The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (361 page)

He married again, in 1988, to Lee Radziwill, and his pictures after that only served to indicate the good judgment of Nora Kaye. But Ross is a curiosity and a throwback to the heyday of, say, George Cukor, when overall proficiency made up for lack of substance. But Ross had so little of Cukor’s generosity—and so little sense of missing it.

Isabella Rossellini
, b. Rome, 1952
Isabella Rossellini has been one of the most broadcast beauties of her time—thanks to Lancôme. She is clearly intelligent, creative, and a social creature, as befits the child of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. She is also a very sympathetic actress—as witness her wife to Bruno Hauptmann in the TV
Crime of the Century
(96, Mark Rydell)—who can rise to a performance of great courage and psychic insight, such as her Dorothy in
Blue Velvet
(86, David Lynch). In addition, she has been the wife of Martin Scorsese and the lover of David Lynch and Gary Oldman. Yet she is independent and practical—a dedicated mother and a capable businesswoman. Still, her screen career is spasmodic and incoherent, as if she had never been entirely sure that it was her destiny—her first aim was to be a journalist: as a young nun in
A Matter of Time
(76, Vincente Minnelli);
The Meadow
(79, the Taviani brothers);
White Nights
(85, Taylor Hackford);
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
(87, Norman Mailer);
Siesta
(87, Mary Lambert); acting with Lynch in
Zelly and Me
(88, Tina Rathbone);
Cousins
(89, Joel Schumacher);
Wild at Heart
(90, Lynch);
Death Becomes Her
(92, Robert Zemeckis), as some guru of cosmetics;
Fearless
(93, Peter Weir);
The Innocent
(93, John Schlesinger);
The Pickle
(93, Paul Mazursky);
Immortal Beloved
(94, Bernard Rose); Big Nosed Kate in
Wyatt Earp
(94, Lawrence Kasdan);
Big Night
(96, Stanley Tucci);
The Funeral
(96, Abel Ferrara); Athene in the TV
Odyssey
(97, Andrei Konchalovsky);
Left Luggage
(98, Jeroen Krabbé);
The Imposters
(98, Tucci); the Duchess in
Don Quixote
(00, Peter Yates) for TV;
Il Cielo Cade
(00, Andrea and Antonio Frazzi);
Empire
(01, Franc Reyes); Josephine in the TV miniseries
Napoleon
(02, Yves Simoneau);
Monte Walsh
(03, Simon Wincer);
The Saddest Music in the World
(03, Guy Maddin).

She is by now a blithe icon of independent film:
The Tulse Luper Suitcases: The Moab Story
(03, Peter Greenaway); and
Vaux to the Sea
(04, Greenaway);
King of the Corner
(04, Peter Riegert);
Heights
(05, Chris Terra);
La Fiesta del Chivo (05, Luis Llosa); My Dad is 100 Years Old
(05, Maddin);
The Architect
(06, Matt Tauber);
Infamous
(06, Douglas McGrath); narrating
The Last Jews of Libya
(07, Vivienne Roumani-Denn);
The Accidental Husband
(08, Griffin Dunne).

