Roberto Rossellini

Texto en castellano

DE ESCIPIÓN A BERLUSCONI. UNA HISTORIA DE ITALIA EN 50 PELÍCULAS
Cuenta André Breton que, cuando el grupo surrealista acudía al cine, acostumbraba a entrar comenzada la proyección, y la abandonaba al poco tiempo para volver a irrumpir en otra sala, donde se exhibía otra película, en cualquier momento de la función. Al final de la jornada, las secuencias dispersas, cubiertos los huecos en la imaginación, iban construyendo en la memoria un nuevo argumento, a partir de la lógica irracional, fragmentaria y elíptica del inconsciente. Algo de la visión «sonámbula», y profundamente liberadora, que reivindicaba el surrealismo, subyace en el viaje por el imaginario histórico a través del cine italiano que recorre las páginas de este libro. Los autores proponen un itinerario punteado de elipsis, saltos, pasadizos subterráneos, flashbacks y flashforwards, un recorrido transhistórico que se apoya en el asincronismo entre el tiempo que señalan las tramas, a partir del cual se ha ordenado la selección de los films, y el de su producción y estreno en sala. En resumen, lo que este volumen plantea es una de tantas historias posibles de Italia —tantas como antologías probables— a través del objetivo de la cámara.

El presente artículo recorre diferentes proyectos específicos elaborados para la televisión por cineastas trabajando en la órbita de alguna de sus fuentes de origen: teatro en Renoir, novela realista en Pialat, televisualidad en Lynch, y oralidad en Welles. Los específicos de la duración, la repetición o la serialidad, más otras coordenadas afines a la televisión como la simultaneidad, la intimidad y el alcance popular del medio, han convertido a la televisión en un territorio de infinitas posibilidades a explorar a partir de asumir una cierta pobreza de la imagen, esbozada ya en los trabajos televisivos de esos cuatro cineastas.

With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City founded the movement known as " Italian Neo-Realism. " The film vividly presents the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics. Rossellini asserts that a Christian Europe can be reconstructed only on a foundation of charity rather than hate, vengeance, or even justified punishment for Nazi crimes. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance that Italians and Europeans can be reborn, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to " love your enemies. " European rebirth means the installation of a moral order that makes parenthood feasible and respectable. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece, I examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found.

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) is one of the most renowned figures in world cinema. Director of a long list of critically acclaimed motion pictures, including La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, and Amarcord, Fellini's success helped strengthen the international prestige of Italian cinema from the 1950s onward. Often remembered as an eccentric auteur with a vivid imagination and a penchant for quasi-autobiographical works, the carnivalesque, and Rubenesque women, Fellini's inimitable films celebrate the creative potential of cinema as a medium and also provide thought-provoking evocations of various periods in Italian history, from the years of fascism to the age of Silvio Berlusconi's media empire.

In Making a Film Fellini discusses his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Rimini, the time he spent as a cartoonist, journalist, and screenwriter in Rome, his decisive encounter with Roberto Rossellini, and his own movies, from Variety Lights to Casanova. The director explains the importance of drawing to his creative process, the mysterious ways in which ideas for films arise, his collaborations with his wife, Giulietta Masina, his thoughts on fascism, Jung, and the relationship between cinema and television. Often comic, sometimes tragic, and rife with insightful comments on his craft, Making a Film sheds light on Fellini's life and reveals the motivations behind many of his most fascinating movies.

Available in its entirety for the first time in English, this volume contains the complete translation of Fare un film, the authoritative collection of writings edited and reworked by Fellini and initially published by Giulio Einaudi in 1980. The text includes a new translation of the Italo Calvino essay "A Spectator's Autobiography," an introduction by Italian film scholar Christopher B. White, and an afterword by Fellini's longtime friend and collaborator Liliana Betti.

My review essay of Jean-Luc Godard's profound, passionately detached audiovisual work <Le livre d'image>(2018/2019) aka <The Image Book>. 

