. The journalist was apparently a terrible embarrassment who affected astonishment at everything Rossellini said about the country: "You mean they really have steel pipe there? Come on, you're kidding," and so on.

15. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma , no. 145 (July 1963), 4-5. Later, he rhetorically asks his interviewers, "Do you seriously believe that there can be art without the intervention of personality?" And then, in a surprising outburst, showed how emotionally charged the entire issue was for him:

I went to a showing and said to myself: Well, this is cinéma-vérité. There was a camera on the floor [identified in a footnote as belonging to the Maysles brothers], and everyone was worshipping it, even though it was just a camera. A camera is a camera. It's just an object. That doesn't excite me, and it drives me crazy that a camera can excite someone. It's unbelievably stupid! This camera, which was exciting the minds and genitals of the people present, was something which left me absolutely indifferent. If I can't get excited by a camera, I can't understand the people who can. There are also pederasts in the world, but because I'm not a pederast, I can't understand them. You don't have any idea how ridiculous that evening was (p. 6).

He recognizes clearly, however, that Rouch's position is simply the logical extension of his own refusal of preordained scripts and professional actors: "I was saying the same things, yes, but I was saying them without totally destroying everything" (p. 7).

16. Torri, Cinema italiano , pp. 62-63.

17. Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard , p. 238.

18. Herman, "Rossellini tourne India 57," 9.

19. Originally appeared in Cahiers du cinéma , no. 96 (June 1959); reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard . It has also been reported to me by Daniel Toscan du Plantier, the former head of Gaumont and a close friend of Rossellini during the last two years of his life, that when the director heard that Godard had said that India was more real than life itself, Rossellini told him he was crazy.

20. Mida, Roberto Rossellini , pp. 8-9. Unfortunately, Rossellini was not to enjoy his critical triumph in tranquility. Before he went to India, it was clear that his marriage with Bergman was not going very well, given the various professional and personal strains it had to endure. While abroad, Rossellini became romantically involved with his chief assistant, Sonali Das Gupta, who became pregnant. Like Bergman eight years earlier, this woman was already married, and the husband, a well-known Indian producer and director, understandably put up a fuss. Rossellini was threatened with expulsion from the country at various points, and the seamy details of the love triangle were played out in the world's tabloids for all to savor. Once back in Europe, after an embarrassing series of denials, the marriage of Rossellini and Bergman was annulled, freeing Rossellini to marry Das Gupta, who had by that time managed to escape from India to a private hide-away in Europe.

21. Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 148.

22. Andrew Sarris, "Rossellini Rediscovered," 61.

23. Interview with Fereydoun Hoveyda and Jacques Rivette, Cahiers du cinéma , no. 94 (April 1959), 11.