Roberto Rossellini

About Roberto Rossellini:

• Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: Open City and Paisan

Films of Roberto Rossellini:

• The Flowers of Saint Francis (Francesco Guillare di Dio) - Roberto Rossellini (1950)

"The Flowers of Saint Francis - Roberto Rossellini (1950)

Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (Francesco Guillare di Dio, translation: “Francesco, God’s Fool”, 1950) bewildered critics when it came out, since it appeared to be a strange amalgam of spirituality and realism. As a consequence the film was a critical and commercial failure, even though Rossellini later remarked that it remained his personal favourite. Rossellini had become an international star director when he effectively launched the Italian Neorealist movement with his postwar trilogy, Rome, Open City (Roma Città Aperta, 1945), Paisan (Paisà, 1946), and Germany Year Zero (Germania Anno Zero, 1948). But thereafter he was charged with having strayed from the Neorealist aesthetic, and The Flowers of Saint Francis was dismissed as an intellectually and aesthetically confused offering. Was slapstick the appropriate genre for such an enlightened spirit as Saint Francis? Of course, there were others, including eminent film directors, who embraced the film as a work of genius. For them, Rossellini’s film was not an exalted evocation of the other world, but instead uniquely grounded Saint Francis’s humanity in everyday human existence.

As usual with Rossellini, the acting was performed by nonprofessionals drawn from the social milieu of the story. In this case monks from the Nocere Inferiore Monastery played the roles of Francis and his friars. The script, co-written by Rossellini and Federico Fellini, was episodic in structure, which for Rossellini was a return to the narrative format of his greatest successes, Rome, Open City and Paisà. It covers nine episodes that have been drawn from the 14th century works, Little Flowers of St. Francis (I Fioretti Di San Francesco) and The Life of Brother Juniper (La Vita di Frate Ginepro) that compiled tales about Saint Francis and his followers that had been passed around in the years following his death. Although the nine episodes, or “chapters”, are all supposed to take place in the two years following the endorsement of his order in 1210 by Pope Innocent III, there are some anachronisms here. Since Francis had only taken up his spiritual vocation in 1209, the film begins at an early stage of the Franciscan movement, when Francis had only eleven followers.

1. Francis and his followers return in the rain to a humble hut they had just constructed, only to learn that the small shelter is now claimed by a peasant and his donkey. Rather than contest this usurpation, Francis urges his followers to relent and to rejoice that they have finally done something useful in God’s world. The friars then go on to construct a small chapel, Saint Mary of the Angels. Also in this episode, one of the friars, Brother Juniper, returns to the chapel half-naked, because he had given away his tunic to a beggar. Francis gently admonishes him for his naive generosity and instructs him to remain behind at their chapel thereafter to prepare meals for the other friars to eat when they return from preaching.
2. A simpleminded old peasant, Giovanni, comes to Francis and joins the brotherhood.
3. A nun from a nearby monastery and an ardent follower of Francis’s mission, Clare (Chiara Offreduccio, who would later found a monastic order for women and is now known as Saint Clare of Assisi), comes to visit Francis and joins the friars in a dinner.
4. Seeking to provide an ailing brother with his favourite pig’s foot stew, Brother Juniper goes out in the woods and thoughtlessly cuts off the foot of a wandering pig that he finds.
5. While praying one evening in the woods, Francis encounters a leper and is overcome with compassion. Despite the leper’s efforts to keep his distance, Francis embraces him.
6. Brother Juniper, seeking to free up time from his cooking duties so that he can join in the preaching, cooks the entire two-weeks worth of food that the group has in store. Again the tolerant Francis only smiles and grants Juniper the desired permission to preach.
7. Now preaching in the world, Brother Juniper runs across a rowdy warlord gang, whose leader suspects him of being an assassin and orders him to be executed. But Juniper’s meekness and humility dumbfounds his captor and moves the “tyrant” to release him and abandon military siege he had been conducting.
8. Francis and Brother Leon discuss what is perfect happiness, with Francis dismissing a number of suggested scenarios as not achieving the desired perfection. Then they seek alms in the name of Jesus at a residence and are rewarded with a sound beating by the owner, at which point Francis proclaims that this kind of suffering for God is exactly what constitutes perfect happiness.
9. Before sending the brothers separately out into the world to teach, Francis has them spin around until they are dizzy and fall to the ground. The individual directions they now face will be where God wants them to head out to preach.

