1. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma , no. 133 (July 1962), 6.

2. "Responsibilità del governo passati e presenti," Cinema nuovo , no. 141 (September-October 1959), 413.

3. Roberto Rossellini, "Un nuovo corso per il cinema italiano," Cinema nuovo , no. 152 (July-August 1961), 307, 311-13. This essay was originally written as part of a conference held in Milan the previous year concerning "The Audio-Visual Media and the Man of Scientific and Industrial Civilization."

4. "Censure et culture" (open letter to Renzo Helfer), Cinéma 61 , no. 60 (October 1961), 26.

5. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma (1962), 5. Further references to this interview will be included in the text.

6. Later, in 1965, he adds in his newspaper article "Difendere la speranza che è dentro di noi" the startling opinion that "the State, especially, will intervene to spread truth and knowledge." He affects the grand tone in his 1966 "La ricerca di stile e di linguaggio e il rinnovamento del contenuto" ( Filmcritica , no. 167 [May-June 1966], 265), ending this essay with one of his most passionate appeals:

I, a free man without preconceived ideas, do not favor optimism, but rather the knowledge of things. I'm against the professional mourners of progress, I'm against complaining, moaning, pulling out your hair, and all those who are so used to doing it. I think it is beautiful and exalting to live in the grand current of history, to live therefore in the midst of progress, not in its wake but with an alert mind and a critical sense so that it can be governed and we can find our way with it.

Rossellini's interest in science links him to another major figure of the twentieth century, Sergei Eisenstein, who also wanted, in the words of Barthélemy Amengual, "to reconcile the paths of science and those of poetry, reason and myth, thought and emotion" (Barthélemy Amengual, Que Viva Eisenstein! [Lausanne, Switzerland: Éditions L'Age d'Homme, 1980], p. 585). Most of Eisenstein's films, of course, were filled with physical action, and thus differ sharply from Rossellini's. However, one relatively little-known (and astonishing) project of Eisenstein's, the filming of Marx's Das Kapital , was closer to the spirit of the Italian director. Perhaps the clearest statement of the similarity of the two men's ideas comes in this 1930 remark of Eisenstein's made first at the Sorbonne:

The intellectual film is the only thing capable of overcoming the discord between the speech of logic and the speech of imagery. On the basis of the speech of kinodialectic, intellectual cinematography will not be the cinematography of episodes, continue

not the cinematography of anecdotes. The intellectual kino will be the cinematography of concepts. It will be the direct expression of entire ideological systems and systems of concepts.

My new conception of the film is based on the idea that the intellectual and emotional processes which so far have been conceived of as existing independently of each other—art versus science—and form an antithesis heretofore never united, can be brought together to form a synthesis on the basis of cinedialectic, a process that only the cinema can achieve. The scientific formula can be given the emotional quality of a poem. I will attempt to film Capital so that the humble worker or peasant can understand it in the dialectical manner.

(Quoted in Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein . Revised edition [London: Dennis Dobson, 1978], p. 153. The lecture was originally published as "Les principes du nouveau cinéma russe," in Revue du cinéma , no. 9 [April 1930].)

However, while both directors want to aid their audiences to "think" better and presumably more critically, Rossellini believes that the process of thinking is itself unproblematic, and he sometimes seems to be saying that what is important is the sheer amount of information transmitted. For Eisenstein, however, the purpose of filming Das Kapital will be not to convey information, nor even to teach Marxist principles, but to aid the spectator in learning to think dialectically . Amengual explains that as part of this attempt

to liberate the spectator and not to subjugate him, to give him an instrument (dialectical materialism) and not to indoctrinate him, Eisenstein planned—an idea that was more Vertovian than Brechtian—to reveal his own game periodically and thus make his passive "subject" a partner who had been warned: "The mechanics of production must be made explicit. To conduct the spectator, by means of a chain of cinematic provocations, up to a specified emotional effect, and then furnish him a card saying 'Well, now we arrived at such and such a point'" (p. 588).

Except for certain complicated aspects of Louis XIV , which I will look at more closely later, Rossellini emphatically does not (intentionally) reveal himself or his game in these films.

7. "Cinema: Nuove prospettive di conoscenza," Filmcritica , nos. 135-36 (July-August 1963), 52.

8. Informazione democrazia: La RAI TV in Italia , ed. Beppe Lopez (Rome: Dedalo Libri, 1973), p. 59.

9. "Conversazione sulla cultura e sul cinema," reprinted in R.R.: Roberto Rossellini , ed. Edoardo Bruno (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979), pp. 29-31. (All of Rossellini's articles and interviews originally published in Filmcritica are reprinted in this useful volume.)

