Even several of his major films-such truly great works as Viva l'Italia!, India, and The Messiah -have yet to be released in this country. The result is that many of his more or less minor films have never been shown in the United States, or have been unavailable since their original release.
Other films, such as The Miracle, have so upset conventional religious views that they have been banned and picketed.
And it must be said that he somehow rubs audiences the wrong way even his greatest films contain intellectual, emotional, or technical rough (but exciting) edges that put us off at first. His brilliant innovations in narrative technique have always challenged the viewer's attention and patience in ways that usually spell disaster at the box office thus, few of his films since Open City have been successes in any country. In most cases this lack of familiarity is simply a logistical matter, as, for example, in the United States, where the great bulk of Rossellini's work is still unavailable. To those under forty, he seems hardly to be known at all. Despite these formidableĪccomplishments, however, Rossellini is primarily known to the average educated filmgoer over forty as the man who seduced Ingrid Bergman. His grand television project-to provide information to a mass audience about its collective history-was a courageous feat that, if theoretically inconsistent, will never be equaled in scope and audacity. Thus, while many have thought Antonioni demanding, he has always been considered "artistic" Rossellini was simply thought to be amateurish and incapable of making a competent film. Unfortunately for Rossellini, the intellectual world was unable to accept these techniques in 1950. In his imaginative, purposeful use of what might be called "antinarrative" devices such as dead time and dedramatization, he is also an obvious forerunner of Antonioni and other filmmakers who began to be noticed in the early sixties. Such films as Open City and Paisan make him a central, founding figure of neorealism, the startling return to reality in postwar Italian filmmaking that has drastically influenced all subsequent cinema practice. Andrew Sarris has stated flatly that Rossellini "must be accorded the top position in the Italian cinema." Vincent Canby has claimed that "when the history of cinema's first hundred years is recollected in tranquillity-say in about 150 years-Rossellini's films will be seen as among the seminal works of what, for lack of any more definite term, can be called the New Movie." But as Robin Wood has rightly pointed out, though Rossellini "belongs, with Eisenstein, Murnau, Welles, Godard, among the key figures of film history," curiously "with no other director is there such a discrepancy between the estimate of his achievement by a handful of experts and the apathy or scorn of non-specialist critics and the public at large." Ĭertainly, the sheer variety of Rossellini's achievement is astounding. Roberto Rossellini is perhaps the greatest unknown director who ever lived. Roberto Rossellini. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996 1996.