There is little narrative progression in The Flowers of Saint Francis, and the nine episodes can collectively be considered to paint a psychological portrait of Francis and his nascent group. Each of the episodes seem to highlight the almost absurd gaiety of the Franciscans in the context of their miserable poverty. They are all presented as holy fools wallowing joyously in the mud. This sharply contrasts with typical films about religious figures, who are typically presented as (eventually) exalted souls that soar far above us ordinary sorts. Here in this film, Francis and the brothers are so ordinary, and their circumstances are so confined and squalid, that we find it hard to believe that this represents the origins of a holy order. And yet Rossellini’s neorealist aesthetics makes these figures come alive as real, believable people.

I have remarked on Rossellini’s neorealist aesthetics before, in “Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: Open City and Paisan”. There is an emphasis on direct, sometimes melodramatic action and, at the same time, the maintenance of a somewhat detached perspective on the part of the camera (the narrative’s “silent witness”) that generates a sense of newsreel immediacy. This is enhanced by the naturalness of his nonprofessional actors that evokes a realistic social milieu. It is an evocation of realism in our subjective consciousness, rather than a true representation of what actually happened. As an example, criticism of the film illustrates the distinctions concerning what is true “realism”: some critics complained that the friars in Rossellini’s film looked too comfortable and well-fed for what must have been emaciated 13th century religious mendicants living in extreme poverty. They complained that Rosellini’s friars were not realistic, despite the fact that Rossellini had engaged real Franciscan monks to play the roles. Rossellini, the humanist, was seeking realism in a different dimension than the purely physical and external.

Moreover, true realism of any sort seems to have been entirely abandoned in episode 7, which features the one professional actor in the film, Aldo Fabrizi, whose music-hall hamming as the “tyrant” Nicolaio, features bug-eyed histrionics that belong more in slapstick comedy. These comedic effects not only reduce our feelings about the authenticity of the scene, they also threaten to make the band of brothers appear ludicrous and undermine our overall appreciation of Saint Francis, himself. In particular, those parts of the film featuring Juniper (Ginepro) and Giovanni (episodes 2, 4, 6, & 7) focus on two disciples who seem not to have fully embraced a life of “Sufic” compassion towards others. Giovanni is innocent, but seems to be more of an imitator of outward behaviour, than someone who had fully digested the message of compassion. Juniper is both innocent and selfless, but his literal-minded adherence to Francis’s rules lacks real comprehension and is ultimately destructive. His hacking off of the pig’s foot (which some people apparently regard as funny) is a repugnant example of how mindless rule-following, without any deeper understanding, can be ruinous to one’s fellow beings. All we can say is that his actions remind us that there is no inherent virtue in innocence.

Nevertheless, the spiritual limitations of Juniper and Giovanni do not necessarily detract from our appreciation of Francis, but only remind us of the typical kinds of people who are often attracted to the spiritual path and which one is likely to encounter along the way. And this returns us to the key quality of this film – the ordinariness of the characters, their simple humanity that underlies many of Rossellini’s films.

There are a number of moments and images from this film that linger in the mind afterwards.

• Francis’s vivid and emphatic references to “Brother Fire” and “Sister Death”, which suggest his inner connection with all of reality, all experience.
• The picture of Brother Juniper’s sense of satisfaction as he holds up the pig’s foot that he has just amputated.
• The images of Francis and his brothers almost celebrating their physical wretchedness in the rain and mud, suggesting that their self-realization of their inner sturdiness brings them greater joy.
• Francis’s late-night encounter with the leper.
• Francis talks to a little bird that comes to his hand.
• The tentativeness associated with the meeting with Saint Clare.

It is an odd potpourri from Rossellini, but it is unique and definitely worthwhile seeing.
★★★

Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: "Open City" and "Paisan"

“Neorealism is more an ontological position than an aesthetic one”

– André Bazin

Critical consideration of certain Italian post-war films referred to as Neorealist must perforce deal with rather fundamental questions concerning the nature of the cinematic experience. Unfortunately there is a lack of general agreement as to what actually constitutes Neorealism, since the films have been interpreted on several different levels. However, art movement categories frequently suffer from problems of definition, and, usually it is a case of the old logician’s problem of whether to characterize the class by its defining statement or by its individual members. In the case of Neorealist films, it seems that the weight of opinion has expressed itself in terms of the latter choice, and Neorealism is generally taken to apply only to the specific post-war films of Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Lattuada, and a few others. Such a classification would not be interesting in terms of film theory unless there were certain common cinematic characteristics among these films, and such is the case for the Neorealist films for which there is a persistent critical opinion which asserts that conditions in Italy after the war were such as to engender a common cinematic expression.

