“I make a daily effort to demolish my ignorance”: Roberto Rossellini interviewed in 1976

‘To practise good politics is less useful than to teach good politics to a large number of citizens.’ – Socrates, in Rossellini’s Socrate (1970)

For nearly ten years, we haven’t been seeing much of Roberto Rossellini in Britain. Yet since 1966, when The Rise to Power of Louis XIV materialised with unexpected glory from a career which had seemed to write itself off in the disdainful episode of Rogopag four years earlier, Rossellini has written and/or directed no less than twenty-seven productions, equivalent to his entire output between La Nave Bianca (1941) and Louis XIV.

It stretches the point, perhaps, to create such a statistic by including the twelve one-hour episodes of a television documentary series written and ‘supervised’ by Rossellini (his son, Renzo, directed) in 1967, or all five episodes of Atti degli Apostoli, made for four television companies simultaneously in 1968. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of Rossellini’s work in the decade that now finds him a zestful seventy-year-old is unquestionably astonishing. The choice of subjects, too, seems at first sight equally unpredictable, ranging briskly from Socrates to Pascal, from Augustine of Hippo to Cosimo de Medici, and from Descartes to the Messiah. One might guess that the director of Rome, Open City could come to be the writer of Les Carabiniers, but what are we to make of the gulfs that appear to lie between Viaggio in Italia (1953), Vanina Vanini (1961) and Anno Uno (1974)? Has Rossellini, after all, been rambling arbitrarily through history, an opportunist in search of an auteur? 

A generalisation might be risked that could draw his films within hailing distance. Rossellini’s characters have a childlike and aggressive innocence which, whether the context is war, marriage, the Church, India, majesty or poverty, leads them into disillusionment. Their endings are a form of suicide, moral or physical, when the nature of the struggle is fully understood and a final intolerable choice has to be made. At the point in any Rossellini film when the individual must weigh his own wishes against the needs of his fellow men, individualism always loses. Pietro Missirilli goes to the guillotine, General della Rovere steps before a firing squad, Garibaldi hands Italy over to Victor Emmanuel, Socrates drinks hemlock, Alcide de Gasperi catches a train.

Like children, Rossellini’s people see life in terms of absolutes. If they elect to withdraw, then like the bereaved mother in Europa 51 they withdraw completely. If they elect to adopt a cause, then like the ingenuous monks in Flowers of St Francis they adopt every aspect of it, discomforts, impracticalities and all. The half-life – a decaying marriage (La Paura, Stromboli, Viaggio in Italia), an inactive pacifism (Era Notte a Roma), a neglected Catholicism (Vanina Vanini) – proves in the end to be no life at all. To pick an example, a typically committed hero appeared in one of Rossellini’s rare comedies, Dov’è la Libertà? (1953). This wilful innocent is a barber who after twenty-two years of imprisonment for a crime passionel – he slit the throat of his wife’s lover in mid-shave – is suddenly given a remission for good conduct. Pushed out into the society he has lost all touch with, but which he has always believed to be filled with honesty and kindness, he sets about building a new life only to face sustained villainy at every turn. Even the sweet young girl he sets his heart on proves to be plotting blackmail against his former father-in-law for making her pregnant. So he disguises himself as the prison governor and returns blissfully to his own cell; ironically, it takes another act of violence before he is permitted to stay there.

The barber’s refusal to abandon his code, even when he discovers its total irrelevance to the requirements of society in general, indicates a moral that the only refuge and reward for an innocent man in an evil world is incarceration. Told humorously, the point is better made by suggesting that the struggle is not won by retiring from it – on the contrary, the world stays evil and infects the would-be innocent into violence and deceit as he makes his escape. The barber (played by Totò on a perfect note of fussing melancholy), an idiot delinquent who can find no place for his beliefs within society, comes as a sour echo of Ingrid Bergman’s wistful entombment in an asylum in Europa 51, the film Rossellini had made a few months earlier. The two productions mirror each other closely, both the central characters accepting responsibility for a death (in Bergman’s case, the suicide of her neglected son) and attempting some kind of atonement by involving themselves with the lives of others. Neither has much of a chance, but they do give it a try.