In contradistinction to the tempting yet rather conventional attempt to recycle the idea of 'archive' along the lines of <Histoire(s) du cinéma>, I chose to render manifest the lush legacy of Jean Rouch whose pioneering attempt at 'Ethno-fiction' is here recalibrated- in conjunction with Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi's 'archeological probe'- in the midst of the Arab Spring's bitter aftermath and global islamophobia- or, the so-called 'the global civil war.'

* The original title of this essay when I contributed it was: <Future of 'Le Petit Soldat' and 'War Game', or Coughing of an 'Ardent Hope'>.

원래 편집부에 보낸 원고의 제목은 <‘소년병’과 전쟁놀이의 미래,  또는 ‘열렬한 희망’의 기침>이었다.

"Numero 20 di “Fata Morgana” (di fatto ventunesimo fascicolo, essendoci stato un numero 0), numero speciale, numero su
"Cinema", a cui partecipano anche molti cineasti.  Questi ultimi hanno scelto, o disegnato, l’immagine di un film rappresentativo della loro idea di cinema, associandola ad un breve testo, talvolta poche parole. Numero a cui partecipano studiosi di prestigio, alcuni dei quali accompagnano la rivista fin dalla sua nascita."

Si l’on entend avec Jacques Rancière la démocratie non pas comme simple forme politique mais comme force d’excès et de dissensus, qu’en est-il alors de la littérature et des arts ? À quelles conditions peut-on dire qu’ils sont démocratiques, c’est-à-dire qu’ils favorisent la redistribution des espaces et des temps, la disposition nouvelle du visible et de l’invisible, la circulation inédite de la parole et du bruit entre ceux qui parlent, ceux qui ne parlent pas, et ceux qui parlent mal ? Par ailleurs, si ce qui se dévoile par choc sensible ne se livre pas immédiatement à la compréhension, à laquelle aspire l’art critique, comment une telle esthétique du choc sensible, en refusant de refermer l’œuvre sur un concept qui lui préexisterait, pourrait-elle permettre l’expérience d’un sens commun toujours fracturable, se défaisant et se retissant sans modèle ni scénario préécrit ? Quelle est, en définitive, la puissance proprement politique de ce qui, dans le sensible, résiste au sens et à la forme établis ?

Rossellini, Resnais, Pasolini, Ivens, Marker, Antonioni, Malle. C’è stata una stagione – orientativamente tra gli anni Cinquanta e i Settanta – in cui alcuni grandi cineasti europei hanno compiuto viaggi in Asia per realizzare film, documentari, inchieste, spinti chi da curiosità intellettuale, chi da militanza politica, chi da contingenze di lavoro. Le loro opere hanno spesso fatto parlare di sé: alcune sono state considerate imprescindibili (India di Rossellini), altre hanno causato incidenti diplomatici (Chung kuo - Cina di Antonioni), alcune hanno «inventato» nuove forme di racconto (Lettre de Sibérie di Marker), altre ancora offerto sguardi inediti su avvenimenti capitali del Novecento (Hiroshima mon amour di Resnais). Orient (to) Express è il primo libro che considera questi film come un fenomeno frutto di un’unica temperie culturale, terrain d’entente grazie al quale riconsiderare alcune questioni teoriche che hanno attraversato la storia del cinema. Prima di tutto il concetto d’autore, poi le adiacenze tra moderno e postmoderno, il carattere visibile e fotogenico delle immagini e ancora l’orientalismo come pratica politica e come genere. La stessa esperienza del viaggio appare cruciale in questa ricerca per la sua dimensione pragmatica e archetipica e perché espone i registi a malintesi e incomprensioni, slanci e insicurezze, rendendo i loro film degli oggetti controversi, complessi, talvolta rabberciati, assolutamente da studiare.

Una riflessione filosofica, un primo commento su ciò che Deleuze ha definito sinteticamente "immagine-tempo". Il cinema italiano ha offerto al filosofo francese la possibilità di ripensare le teorie sullo spazio-tempo, argomento arduo e sempre contemporaneo. Deleuze, riprendendo le teorie bergsoniane riflette sull'opera nova che il cinema italiano ha offerto al mondo.