However, critics and historians express the essence of Neorealism in terms only of the social environment that spawned it. Arthur Knight [1] remarks that “drawn irresistibly to social themes, they [the Neorealists] were united by a common [social] philosophy.” Hollis Alpert [2] says Neorealism meant “the birth of a new conscience, which was translated into social awareness and a concern for the ordinary man.” And Andrew Sarris [3] observed that Neorealism “was never anything more than the Stalinallee of social realism.” While this line of analysis may be appropriate to the Communist theoreticians who dominated Italian criticism, it doesn’t go far enough to provide the aesthetic distinctions which distinguish the Italian films from other efforts at realism, such as, say, cinema verité. Indeed the importance of the aesthetic basis of the Neorealist films is likened by André Bazin to that of the Russian films of the Twenties [4]:

Potemkin turned the cinema world upside down not just because of its political message, not even because it replaced the studio plaster sets with real settings and the star with an anonymous crowd, but because Eisenstein was the greatest montage theoretician of his day, because he worked with Tissé, the finest cameraman of his day, and because Russia was the focal point of cinematographic thought. . .

It is my purpose here to look at some aesthetic ideas appropriate to the Neorealist films and then consider two important films of this genre, Open City (Roma, Città Aperta,1945) and Paisan (Paisà, 1946), in light of those ideas. I restrict myself to the two films by Roberto Rossellini, because, though uneven, each contains sequences which are, in my opinion, expressive of the essence of the neorealistic aesthetic – this despite Rosselini’s own statement [5] that Neorealism was

“above all a moral standpoint from which to view the world. Afterwards it becomes an aesthetic viewpoint."

This merely reflects the fact that the expression of an amoral standpoint can have profound aesthetic consequences, consciously intended or not.

The most memorable scenes of the two Rossellini films, the activity in the Roman streets in Open City and the fourth (“Forentine”) and Sixth (“Po River”) segments of Paisan, are those that give, in the words of James Agee, the “illusions of the present tense.” [6] In these scenes we are presented images of unanalyzed reality – or rather, images that are one level of abstraction closer to concrete reality than those usually present on film [7]. Getstalt psychologists have determined that a certain amount of analysis takes place at the level of perception, that is, prior to cognition [8]. When one is shown four dots arranges as follows:

One perceives, in addition, the form of a square in the manner of (a), rather than (b) or (c):
In general, reality is reduced to the most simple patterns at the moment of perception. A certain “reduction” of reality takes place. Much of the history of modern painting is concerned with artists’ attempts to deal with the formal perception of the world as opposed to reality as it appears unanalyzed (as it might appear in a photograph). Similarly most of the advances in film technique have been concerned with ways of presenting a reduced or analyzed version of reality on screen – analyzed so that certain formal and thematic connections can be made by the viewer and so that the film itself can become a statement by the author.

As stated above, the important scenes in Open City and Paisan present the world in a relatively unanalyzed state and run counter to the, up to then, historic course of cinematic expression. Though at first thought this might merely seem to be a retrogression in film technique, there is another consideration. With virtually every mode of artistic expression (except music), there is a delicate balance that must be maintained between the referential reality and the language or grammar of expression. To elaborate on this, let us consider an idea from gestalt psychology – that reality is perceived structurally and this structure is the simplest possible for the circumstantial stimuli [9]. From such an idea it is quite reasonable to speculate that what we might call the most admirable “statements” about the world are those that can be applied to the greatest amount of reality and yet have the simplest attendant structure. Certainly such a principle dominates the ascendency of theories in the scientific world, and something similar is involved when we admire a Shakespearean play for its universality and profundity – here the structure of the play applies to a wealth of human situations that have existed in the world over centuries. The delicate balance between the referential reality and the language of expression means that the language should be profound (possess a significant abstract structure) and yet be directly applicable to concrete reality. The more general the abstraction present, the more widely applicable is the structure to reality, but at the same time the further removed is that structure from concrete reality. The danger exists in allowing the language of expression to become disengaged from concrete reality.