Innocence again, meaning in this case a childlike non-commitment to any cause but oneself, is represented in Il Generale della Rovere (1959) by De Sica’s charming old swindler, who gets the money to pay his gambling debts by offering help to families with relatives in Gestapo hands. Arrested while cheerfully telling a woman that the husband she knows to have been shot is alive and well, he is taken before the local SS Commander and given a choice of trial (and probable execution) or of helping the Germans by playing the role of an imprisoned Resistance leader and passing on any information he may receive about partisan activities. He settles for impersonation but soon decides that in war it’s impossible to be on both sides at once, little as one may care for either of them. Finally disgusted by Nazi duplicity, if only because it is more brutal than his own, he elects for patriotism and dies a courageous, inspiring and rather useless death.

‘You die unjustly!’ protests the wife of Socrates some twenty-eight Rossellini films later. ‘Would you prefer me to die justly?’ responds her husband, true to the director’s and his own form (‘All I do is get others to think by posing questions’), later adding by way of quotable consolation: ‘Remember that I was condemned to death at birth, by Nature.’ In della Rovere’s favour, one might observe that his urbane patter tended not to hit the audience like a shoal of darts delivered at a target; while Socrates, in his favour, makes no attempt to turn on the romantic comedy charm. If the outcasts are similarly doomed, Rossellini’s later examples are certainly presented differently – for one thing, they say what they have to say, clearly and at length, and they have a great deal to talk about. In fact the objections that have most frequently been raised in connection with Rossellini’s television works is that they aren’t filmic at all, they are simply visualised texts. Style and contemplation, the strengths of such masterpieces as Germany, Year Zero (1947), seem to have been sacrificed to statement, plain and uncomfortably simple.

When Rossellini came to England last November for the screenings of Anno Uno and The Messiah at the London Festival, it was quickly apparent that if sacrifice and martyrdom were his themes he was not aware of having relinquished one scrap of his enjoyment of the processes involved in portraying them. His audiences were not particularly charitable. Anno Uno, pirouetting endlessly around a succession of obscure non-events in the Italian politics of the immediate post-war period, seemed a non-event itself, while The Messiah, quoting scrupulously from the Gospels, aroused concern that so many quotations seemed unfortunately chosen.

Amid the ideological arguments, the films themselves appeared to fade from view, as if their substance were all words and nothing else – no colours, no characters, no movement. Anno Uno and The Messiah ring like conference halls with speech after speech, a concert of words, phrases, announcements that slip tantalisingly past before they can be absorbed, considered, discarded. Pencil poised in the dark, one may note that: ‘Young and old are but waves of the same sea’; that ‘It takes no courage to speak the truth’ and that ‘Man is made not for monologue but for dialogue’ (the pencil marks are heavier for this one). But the record should be set straight; the quotations do no justice to the screen. Rossellini’s images speak with their own kind of language, and their own clarity.

The opening scene of Anno Uno is a battleground. Tanks speed by, tents offer inadequate shelter to wounded men, civilian refugees scuttle down a slope as an air-raid begins, and on an opposite slope an anti-aircraft gun hammers at the sky. It’s an obscure incident, serving only to set the stage, and Rossellini wastes no time on it – the whole thing is done, incredibly, in a single shot. Before we can catch our breath, he is tracking through the ruins left by the raid, a jumble of bricks and beams from which rescue squads lift the torn bodies of the victims; in the background, a broken Madonna looks like just another corpse. And then he’s in Rome, where a girl dodges a Nazi round-up and leads us to the central characters of the film, arguing, debating, planning their way towards a future security.

There was talk at one point of starring Gregory Peck as Alcide de Gasperi, who for ten years from 1944 was a leading architect in the reconstruction of the Italian political system. He’s almost too easy to imagine in the role, frowning with innocent integrity; instead, Rossellini picked Luigi Vannucchi, who adds a kindly anonymity to the Peck image and merges so self-effacingly with his environment as to become almost invisible in rooms occupied by more than two people. After the film’s emotive opening, the words of de Gasperi, expressed by this wraith-like form, sound appropriately more like popular opinion than an isolated viewpoint – it seems inconceivable that his call for national unity should be contested and ultimately ignored.

