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39— Final Projects (1975–77)
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Epilogue

In May, a month after the broadcast of "Concerto per Michelangelo," Rossellini went to the Cannes film festival, where, to his great surprise, he had been asked to be president of the jury. True to form, he insisted that an informational panel on the financing of films be set up before he would consent. While at the festival, he fought hard that the Taviani brothers' Padre padrone be awarded the grand prize, not so much because he liked the film itself (though he did), but because it had originally been made for television. He wanted, to the very end, to break down the artificial barriers between cinema and television that he knew could only harm both. Returning exhausted from Cannes, he began working on an article for Paese Sera . In the article he spoke of his first contact with the "cinema" in fifteen years; he was excited that he had been able to see for himself what was going on in that world he had left behind. What he had discovered, however, was that the cinema of the auteur had been reduced to "navel gazing": "Many so-called auteurist films are pure exercises in a useless and schizophrenically personal aestheticism," he wrote. On the other hand, even worse were the purveyors of the entertainment products of sex and violence. What bothered him the most, though, were the complaints he heard concerning the "crisis" of the cinema. As he pointed out in the article, if television were included, one would quickly realize that there was no crisis at all, but that audiences were larger than ever: "Through an enormous error of vision, or of perspective, many take as a crisis that which in reality is a boom."[8] Now that Padre padrone had won, the first time ever for a film made outside the power group of the commercial cinema industry, he insisted, the problem would be distribution, the final way to block new ideas.

But the article was not to be finished. As he was about to leave his apartment to do some errands on the afternoon of June 3, 1977, Rossellini suffered a massive heart attack and died within minutes. He was seventy-one years old, but not yet done with life.

The ironies and tensions of his life and career continued after his death. In homage to his films on the Resistance, and especially since it was known that he was working on a film about Marx, the Communists claimed him for their own, displaying his body at the Communist Culture House, amid bouquets of bright red flowers. The family insisted on a Church funeral, however, given Rossellini's lifelong interest in religion, and the nation was treated to the unusual spectacle of Enrico Berlinguer, the head of the Communist party, attending Rossellini's funeral mass at Sant'Ignazio. Even more surprisingly, he sat next to Aldo Moro, the most powerful man in the Christian Democrat party, and the architect of the famous "historic compromise," which was designed to bring the Communists into the government for the first time in Italian history. Perhaps the wish of Open City , the union of priest and partisan, was about to be fulfilled after all. But it was not to be. Within the year, Moro was kidnapped and assassinated by members of the Red Brigades. Anxious to make a symbolic point, they left his


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body exactly halfway between the Roman headquarters of the Communist party and the Christian Democrat party, and the historic compromise was dead as well.

It is significant that Rossellini was claimed by both groups, for in truth he was of neither, this religious atheist and bourgeois revolutionary, preferring always to make his own highly individualistic way in the world. In his art or craft, as well, he was a victim of wrong expectations; from the commercial filmmaking establishment, who wanted him to be commercial, from the political and avantgarde, who wanted him to be those things. What is perhaps most tragic and most sublime about his wonderful, failed career, is, once again, that he was neither, or both, the supreme example of the modernist artist working in a commercial medium that clung desperately to the narrative and dramatic forms it had inherited from the nineteenth century. As such, Rossellini's career remains perhaps the perfect emblem of the frustrating contradictions and unique glories of cinematic art.


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