An example of this disengagement coming to pass is the American Western film, a genre which once may have had close connections with reality, but which has become progressively more mythic and self-contained. The Western is now a self-consistent but disembodied iconography; such films are merely exercises in grammatical expression, analogous to writing love poetry in Latin, and meaningful only to buffs. André Bazin was referring to this kind of imbalance when he wrote the following [10]:

[the representation of reality on the screen] is a necessary illusion, but it quickly becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with is cinematographic presentation. As for the filmmaker, the moment he has secured the unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end. There could never be any question of calling him a liar, because his art consists in lying.

The connection of art expression to reality is not a static condition. As an audience’s perceptual organization of the world evolves, the artist must continually adjust his language of expression so as to continue to relate to his audience’s perceptual reality. Thus a medieval painting seems unreal to modern observers, because it relates to a perceptual reality that no longer exists in the minds of its spectators. Bazin expressed an awareness of this entire aesthetic situation when he observed that “the objective nature of the modern novel, by reducing the strictly grammatical aspects of its stylistics to a minimum, has laid bare the secret essence of style.” [11]

The aesthetic ideas presented so far have been quite general, and they naturally manifest themselves differently in different art forms. When Bazin [12] says that “the cinema stand in contrast to poetry, painting, and theater, and comes ever close to the novel” , he means that the power of the film to represent reality can most closely be compared to that of the novel. There is a danger, however, in drawing this analogy too closely, because the novel’s communication through words is always a highly abstract process. Even if the novel is more concrete than poetry or theater, it still involves the author’s translation of his perceptual reality into linguistic symbols and the ensuing reverse translation by the reader into his own perceptions. Such an abstract process always involves a considerable degree of analysis by the mere use and choice of words independent of grammatical style and is thus less immediate than film. Film, however, is a medium wherein reality can be presented almost without analysis – the balance can be lost in the other direction in this case.

Some of the earliest enthusiasts of Neorealism made the mistake of assuming that the art lay in merely photographing reality outside of the studio. But this is clearly only one component of the process. Surely a film that involved no creator’s selectivity, no analysis of perceptual reality, would not be an artistic statement. It would be no different than looking randomly out the window. The vapidity of such cinema was remarked upon by Stanley Kauffman in his review of the Zavattini - De Sica film, The Roof (Il Tetto, 1956), when he complained that {13]

"they strove to make the film as much like life as possible. Therefore its hour and half contains moment of pathos and humor and excitement together with long stretches that are not particularly interesting. Just like your life and mine."

Such was the result when Zavattini tried to put his own doctrinaire theories about Neorealism into practice.

The Rossellini sequences, on the other hand, are outstanding, because they do represent a distinct point of view (the filmmaker’s statement about reality) and yet effectively root the viewer in concrete perceptions (contrary to previous films which had become increasingly abstract and grammatical). The thematic current that runs through the films is the idea that heroism consists not of accomplishment but of resignation to one’s fate, coincident with the maintenance of one’s moral commitments. When the priest and the Communist both die for their cause in Open City, they do so with a peculiar sense of peace, giving us the feeling that they have achieved, through their resignation, some degree of perhaps Christian transcendence. Critics have tended to isolate Rossellini’s form from his content. Thus Robert Warshow [14] states that “Rossellini has no intellectual defences, and when he attempts to go beyond the passive representation of experience, he falls at once into the grossest sentimentality and falsehood.” Whether false or not, Rossellini’s moral theme is inextricably intertwined with the manner of its presentation.

Moreover critics take exception to Rossellini’s essentially melodramatic narrative form [15]. Yet this melodramatic style is an essential quality for Rossellini. Rossellini organizes the plot around key events, highly dramatic events involving life and death. In the best sequences (the “Florentine” and “Po River” episodes of Paisan), the audience is given no background, no reason for the event. The unanalyzed event takes up the entire action. There are certain relationships among the characters which the audience would find useful to know, but the narrative does not point these out or slow down for audience comprehension. The action itself seems to exist independent of the filming of it, and the camera has no time to examine details. Robert Warshow points out that American films devote considerable screen time to the establishment of characterization in order that the characters, who are really abstractions, can be given the necessary background detail so that they can be individualized and so that the action can be explained in terms of the individual motivations of the characters. Rossellini, keying only on the action of a highly charged event, achieves the unanalyzed and unexplained immediacy he wants, but he does so only by being melodramatic. That is, by having such unrelenting dramatic action, Rossellini appears melodramatic. The failures, (a) in Open City of scenes involving Bergman and his coterie and (b) in Paisan of the episode involving the three American chaplains, arise from Rossellini’s use of symbolic characters, i.e. his deviation from the successful melodramatic-event narrative style.