Rossellini punctuates the story of de Gasperi’s perpetually frustrated career with frequent exterior shots, filmed with the same hypnotic camera continuity, of the society for which he is spokesman. Curiously, the device seems at the same time to explain de Gasperi’s failure. His political manoeuvres are less easy to grasp than the immediately accessible images of Rossellini’s locations, architecture and faces. The crowds speak of reality, the man only of theory. At the end, Rossellini rescues him with a beautiful scene among his family; wife and daughters stand silent around him, like the courtiers around Louis XIV, as the Christian Democrat makes a domestic farewell. ‘God lets you work, then he tells you: “That’s enough, now.” Man’s little mind is unwilling to accept that it’s the end.’

Accused in Italy of having been made with fascist money (one million dollars of the budget came from the public-funded distribution company Italnoleggio, which makes the claim hard to understand), and of having surrendered to what Cinema Nuovo termed the ‘fascination’ of fascism – presumably on the strength of de Gasperi’s equation of Communism with state totalitarianism, ‘the enemy of freedom’ – Anno Uno appears fated to satisfy neither the Italians nor the rest of the world. At the London Festival, nevertheless, it provided a valuable balance to The Messiah, serving to illustrate both how Rossellini streamlines his text to further his message, and how his use of the camera has paradoxically become so eloquent as to make words unnecessary. De Gasperi becomes Christ, and Christ becomes Socrates, even General della Rovere, in The Messiah, a film in which Tunisia provides the dazzling context for an interpretation of the gospels which – amid some indignation – implies that Jewish high priests caused Jesus to be crucified.

Rossellini made The Messiah for the cinema, but the style is no different from that of his television productions – with the possible exception that the long shots are a little more distant from their subjects. Again the eye of the camera is constantly on the move, gliding from close-up to close-up in a continuous curiosity, as if to cut from one position to another would be to sever our links with a parallel universe. At the Last Supper, filmed from what to anyone else might have seemed an impossible angle, Rossellini takes us smoothly, insistently, from one disciple to the next, examining their hands, beards, faces, and above all their shared participation in the event itself. As Christ and Barabbas are offered as alternative sacrifices to a small, grubby crowd, and Pilate strides in disdainful perplexity around an enormous courtyard, from victim to accusers to guards to victim and at last to a bowl of water for his hands, the camera makes not a single blink. It’s a remarkable economy of description, and Rossellini intends that it should make us realise how much has been left undescribed – indefinite because neither words nor images can do justice to it. Whatever he has made of his theme – and from his answers to his critics it became evident that, for one thing, Rossellini isn’t in favour of complexity – he has perfected his own manner of telling it.

In London, Rossellini faced the questions like the target for a firing squad. Small, immaculate, defiantly placid, as if knowing that here too he was not about to win any victories, he seemed to pluck his answers from some rich, invisible text such as those apparently consulted by the spokesmen in his films. On stage, or giving more relaxed audience in his hotel suite, he proved an inviolable oracle, retiring when necessary – as is an oracle’s privilege – behind gently unanswerable rhetoric.

The figure of Alcide de Gasperi in Anno Uno, unfamiliar as he is to British audiences, seems to express a very simple philosophy of national unity? 

Simple, yes, in that sense de Gasperi was really Christian, and although he didn’t succeed we seemed to accomplish a certain amount under his guidance. But since he has gone, the conflict of dialectical confusion is so intense that nobody knows what to do. At a time like this, with not just Italy but the whole world in a peculiar situation, the confusion is so great that I feel it’s important for us to be aware of our own history. If we reread these things, it will help us put order in our own minds.

Is film the best method to re-examine the past?

It’s not the only way, but perhaps it’s the easiest. Whatever the point of view, images have the quality of being more easily understood than any sort of verbal discussion. Film can show the context, it can remind us that everything happens in some context or other. It’s so important to see how the hands are working, what kind of tools are being built; our lives are complex and we always simplify too much. All things are linked with each other – even the traffic on the road can influence politics and the economy – and with film it’s possible to show this complexity.