Neorealism emerged as a cultural exchange and a field of discourse that served to shift the confines of creativity and revise the terms of artistic expression not only in Italy but worldwide. If neorealism was thus a global phenomenon, it is because of its revolutionary portrayal of a transformative moment in the local, regional, and national histories of Italy. At once guiding and guided by that transformative moment, neorealist texts took up, reflected, and performed the contentious conditions of their creation, not just at the level of narrative content but also in their form, language, and structure. Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History demonstrates how they did so through a series of representative case studies. Recounting the history of a generation of artists, this study offers fundamental insights into one of the most innovative and influential cultural moments of the twentieth century.

Ανακοίνωση με θέμα «Ο κινηματογράφος κατά τον Gilles Deleuze» στο διατμηματικό σεμινάριο (Τμήμα Θεωρίας και Ιστορίας της Τέχνης & Τμήμα Εικαστικών Τεχνών) «Η μαθητεία της τέχνης» της Ανωτάτης Σχολής Καλών Τεχνών, με διδάσκοντα τον Π. Πούλο.
Αθήνα, 19 Απριλίου 2018.

Si bien el movimiento cinematográfico de la posguerra italiana conocido como Neorrealismo carece de un corpus teórico convencional, la defensa a ultranza del neorrealismo por parte del crítico francés André Bazin ha pasado a la historia como la visión canónica de esta corriente. El objetivo de este artículo consiste en describir la poética neorrealista desde la perspectiva artística de Rossellini, quizá el director más emblemático de esta tendencia cinematográfica. A través de sus declaraciones en conferencias y entrevistas, que huyen de lo especulativo en beneficio de lo expresivo, y a la luz de su denominada trilogía neorrealista –Roma, città aperta, Paisà y Germania, anno zero–, se pretende ahondar en su enfoque sobre el neorrealismo.

So what exactly is Neo-realism if it does not have unique stylistic features as exclusively its own and it borrows other well established conventions of both Hollywood and the Fascist commercial cinema? Marcia Landy helps us construct an answer when she tells us that Neo-realism was a,” challenge to forms of realism that uncritically assumed that “to see is to believe”. This brief essay is an exploration of the challenges that Landy and others lay bare concerning Italian Neo-Realism, as well as, a brief examination of how what is called realism was established in pre and post war American and International cinema.

Italian Neorealism merupakan sebuah gerakan yang dilihat menolak konvensyen filem arus perdana (Nochimson, 2010) dengan membawa pergelutan masyarakat ketika berhadapan dengan krisis ekonomi dan politik yang melanda Itali pasca Regim Mussolini (1945) dan pasca Perang Dunia ke-2 sebagai tema utama. Kewujudan gerakan ini dilihat sebagai penentangan terhadap filem-filem sedia ada yang dikenali sebagai “Telefoni Bianchi” yang sering memaparkan budaya tinggi golongan borjuasi dan gagal memperlihatkan realiti kehidupan majoriti masyarakat di Itali pada ketika itu. Walaupun era kegemilangan Italian Neorealism agak pendek (1943-1950), ia telah menjadi sebuah gerakan filem yang berpengaruh, penting dan memberi inspirasi di dalam sejarah perfileman. Beberapa pengarah seperti Roberto Rossellini menghasilkan Filem “Rom, Open City” (1945) & Vittorio Se Sica dengan Filem “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) bagi menyampaikan realiti pergelutan yang dialami oleh golongan kelas pekerja dalam kehidupan seharian terutamanya mengenai soal pengangguran, moral dan kemiskinan yang melanda Itali pada ketika itu. Dalam menyampaikan naratif penceritaan mengenai pergelutan yang dialami masyarakat di Itali pasca Mussolini dan pasca Perang Dunia Ke-2, watak-watak wanita turut wujud dalam kedua-dua filem ini. Namun begitu, kedudukan wanita di dalam kedua-dua filem ini dilihat memainkan peranan yang kecil atau digunakan semata-mata untuk menyerlahkan kewujudan watak protagonis lelaki (Pandolfi, 2014). Oleh itu, kertas kerja ini akan melihat secara kritikal mengapa wanita hanya berperanan sebagai watak sekunder di dalam Filem Rom, Open City (1945) dan Filem Bicycle Thieves (1948) dengan menggunakan kerangka teoretikal Feminis Sosialis, iaitu cabang dari ideologi feminist yang menuntut peluang yang sama bagi setiap individu termasuk wanita; di dalam kajian yang akan dijalankan.