The remarkable “Florentine” and “Po River” episodes of Paisan work because they are melodramatic. The viewer is constantly perceiving violent and fragmented images (not fragmented artificially, but as they would come to a bystander) which he must assemble coherently in his mind. The analysis, performed by the viewer, would not even be undertaken if the event itself were not of sufficient dramatic intensity.

In the “Florentine” episode a woman is looking for her lover in a contested part of the city. The camera maintains a consistent third-person perspective. There are no cuts to closeups. Indeed the camera seems to be somewhat wary of the danger present in the situation. The viewer thus feels himself part of the action. When two fascists are captured, they are rushed up almost too close to the camera for comfort. One feels like taking a step backwards when watching. This sense of immediacy is maintained until the woman learns of the death of her lover and the episode ends. The viewer’s knowledge of the woman and whatever her lover meant to her is constructed consistently of what can be drawn from her actions during the event. This is a limitation, but at the same time the event is so real that it seems as rich as life itself – so full of possibly meaningful, briefly glimpsed detail that still awaits our minds’ attentive reflection. This overall effect is enhanced by the elliptical succession of images. Important actions are not even shown, and the viewer must fill it in for himself, because the action is racing ahead. The entire “Po River” sequence is put together in this fashion. Also, because the viewer is putting together some of the action in his mind, the unseen events make their presence felt in succeeding scenes, just as they do in real life. An example of this shadow casting of an event is the effect of Pina’s death on the subsequent scene in Open City.

The passive, eye-level camera techniques, the newsreel editing, and the naturalistic acting ultimately bring about the active perceptual participation of the viewer. The necessity of the viewer to continually analyze the event and keep up with the action harmonizes with Rossellini’s moral purpose. The various deaths reported in the “Forentine” and “Po River” episodes of Paisan seem so random and brutal, so subordinate to the larger context of the war and the rest of the real world, that we, the viewers, can only reflect upon them in our own time. Yet at the same time the characters who participate in these events are struggling on behalf of their ideals. This combination is what gives the strength to what is best in Rossellini’s films. The moral attitudes of the characters and the concrete context in which they are depicted each give substance to the other. And this is the crucial point that is missed by Bazin and Warshow and which the foregoing argument has been an attempt to justify: that the potency of Rossellini’s realistic cinematography depends aesthetically on the melodramatic narrative style and the moralistic message – whether one is in sympathy with that moral message or not.

[See also "Subjective Realism in the Italian Film"]

Notes:

1. Knight, Arthur, The Liveliest Art, The New American Library (1957), p. 225.
2. Alpert, Hollis, The Dreams and the Dreamers, Macmillan (1962), p. 183
3. Sarris, Andrew, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969, Simon and Schuster (1971), p. 30.
4. Bazin, André, What is Cinema?, Volume II, University of California (1971), p. 25.
5. Rossellini, Roberto, Interviews with Film Directors, ed. by Andrew Sarris, Avon Books (1967), p. 475.
6. Agee. James, Agee on Film, Volume I, Grosset and Dunlap (1969), p. 301.
7. I am, of course, presuming that there actually is a concrete reality and that all of us are referring to the same thing when we use the phrase. Moreover, I am overlooking such linguistic issues, as what exactly Gertrude Stein meant when she said, “there’s no there there.”
8. See, for example, Rudolph Arnheirm’s book, Art and Visual Perception. (1974).
9. “The basic law of visual perception. . . asserts that any stimulus pattern tends to be seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as the given conditions permit.” – Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, University of California (1954), p. 45.
10. Bazin, André, op. cit., p. 27.
11. Ibid., p. 31. In connection with realism and the recent course of modern literature, there is an interesting article by Tom Wolfe in the December 1972 issue of Esquire, entitled, “Why they aren’t writing the Great American Novel Anymore”, which generally supports the aesthetic outline in this article.
12. Ibid., p. 26.
13. Kauffmann, Stanley, A World on Film, Delta (1966), p. 292.
14. Warshow, Robert, The Immediate Experience, Atheneium (1962), p. 257.
15. “Unfortunately the demon of melodrama that Italian film makers seem incapable of exorcising takes over every so often, thus imposing a dramatic necessity of strictly foreseeable events.” – André Bazin, op. cit., p. 31.