Restoring Rossellini to his rightful place

By Susan King

Feb. 15, 2007 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

IN Bernardo Bertolucci’s first major film, 1964’s “Before the Revolution,” there is a scene in which two men are sitting at a table. One man says to the other, “Fabrizio, we cannot live without Rossellini.”

“And that is the truth of it,” Rossellini scholar Tag Gallagher says today. “We cannot live without Rossellini!”

But since the filmmaker’s death 30 years ago, it has been more famine than feast when it comes to seeing Roberto Rossellini’s landmark postwar neo-realist dramas “Rome Open City” and “Paisan,” his five collaborations with then-wife Ingrid Bergman and his acclaimed biographical dramas (such as “The Rise to Power of Louis XIV”).

“We have been starving,” says Gallagher, author of “The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini.”

Repast is at hand. In honor of his centenary year -- he was born in 1906 -- the UCLA Film &Television; Archive, in conjunction with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles, is presenting the six-week “Roberto Rossellini: A Retrospective.” It begins Friday.

“We are showing all the theatrical features except for the first two and the last one, and a good selection of the TV work as well,” says UCLA programmer David Pendleton.

The retrospective follows similar 100th birthday tributes to the director that were held in Paris, Toronto and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Actress-model Isabella Rossellini will be on hand to talk about her father on Feb. 28. That evening the program consists of a short film, “The Chicken,” which features her mother, Ingrid Bergman; Isabella’s movie valentine to her father, “My Father Is 100 Years Old”; and 1949’s “Stromboli,” the first film that Bergman and Rossellini made together. That was the movie that caused the actress to be banished from Hollywood for several years because of their affair and out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Isabella Rossellini will also appear Feb. 26 at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater for a program honoring her mother and “Ingrid,” the new biography about the Oscar-winning actress by Charlotte Chandler.

The majority of Roberto Rossellini’s movies were unsuccessful in the United States -- they were often distributed in poor prints -- especially the ones he made with Bergman.

“They were not considered special,” Isabella Rossellini said of those films. “In the U.S., it is a great cinema, but the tradition is to look at films more as entertainment. In Europe, it was torn by wars. Films were very important to denounce situations. Cinema became a much more social instrument.”

“In the American system, films are merchandise and often art is a tough merchandise to sell,” Renzo Rossellini, the filmmaker’s son, himself a producer, agreed via e-mail from Rome.

Isabella Rossellini is thrilled that her father is being honored with retrospectives at major international archives -- “you can’t get bigger than that” -- but, she added wistfully, “it only happened 30 years after his death.”

Lack of commercial success is the reason his films have been so difficult to see. They weren’t made at major studios, and a lot of the small companies he worked for went bankrupt, said Isabella Rossellini.

“It was always difficult to clear up the rights,” she said, and changing technology only complicated matters: “There were not contracts covering DVD distribution [when he was alive].”

The UCLA retrospective features several new prints from Italy. The government there has restored and preserved the work of several Italian directors because cinema is considered an art form “that has to be defended like the Renaissance painters and the Colosseum,” Isabella Rossellini said.

Roberto Rossellini was consistently reinventing himself during his 30-year-film career. “He was more of a pioneer,” said his daughter. “It was his nature to be a pioneer. Once he succeeded in what he was trying to reach, then he moved [on to another genre].”

Still, she said, “I think there’s a tremendous misunderstanding of thinking that my father thought first of a style and then a film. He didn’t say, ‘Let me make a film that looks like a documentary and has this kind of style.’ He did neo-realism because Italy was torn by war. It was very poor and he felt the need to explain what life was like for civilians during the war, not like in the military propaganda films that were seen during the war.”

He made his post-World War II trilogy, “Rome Open City,” “Paisan” and “Germany Year Zero,” “with the means he had,” she said. It was the critics, she continued, who labeled these films “neo-realist.”

“And then it became a fashion,” Rossellini said.

According to Renzo Rossellini, his father always said that “neo-realism was not an aesthetic expression, but a moral and ethical one.”

Before neo-realism, said Renzo Rossellini, “cinema was in its adolescence, a form of entertainment only. With my father and other Italian directors like Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, cinema became an adult art form. In particular, for my father after 20 years of fascism and censorship, [neo-realism] was a loud scream of liberty.

“My father discovered early that cinema was the best form of art to represent the truth,” he said. “His search was to look for an aesthetic of that which is just, not an aesthetic of beauty.”

susan.king@latimes.com

‘Roberto Rossellini: A Retrospective’

Where: The Billy Wilder Theater, UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: Friday-March 28

Price: $7-$9

Info: (310) 206-8013 or go to www.cinema.ucla.edu.

Schedule

Friday: “Rome Open City,” “The Man With the Cross,” 7:30 p.m.

Saturday: “Paisan,” “Escape by Night,” 7:30 p.m.

Sunday: “Germany Year Zero,” “A Foreign Affair,” 2 p.m.

Feb. 24: “L’Amore,” “La Macchina Amazzacattivi,” 7:30 p.m.

Feb. 28: “The Chicken,” “My Dad Is 100 Years Old” and “Stromboli,” 7:30 p.m.