The Past Is Always Present: The Evolutionary Career of Roberto Rossellini

Commonly celebrated as the “father” of Italian neo-realism, Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), was, in fact, much, much more than this and to label him simply as a neo-realist director is to greatly undervalue his influence on and importance to world cinema. He was constantly reinventing his filmmaking throughout his career, experimenting with new technical and stylistic challenges, changing conditions of production and the porous boundary between documentary and fiction, the present and the past.

Rossellini began as a filmmaker in fascist Italy, and his early films were sometimes naive but fascinating commercial products of their time, existing within ideological and stylistic constraints but also exploring a more rounded view of humanity and society. These were then followed, in turn, by his pioneering neo-realist works, his pared back, spiritual and contemplative films with Ingrid Bergman, his attempts to combine elements of neo-realism with more speculative approaches to history, and his final, more didactic works for television focusing on key figures in European philosophy.

This season takes in a diverse range of work from across the first four “phases” of Rossellini’s career and includes the pick of his early work in wartime fascist Italy, Un pilota returna (1942), the most widely celebrated and influential of his famous neo-realist “War Trilogy”, Rome, Open City (1945), two collaborations with his then wife, Ingrid Bergman, including a fascinating and rarely shown post-Hollywood return to her role as Joan of Arc, and two of the director’s best “mainstream” mid-career features: Il generale Della Rovere (1959), featuring a brilliant central performance from fellow neo-realist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, and Viva l’Italia (1961), an absorbing companion piece to Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963).

This season highlights the extraordinary creativity, variety and restlessness of Rossellini’s cinema and also concludes with his deeply engaged documentary-fiction hybrid, India: Matri Bhumi (1959).