Roberto Rossellini
(1906–77), b. Rome
1936:
Daphne
(s). 1938:
Prelude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune
(s);
Luciano Serra Pilota
(codirected with Goffredo Alessandrini). 1939:
Fantasia Sottomarina
(s);
Il Tacchino Prepotente
(s);
La Vispa Teresa
(s). 1941:
Il Ruscello di Ripasottile
(s);
La Nave Bianca
. 1942:
Un Pilota Ritorna
. 1943:
L’Uomo della Croce; Desiderio
(codirected with Marcello Pagliero). 1945:
Roma, Città Aperta/ Rome, Open City
. 1946:
Paisàn
. 1947:
Germania, Anno Zero/Germany, Year Zero
. 1948:
L’Amore
(containing “Una Voce Umana” and “Il Miracolo”);
La Macchina Ammazzacattivi
. 1949:
Stromboli, Terra di Dio
. 1950:
Francesco, Giullare di Dio
. 1952: “L’Invidia,” episode from
Les Sept Péchés Capitaux; Europa ’51
. 1953:
Dov’è la Libertà?; Viaggio in Italia;
“Ingrid Bergman,” episode from
Siamo Donne
. 1954: “Napoli ’43,” episode from
Amori di Mezzo Secolo; Giovanna d’Arco al Rogo; La Paura/Die Angst
. 1958:
L’India Vista da Rossellini
(d);
India
(d). 1959:
Il Generale della Rovere
. 1960:
Era Notte a Roma; Viva l’Italia
. 1961:
Vanina Vanini/The Betrayer; Torino Nei Centi’anni
(d). 1962:
Anima Nera;
“Illibatezza,” episode from
Rogopag
. 1964:
L’Eta del Ferro
(d). 1966:
La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV
. 1967:
Idea di un’Isola
(d). 1968:
Atti degli Apostoli
. 1970:
Socrate
. 1972:
Agostino di Ippona
. 1974:
Anno Uno/Italy: Year One
. 1975:
Il Messia/The Messiah
. 1976:
The Age of the Medici
.

Rossellini was less a filmmaker than someone who observed the world through film. He had worked his way toward the idea that any situation could be made intelligible and moving by film and that “human stories” were natural illustrations of history and politics. Rossellini thought that “The real creative artist in the cinema is someone who can get the most out of everything he sees—even if he sometimes does this by accident.” The implication of this was that the spectator needed to be as active as the director in the experience of cinema.

That was not just a hopeful assertion of solidarity, but part of the demanding critical basis of his films. He encouraged the spectator into testing his or her own emotional and intellectual responses. He tried less to entertain than to synthesize the performer and the spectator: for the viewer is a participant, while a part of the performer is always watching to see what effect he or she has.

In 1958, the year of his divorce from Ingrid Bergman, and the point at which documentary film began to dominate his work, he spoke of the need “to hold people up to people” and of the realization that “it is in the images themselves (as opposed to montage) that the creative artist can really bring his own observation to bear, his own moral view, his particular vision.”

Viaggio in Italia
is not so much his masterpiece as the film that manifests most of his investigative methods. Its enigmatic title leads into a wealth of inner meanings. An English couple named Joyce—Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders—are going to Naples to supervise the sale of their house. Their marriage is breaking up. But the confusing experience of Italy is enough, temporarily at least, to reconcile them.

The situation is not extended by plot, apart from Sanders’s passing interest in two other women and Bergman’s reminiscence of a young poet she once knew. The action of the film consists largely of the two characters observing Italy and its effect on them. While Sanders deals with the business, Bergman explores the sights of Naples, including Pompeii.

Time and again, the simplicity of the narrative forces the viewer to participate in the actual language of the camera: the cramped, static shots of the couple, like flies, in their car, and the liberation of the tracking shots on the sunroof of their home when people and place are rapturously united. Bergman’s wandering through Naples has meaning not just in the impression made on her by antiquity, by so many pregnant women, and by the unearthing of a Pompeiian couple arrested by lava, but in the dynamics of camera movements and the constant “documentary” shooting of person (or actress) in location.

Much rests in the disharmony between Bergman and Sanders. She is not easily diverted from anxiety, while he shrinks from emotion. Rossellini’s tact in adapting such characteristics is all the more comprehensive in that Bergman was then his wife. The mingling of fictional and actual marriages is reflected at the end of the film when, at the moment of reconciliation, the shadow of the camera crane falls across the scene. This comes quickly and with as little emphasis as Rossellini’s style ever allows. It needs to seem accidental or careless. But it crystallizes the feeling that grows throughout of
Viaggio
being an investigation of marriage, in which the characters come together again, not finally, but as speculatively as an audience responding to the signs in life that support lasting human feelings. The “voyage” or “journey” is, finally, into the spectator’s consciousness.

