Auteurs. Rossellini.

"Like most directors associated with the post-war neo-realist film movement out of Italy, [Roberto] Rossellini - whose films Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948) are canonical masterpieces of the era—is rarely popularly remembered for his films outside of the 1940s," writes Daniel Kasman, looking ahead to a season of potentially relevatory releases on DVD. "If anything, Rossellini's didactic works, including [The Taking of Power by Louis XIV] and other such masterpieces as Blaise Pascal (1972) and later works on Socrates, St Augustine and Descartes clarified that perhaps Roberto Rossellini was the only director working - or perhaps had ever worked - in neo-realism. These are films where realism did not mean use of non-professional actors, or social-realist narratives, or location shooting, or the many other textbook qualities commonly ascribed to the movement, but rather, in the words of New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, they were movies that attempted to present the world, unadorned."

Also in the Auteurs' Notebook, Zach Campbell on Dov'è la libertà...? (Where Is Freedom?, 1954) and Era notte a Roma (Blackout in Rome, 1960): "Dov'è la libertà works out the same basic problem that animated Rossellini's much more 'serious' Europa '51 (aka The Greatest Love) made just before - that is, what becomes those whose adherence to a commonly held good leads them, logically, to a destination with which society cannot make sense?... Though comedic, the film rummages through the moral and historical rubble of postwar Italy in a sense analogous to the literal rubble of Italian cities in neorealist cinema." And: "Though [Era notte a Roma] is in many ways a retread of earlier material, its camera style beckons ever-so-mildly to the films that Rossellini would start making a few years later - the late historical telefilms, four of which will come out on R1 DVD courtesy of Criterion/Eclipse very soon."

Posted by dwhudson at October 30, 2008 8:30 AM