Roberto Rossellini - Life and work, Other filmography
Film director, born in Rome, Italy. His first independent film was Roma, città apperta (1945, Rome, Open City), made while it was still under German occupation, often with hidden cameras in a style which came to be known as neo-Realism. It was followed by Paisà (1946, Paisan) and Germania, anno zero (1947, Germany, Year Zero). Later films on spiritual themes, and his liaison with Ingrid Bergman, were condemned by the Catholic Church in the USA, but another war-time story, Il generale della Rovere (1959, General della Rovere), restored his popularity. He later produced several television documentaries on historical figures, such as Louis XIV and Socrates.
Roberto Rossellini (May 8, 1906 - June 3, 1977) was an Italian film director. Rossellini was one of the most important directors of Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.
Life and work
Born into a bourgeois family living in Rome, he lived in via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had his first Roman hotel in 1922 when Fascism obtained power in Italy.
Rossellini's father built the first Roman "cinema" (a theatre in which films could be shown), granting Roberto an unlimited free pass; Rossellini had a brother, Renzo, who later scored many of his films.
His close friendship with Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce and responsible for cinema, has been interpreted as a possible reason for having been preferred to other apprentices.
Early career
Some authors describe the first part of his career as a sequence of trilogies.
His first feature film, La nave bianca (1941) was sponsored by the audiovisual propaganda centre of Navy Department and is the first work in Rossellini's so-called Fascist Trilogy, together with Un pilota ritorna (1942) and Uomo dalla Croce (1943).
When the Fascist regime ended in 1943, just two months after the liberation of Rome, Rossellini was already preparing Roma città aperta (1945) (with Fellini assisting on the script and Fabrizi playing the role of the priest), which he self-produced (most of the money came from credits and loans). Rossellini had started now his so-called Neorealistic Trilogy, the second title of which was Paisàn (1946), produced with non-professional actors, and the third Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1946), sponsored by a French producer and filmed in Berlin's French sector.
Transition and later career
After his Neorealist Trilogy, Rossellini produced two films now classified as the "Transitional films": L'Amore (with Anna Magnani) and La macchina ammazzacattivi, on the capability of cinema to portray reality and truth (with recalls of Commedia del Arte).
1948 was the year of love: Rossellini received a letter from a famous foreign actress proposing a collaboration:
Dear Mr. Rossellini, I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only "ti amo", I am ready to come and make a film with you.Ingrid Bergman
By this famous letter begins one of the most popular love stories in cinema lore, with Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini both at the peak of their popularity and influence.
This affair caused a great scandal in some countries (Bergman and Rossellini were both married to other people);
In 1957 Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister at the time, invited him to India to make the documentary "India" and put some life into the floundering Indian Films Division.
In 1971, Rice University in Houston, Texas, invited Rossellini to help establish a Media Center.
In 1977, Roberto Rossellini died of a heart attack, aged 71.
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