But aren’t your films increasingly concerned just with people talking to each other?

If one thinks of film or television as an entertainment, then it’s necessary to pursue a different effect, but if you try (as I do) to present something educational then talk is unavoidable. For example, I made a film on Pascal, a philosopher, a very boring character who never made love in his life. When he was suffering, which was most of the time – he was always having pains of one kind or another – he solved problems of geometry. He really wasn’t much fun. Well, RAI-TV were very reluctant to present a film which was so unlike their normal programmes. They took a survey before they showed it, and the survey revealed that only one per cent of Italians had even vaguely heard of Pascal. The film then had a single transmission, it was seen by almost ten million people, and another survey six months later found that 45 per cent of the population knew something about Pascal. And the same survey showed that during the same period there had been a big increase in the sales of books about Pascal, and about that era of French history.

Of course we are used to action and spectacle on our screens, but I think that at the same time we must get used to receiving a little more information. I’m aware of the danger of filming long sections of dialogue, but I am quite stubborn. I insist on them. I think it would be a tremendous adventure if little by little we could demolish our ignorance. I want to arouse curiosity in the audience, and this in turn can lead to the satisfaction of their understanding something new for themselves.

Have you now become, then, more teacher than film-maker?

Oh, I’m the same person that I always have been – film-making is simply a technique that I’ve acquired little by little. And the technique I use now, with the Pancinor camera that can zoom in here and pan out there, perfectly suits what I want the film to demonstrate. The dialogues could be filmed in other ways, but given the possibility of moving all the time with the zoom lens, I can add a lot of extra messages – reactions, backgrounds, feelings, distractions – to stir the audience to want to know more. It’s an attempt to reproduce what happens in life, in conversation, when one’s attention wanders around the subject, looks away, then returns from a different angle. I think that conventional filming of these sequences – long-shot, close-up, close-up, close-up – would be intolerable. The challenge of filming them in an interesting way is something I find very exciting.

Do these enormous speeches cause problems for your actors?

In general, with few exceptions, I give the scripts to the actors at the last minute, because I don’t want them to prepare themselves mentally. Otherwise I may have to demolish what they think in order to get what I think is the correct sense of a scene. So they memorise what they can and they improvise the rest. I don’t mind; I can profit from their improvisations. It’s the way I’ve always worked, although in the case of The Messiah the texts had to be accurately taken from the Scriptures (mainly the Gospel of St. John). We shot the film in English, often with the actors not understanding a word they were saying, so I wound up with the same sense of spontaneity as usual…

What were your intentions behind The Messiah? You avoid showing the Resurrection, but you end the film up in the clouds as if in support of the miracle.

I try to resist any kind of propaganda or interpretation in my work. I’m obsessed with not preaching anything, because I believe it’s wrong, a violation of the personalities of the people watching. It’s best to offer material and let each human being take from it what he wants. People should be given data to work with, to elaborate upon, and then – who knows? – perhaps they will be able to come up with something new. Anyway, I’m not religious at all. I’m the product of a society that is religious among other things, and I deal with religion as a reality. We are capable of thinking in metaphysical terms – that’s a reality and it has to be dealt with. I tried to make The Messiah acceptable to everybody, with the intention of putting people together, not dividing them. People find belief in the fact that Jesus performed miracles. I find tremendous importance, rather, in what he said. ‘The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath’ is, I think, one of the most revolutionary sentences ever spoken.

As a prompt towards new ways of thinking, aren’t your characters rather passive? Socrates, for example, submits quite willingly to his fate.

Socrates is passive in the way that Jesus was passive. They accept the sacrifice, but it’s a way to become very active, a way of impressing people, making them aware of what’s going on. My effort in presenting them is that I try to understand what they might represent for us today. It’s amazing that the words of these people have survived so long, that Christ has in a way conditioned two thousand years of history. I don’t know if, without Christ, it would have been possible to have Karl Marx, for example. In my films I attempt to reread their words, out loud so that anybody can hear and reconsider the sense of those words for himself. I’m sure that the sketchy information we all got about the Gospel at school, when we would rather have been playing football, left us with the impression of a boring text. A few sentences stick in the mind and on the strength of them we imagine that we know the word of Christ. In fact we don’t know a thing about Christ. And if you checked on all the Marxists in the world today, you’d find the same thing, they don’t really know Marx at all. A few words here and there, that’s all. I’ll make a film about Marx one day.