In this article, I present the Italian war documentary Giorni di gloria (collectively directed in 1945 by Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Marcello Pagliero and Mario Serandrei) as a detailed meditation on the trajectory of violent reversals that defined the relationship between Italian fascists and antifascists before and after the liberation. By presenting such serially occurring acts of reciprocal retaliation as collectively witnessed events, the film ultimately treats the recourse to political violence as unavoidable nation-building tool, the necessary stage in the process of the nation’s self-determination and identity formation. The film’s emphasis is on the hagiographic presentation of the partisan movement’s capacity to simultaneously endure martyrdom and retaliate against the enemy with comparable ferocity. With great attention to dramaturgy and collective spectatorial impact, the film basks into the shock value, graphicness, and incendiary potentials of a material whose arrangement has largely to do with making a certain vision of death a source of arousal. Yet, the film does not attempt to merely narrate, glorify, or justify the recourse to political violence and the excesses of postwar vindictiveness, nor does it artfully lie about the degree of active popular participation. Rather, the rhetorical tropes of film serve the filmmakers to valorize in epic-mythical terms the choice of those who did fight, manufacturing post facto a visceral bond, both human and ideological, between the few who fought and the many who simply witnessed the combat, so as to ultimately elevate the prise de conscience of the former camp as unquestionably representative of a whole nation’s political aspirations.

This polemical article objects to the pervasive use of realism as a value or prescriptive term in the writing of Italian cinema history. It also offers a dissenting appraisal of the ‘institution’ of neorealism: the body of critical work and discourse that constructs neorealism as the ethical and aesthetic centre of Italian cinema. The discursive recourse to neorealism has become the essential authoritative gesture: to fail to refer to it is to risk seeming ignorant, philistine and most of all politically suspect. We contest this insidious common sense of Italian cinema studies, a common sense that is underpinned by a notion of auteurist ‘paternity’ as the default explanatory metaphor of Italian film history, and which leads to a dismissive tone in the discussion of genre films, not to mention a disdain for the audience for such films. We critique the idea of cinema as a ‘mirror’ of the nation found in some of the pre-eminent scholars of Italian cinema, and we finish by recommending a moratorium on the mention of neorealism for at least five years. What would a silence on realism allow us to reveal about other modes and genres?

The article is followed by replies from Giulia Fanara (Rome), Millicent Marcus (Yale) and Robert Gordon (Cambridge), and then the authors’ own short response to the replies.

Il cinema – insieme alla fotografia probabilmente – è l’arte del Novecento, quella che lo racconta meglio, e c’è infatti una documentazione sterminata. Ma quale è stata la funzione del cinema? è stata una funzione di conoscenza, soprattutto per gli analfabeti. Charlie Chaplin è il più grande di tutti per un motivo molto semplice. Charlot faceva ridere e piangere gli africani, i giapponesi, gli svedesi, i ricchi, i poveri, gli analfabeti e gli intellettuali, i maschi, le femmine, i bambini, i vecchi, i neri, i bianchi, i rossi... Perché? Grazie al mezzo meccanico (pensa alle osservazioni di Walter Benjamin)...

In his burgeoning body of film theoretical work, French philosopher Jacques Rancière repeatedly turns to some canonical films by neorealist pioneer, Roberto Rossellini. Not simply retreading tired motifs of neorealism, Rancière’s comments offer some profound new insights, revolutionising prior perspectives on Rossellini. In this article, I shall put Rancière’s perspective into dialogue with two of the most significant of these perspectives: André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze. In doing so, I shall claim that Rancière’s approach departs radically from the canonised, standardised neorealist conception of Rossellini. Instead, I wish to claim that he describes a modernist artist primarily concerned with aesthetic clashes. In doing so, I shall contemplate how the meaning of these films has evolved since the era of their contemporary reception, demonstrating the congruences and disparities between these three disparate approaches.