10. The relation between Brecht and Rossellini is complicated. For one thing, their attitudes concerning the place of emotion in representation are equally contradictory, for while both wanted to appeal to the spectator intellectually rather than emotionally, they also felt, like Eisenstein, that intellectual curiosity and the life of the mind could be emotionally fulfilling in their own right. The most important difference between them, however, is that, while Brecht was continually at pains to point out the constructed, made nature of the spectacle through the famous Verfremdungseffekt , the unrelenting destruction of illusionism, Rossellini's entire conscious aesthetic was built upon the necessity of illusionism. As we have seen throughout his career, Rossellini realized that it was impossible to portray reality directly, without mediation, and various experiments reveal that realization in subtle ways. Yet once in the realm of the overtly historical and "scientific," when the overriding project is to inform, Rossellini seems to want to forget the problematic nature of representation. The situation is complex, of course, for there is a way in which the long takes, the refusal to give in to Hollywood-style illusionism (which is paradoxically based on short takes), is in itself illusion-breaking. Nevertheless, his efforts in this direction are tentative and finally minor, at least com- soft

pared with Brecht's and those of his cinematic offspring Godard, and it is misleading to call Rossellini Brechtian, as many have.

One other important difference is the essentializing nature of Rossellini's films: as we have seen, all of Rossellini's vaunted placing of human beings in a specific time and place leads nevertheless and inevitably to the discovery of a timeless human nature. Nothing could be further from Brecht's project. This quotation from Brecht, in which he distances his own practice from that of conventional theater, can also serve to distinguish him from Rossellini:

The bourgeois theatre emphasized the timelessness of its objects. Its representation of people is bound by the alleged "eternally human." Its story is arranged in such a way as to create "universal" situations that allow Man with a capital M to express himself: man of every period and every colour. All its incidents are just one enormous cue, and this cue is followed by the "eternal" response: the inevitable, usual, natural, purely human response.

( Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , ed. and trans. by John Willet [New York: Hill and Wang, 1964], pp. 96-97. For a more detailed comparison of Brecht and Rossellini, see my "Just How Brechtian Is Rossellini?" in Film Criticism , 3, no. 2 [1979]. This article is also reprinted in the BFI dossier on Rossellini.)

11. Aprà and Ponzi, "An Interview With Rossellini," p. 122.

12. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma , no. 145 (July 1963), 8.

13. Ibid., 13.

14. Renzo Rossellini told me in 1979 that his father involved him in this film "to save me from something dangerous." Renzo had been working in France at the time and at age 17 had become involved as a "sympathizer" with the revolutionary FLN. (Interview with the author, Rome, June 1979.)

15. Aprà and Ponzi, "An Interview With Rossellini," p. 124.

16. Renzo Rossellini has said that this entire period, when his father was moving toward the history films, was the "most important intellectual experience of my life." In their interminable discussions about civilization and world history, which began the summer during which General della Rovere was filmed, Renzo admits that his father was the "free spirit" and he the dogmatic one, instead of the usual roles assigned in father-son debates. At the time, Renzo was committed to a Marxist and materialist perspective, while his father took the Rousseauist, humanist position of an admirer of the French Revolution. The result was a dialectic that, according to Renzo, was for him the "greatest university possible."

17. Interview, Filmcritica , no. 190 (August 1968), 351.

18. Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 225. Adriano Aprà sees the television-cinema relationship as part of an elaborate male-female dialectic working throughout Rossellini's career. In his model, the cinema is essentially feminine, and thus Rossellini's move to television is also a definitive move to the possibility of a cold, masculine examination. Using McLuhan's terminology, Aprà finds that neorealist films were too "hot." He also suggests that Rossellini found the cinematic situation of the darkroom and the projected light very manipulative, making the cinema a kind of maternal womb, as scathingly depicted in "Illibatezza," his last theatrical film. ("Rossellini oltre neorealismo," in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano , ed. Lino Miccichè [Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1975], p. 297.)

19. Cinema: A Critical Dictionary , ed. Richard Roud (New York: Viking, 1980), vol. 2, p. 900. Again, one person's meat seems to be another's poison: I have discussed these films with critics who have no difficulty with Antonioni's longueurs who find them excessively slow, and with nonspecialist audiences—interested almost totally, as Rossellini would have wanted, in their content—who have found them fascinating.

This question of "boredom" is obviously one of the main reasons that Rossellini's didactic films have never, with the exception of Louis XIV , been shown on American public television. Another problem, examined over ten years ago by the New York Times television critic, John J. O'Connor (April 30, 1972, II, 17) is that the dubbing is painfully obvious to Americans, though it does not seem to bother Europeans. Since these films rely so heavily on words, subtitled versions do make one feel as though one has been reading a book rather than seeing a film. Obviously, dubbing is preferable since there is no special concern with preserving a star's voice, and in dubbing virtually everything can be translated. O'Connor reported that in the future Rossellini planned to have his actors mouth English on the set so that the postproduction dubbing into English would seem more natural, thus enabling him to get American television contracts. (In fact, Rossellini did exactly that in the three-part The Age of the Medici , the definitive version of which is in English, and stories are told of minor characters mouthing words that had absolutely no meaning for them. It was all for naught, however, as one might have suspected, since this excellent and complex work has never been shown on American television either.)

20. James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 210.

21. Goffredo Fofi, Il cinema italiano: Servi e padroni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), p. 160.

22. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma , no. 183 (October 1966), 18-19.