You’ve been quoted as saying that you believe power is not human, it’s a thing born of cowardice, but your Louis XIV is far from cowardly in his pursuit of power.

It is a characteristic of man that he always refuses to accept responsibility, yet it’s our duty to be responsible – for everything and to everybody. We must be responsible politically, socially, in every sense. When we protest against a dictator we must equally protest against ourselves for having allowed him to gain power. Our daily lives are governed by two fundamental drives, fear and desire. There are certain people, like de Gasperi, who are idealists, utopians, and they find themselves promoted into power by the fears of others; yet they are opposed by the desire of others to preserve ideas that are already well established, who in fact resist the chance for an adventure. Historically we are trained to accomplish a certain kind of duty in society as individuals, and this may have gained something for the human race in six or seven thousand years but it hasn’t achieved happiness, it hasn’t achieved security. Today, we have accumulated so much knowledge that I wonder if we shouldn’t be looking at ourselves in a different way, based on the realisation that society is a continuous failure.

Show me a single example of a civilisation that has survived for any length of time. Tourism is based on visits to the ruins of earlier civilisations. They die all the time, because they’re imperfect, as Toynbee pointed out. And that imperfection is always the same – they are built on the idea that power has to be delegated to a single figure to provide inspiration, energy, work. Well, perhaps it’s time to try the opposite method, to allow the intelligence of the human race as a whole, as a species, to direct us, instead of leaving it to the intelligence of a minority, an elite.

Do you really feel that it’s possible for people to learn from the past? Your own films seem to deal with a long succession of defeated men.

My central characters may be losers, but the audience can learn something from them. You gain a victory only by being crucified; without the Crucifixion the words of Jesus would never have survived. We’re always creating tragedies around ourselves. But despite my bleak endings, I don’t believe it’s impossible for us to improve. We’ve gone to the Moon, nothing is impossible.

In view of your concern with these themes, do you become impatient with the less interesting aspects of film-making?

Never. The films don’t take long to shoot (Anno Uno was six weeks, The Messiah was seven), but they take a long time to prepare, and the research itself is fascinating – there’s so much to discover. I make a daily effort to demolish my ignorance. I read a great deal, work a great deal, and I try not to fall in love with a single viewpoint; I read a lot of books all together, turning from one to the other. The film slowly takes shape from them, and then with the research into costumes and locations it really starts to exist. To find a wall is as important as finding an actor. You know, when we did the series Man’s Struggle to Survive, we rebuilt hundreds of old machines, rebuilt them ourselves. We looked at the original designs in the Vatican, which has the records for everything, and we learned how to make the machines work. We even reconstructed the early clocks for the Medici film, and the incredible gadgets for making gunpowder – every step is exciting. At the moment, I am preparing a series about Islamic sciences; and I also have in mind a film like Intolerance, dealing with ethics in history.

Do you ever want to return to commercial film-making, or do you feel that these films are successful enough in their own right?

If I wanted success, I wouldn’t be making films like these – it would be a miracle if success resulted from them. I simply hope they will be seen, this year, next year, in ten years, some time. Rome, Open City and Paisa were totally ignored when they were first shown; then two to four years later they were discovered. I don’t believe my work is wasted, in any sense. But mainly I try to live with pleasure; not to have a boring moment in my life, that’s my main preoccupation. I think it would be possible for me to be a part of the industry, to be a very successful director, to earn a lot of money, to be respected, important. But I rejected all that, for the sake of adventure. I’m seventy and I don’t have a penny. I don’t care. I go on, and I have fun. When I set up a production, my first step is to build up a huge debt with somebody; I borrow money and I offer my best guarantee, that at my age I don’t have a penny. You should think of the future, they say. Well, I’m working for the future, so that’s all right.