Afterword

In support of his argument that Rossellini’s postwar films–including his works with Bergman–are an “antecedent to rather than a part of a [cinematic] modernism” that for him began decidedly with Antonioni in his 1950 Story of a Love Affair, András Bálint Kovács refers to a comment the director made in a 1965 interview, a comment in which he appears to reject the modernist approach, even condemning its existence in some of his own films. Looking back at films like Voyage to Italy, Rossellini contends that:

in the past hundred years art has been reduced to complaints. An artist is greater or lesser depending on how much he complains… . Complaint, as a rather irrational attitude, doesn’t seem to get you anywhere, when you have extremely concrete things to struggle for… . Yes, [Voyage to Italy] was about alienation. But that’s why I say that I don’t even like my own films, because when I began to make those kinds of films it was of course in search for an orientation, but when you realize that everyone has the same orientation, or is engaged in the same search, it becomes an attitude, an attitude of complaint. ¹

Since Rossellini himself repudiated the pessimistic and unfocused “art of complaint” of his early career, it stands to reason, Kovács concludes, that the director’s relationship to modern cinema is surely compromised and ambiguous. If we are to understand Rossellini, as Kovács does, as the “uncontested hero, even the materialization of the essence of neorealism’s progressive spirit,” that prepared the way for modernism, it becomes incumbent for Kovács to establish the ways in which his films do not partake of the modernist project. Kovács does this largely by emphasizing the social and political commitment of Rossellini’s postwar oeuvre, and by downplaying the psychological, subjective dimension of films like Stromboli and Germany Year Zero. While the author cannot deny that Rossellini’s postwar films often depict a profound sense of estrangement between characters and their environment, ultimately, he says, all of the director’s works from this period contain a final resolution, “a neorealist miracle,” as he calls it, that reestablishes “an organic relationship with the everyday environment.” Like many of the critics I have engaged with (and challenged) in this book, Kovács wants to see Rossellini’s postwar oeuvre (i.e., those films he made in the ten years following the war) from the optimistic perspective of the Liberation, as it was depicted in the powerful, but in many respects “detraumatized filmic account of the war in … Rome Open City.” ² This is a Rossellini who affirms the alliance between different groups within the Resistance movement and between different classes of Italian society in the fight against Fascism, as well as “the positive role of the Church, and the stories of [Italy’s] heroes and martyrs.” ³ It is a Rossellini who–even in the postwar films that deal only indirectly with the war and its aftermath (such as Voyage to Italy, and Europa’51)–valorizes the sustaining power of the community and of the surrounding environment as an antidote to alienation and neurosis. Yet, one sees in the critical discourse starting already with Germany Year Zero how uneasily much of Rossellini’s work after Rome Open City fitted into such a conception of neorealism (and of Rossellini’s role as its progenitor), a conception born out of a period, in the immediate aftermath of the war, when the heroic myth of the Resistance and the restorative conciliatory stance that came with it “responded to the populist and human needs of the moment.” ⁴