Introduction

In his introduction to a recent volume of collected essays on Roberto Rossellini, David Forgacs asserts that it is probably fair to say that “no wholesale critical reappraisal of Rossellini’s work has taken place during the last quarter century.” Why, Forgacs asks, “has Rossellini remained a controversial figure? Why has so much of his work consistently been ignored? Why reopen the case now?” ¹ Although I came to this project intending to concentrate primarily on the relationship—as it has manifested itself in the films—between the Italian neorealist director and the internationally famous Hollywood star, over the course of writing I came to realize that the Rossellini/Bergman films need to be evaluated within the larger context of questions regarding all of Rossellini’s immediate postwar works (1945— 1955) and their place in the dynamic topography of Italian postwar cinema. I fully endorse Forgacs’s assessment of the uneven—and, to a certain extent, neglectful—critical reception of Rossellini’s oeuvre. ² It is true that the influence of Rossellini’s work on major directors throughout the second half of the twentieth century remains undisputed. Jean-Luc Godard wrote in a 1959 review of Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir, “all roads lead to Rome Open City.” Filmmakers as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni, Martin Scorsese, and Max Ophuls, to name but a few, have referred to Rossellini as a major influence and ranked him among the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. ³ Yet, the often highly politicized and conflicted appraisals in the forties and fifties of the director’s work have never been thoroughly evaluated or challenged. This project begins such a reappraisal, through a focus in particular on Rossellini’s later postwar films, precisely those works—beginning with Stromboli, terra di Dio (1949)—that were seen to betray or move away from neorealism. These films that have been widely perceived to be deviations from the aesthetic of neorealism can, from another angle, reveal to us a new reading of the movement’s birth, and thus of what was understood to be its essence.