23. Cinéma [Paris], no. 206 (February 1976), 70-71. The most straightforward recent version of Rossellini's position can be found in Paul Schrader's remark that "the facts of the past must be framed in such a manner to reveal their —not Rossellini's, not our—intrinsic truth." (Schrader, "The Rise of Louis XIV," Cinema [Beverly Hills], 6, no. 3 [Spring 1971], 4.)

24. Another theoretically provocative formulation of this view is that of Pascal Kané, writing in Cahiers du cinéma . For him the fascinating contradiction of history films is that a presumably unknown historical period must somehow be represented, and thus recognizable at the same time. The remainder that is always left over is what Kané calls "l'effet d'étrangeté." Comparing Rossellini's Louis XIV with Pasolini's Thousand and One Nights , Kané finds that, for Rossellini, the point is to locate an absolute historical truth and then to convey it:

The strangeness of the representation, the resistance which history opposes to its own deciphering by the spectator, is therefore not the product of an insufficient reading, of a lack of knowledge concerning the context. The feeling of strangeness doesn't have any other source, it belongs in no case to a fact of narration, it is not (or at least shouldn't be) the support of any jouissance . It is only the effect of a "more than real" asked of a particular representation. The signifieds which are produced, among other didactic ones, will therefore be totally identified with the historical referent of the story.

Pasolini's film, on the other hand, offers the "absolute strangeness of practice and discourse, but also of bodies and places":

It is a cinema fascinated by "the Other," pure jouissance of the heterogeneous, and absence of every foundation, of every historic, sexual, economic, and even architectural referent of the story. . . . History is no longer anything but a particular case of mythic discourse.

To the omnipresence of the Rossellinian historic reference . . . and correlatively, to its eliding of the narration, of the "time of the enunciation," is here opposed an infinite distancing from all contexts, dissipated in the infinite difference of the narration, the only true reference. . . . With Rossellini, the signified will be identified exactly with the referent of the fiction (supposedly full) without ever constituting an autonomous production. With Pasolini, every discourse is only a discourse on the narration itself, the only tangible referent, the only foundation of meaning (the historic reference is emptied of every role).

(Pascal Kané, "Cinéma et histoire: L'Effet d'étrangeté," Cahiers du cinéma , nos. 254-55 [December 1974-January 1975], 78, 80-81.)

25. Leprohon, The Italian Cinema , p. 213.

26. Ibid., p. 176.

27. An interesting comparison can be made with the CBS television program of the 1950s entitled "You Are There." In at least one "dramatization"—the "Death of Socrates"—the two projects overlap. In the American television version, as might be expected, the overwhelming emphasis is on the highly dramatized clash of personalities, with little or no attempt to explain Socratic ideas.

28. He does not want to include anything deliberately anachronistic, of course (this kind of insistently illusion-breaking device never interested him), but this pursuit of the essential idea of an era explains why he was not concerned by the obvious artificiality of some of the matte shots in Socrates and other films. These sometimes totally unconvincing matte shots have disturbed many American critics. One practical matter that must be kept in mind, however, is that, while these films are usually seen on the giant screen, they were intended for television, where the matte shots would obviously be much less noticeable. John Dorr makes many of the same points I have made above concerning Rossellini's search for essence, but I think he goes too far in claiming that Rossellini deliberately zooms in on the artificial matte shot of the acropolis in Socrates in order to stress that this kind of historical illusionism is unimportant ("Roberto Rossellini 1974," Take One , 4, no. 3 [May 1974], 15).

A great deal has also been written concerning Rossellini's use of the zoom in these films. Dorr makes the point that its use enables the director to capture the "meaning" of an event in staging it, rather than later, as with most filmmakers, in the more analytic editing process. Dorr is clearly following Bazin here, but also, I think, follows him into error when he ontologically privileges the long take over montage (without, of course, using those terms): "His camera is free to move about the action without destroying its wholeness. . . . The scene retains its immediacy, its reality as event" (Ibid.). This notion of the wholeness of an event is intriguing, though it entails gestalt and phenomenological questions that cannot be gone into here. Nevertheless, since the camera can never take in the whole event all the time, an elaborate psychological proof would be necessary to demonstrate just how the inevitable fragmentation of an event produced by the frame at any given moment differs essentially from the fragmentation produced by montage. But it is also possible to talk about the use of the zoom in ways that go beyond Dorr's neo-Bazinian terms. Thus, Fred Camper, writing in the Chicago Reader , says that Rossellini's zoom lens' "multiple perspectives, its ability to change from close-up to long shot and back again, express the continual interdependence between individual and environment, between part and whole, throughout history" (November 3, 1978; quoted in Belton, "The Bionic Eye," p. 22). And Robin Wood has correctly pointed out the inherent distancing properties of the zoom that result from its obtrusiveness: "Its expressive strength lies in our awareness that our perceptions are being guided, our attention focussed. . . . Properly used, the zoom is itself a distancing device, subtly and persuasively reminding us of the presence of the director who is directing our perceptions as surely as he directs the actors" ("Rossellini," 8).