The collision of Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman was as spontaneous as desire, and so chancy it was enough to make one believe in gambling. But, very quickly, their “affair” and their art became a drama (and a melodrama): the scandal exemplified the world’s mixed feelings about movie people; this was Hollywood meeting a new way of doing things; it was north and south; and for both parties, it was a half-comic, half-tragic, and always miraculous mix of hope and terror. She wanted reality; he wanted a star. She was an icon of idealism and a woman at the mercy of her feelings; he was a genius and a rascal—a gambler, a womanizer, a user of people. It may be they never quite understood what was happening. Yet their films are engrossing. They were changed—to be better, sadder, and wiser. We have their films, and their story to learn from.

After the making of
Stromboli
, Rossellini described his cinematic aspiration, directly relating the tremulous existence of a person to the stare of the camera:

I need a depth which perhaps only the cinema can provide, both the ability to see characters and objects from any angle and the opportunity to adapt and omit, to make use of dissolves and internal monologue (not, I might add, Joyce’s stream of consciousness, but rather that of Dos Passos), to take or leave, putting in what is inherent in the action and what is perhaps its distant origin. I will combine my talent with the camera to haunt and pursue the character: the pain of our times will emerge just through the inability to escape the unblinking eye of the lens.

Rossellini’s work begins in the pain and disruption of war and works toward the essayist calm of a philosopher. Where the other neorealists fumbled with a new fad, he produced three films that conveyed specific fictional incident and historical survey. In
Paisan
, for instance, there is an accumulation of fragments: human moments, all rendered with astonishing clarity, all capable of sustaining an entire feature, but packed together to suggest the total experience of Italy. The achievement is a lesson in how to watch and see: not just as street-scene observers, but as beholders of history in the making.
Paisan
is the truest Second World War movie, preparation for the endless newsreel from Vietnam or for the matter-of-fact hostilities of
Les Carabiniers
(made from a play adapted by Rossellini and meant by Godard as a homage to the Italian). With
Roma, Città Aperta
, and
Germania, Anno Zero
, he expressed Italy’s contemporary experience and, without sentimentality, observed the social origins of evil in postwar Berlin.

From 1948 he moved into more personal stories, beginning with
L’Amore
, the film dedicated to Anna Magnani (his lover at the time). Again, it is important to stress how creative the very organization of the film is.
Paisan
is less episodic than symphonic. And
L’Amore
has two parts, apparently very different: the first is a version of Cocteau’s
The Human Voice
, a virtuoso piece for an actress in which a woman desperately tries to hold on to a bored lover over the phone; the second, “Il Miracolo,” tells how a simple peasant woman is seduced by a man she believes to be St. Joseph, and how she believes that she is pregnant with the Son of God. The contrast is of sophisticated theatre and peasant drama, and Magnani clearly links the two—a “grand actress” known for her portraits of peasants. Both stories are artificial, but both concentrate on the near-delusion of a woman’s subjective experience. The physical isolation in the Cocteau piece is reflected in the social ostracism of the woman in “Il Miracolo.” Both cling to their “truth.” It is in putting them side by side that
L’Amore
becomes universal rather than the sum of a facile stage play and a rather patronizing peasant story (by Fellini).

After
L’Amore
, Ingrid Bergman approached Rossellini with a frankness that was the least reserved reward the honesty of his films ever met. They married in 1950 and together made
Stromboli; Europa ’51; Viaggio;
the Ingrid Bergman episode from
Siamo Donne; Giovanna d’Arco al Rogo;
and
La Paura
. Bergman was, artistically, a great challenge to Rossellini. In truth to his art, he could not film her without introducing autobiography, and yet I am not sure she grasped his artistic intelligence. That disparity may have contributed to their eventual separation, for most of their films together are as harrowing as an actual marriage. Only briefly, in
Stromboli
, did the movie marriage of Bergman and Rossellini lead to passionate or erotic cinema. For him, she was a strange planet—an experiment.

Rossellini showed two things that a husband could teach the movie world about Bergman: that she was a plain actress left to herself, but that there was a very touching quality in her stolidity. He dramatized her Scandinavian presence in Italy very simply but very skillfully: thus in
Stromboli
she is a Lithuanian refugee who marries a fisherman on the volcanic island; in
Viaggio
she is an Englishwoman holidaying in Italy; in
La Paura
she is an unhappy, adulterous wife to a German, who ultimately leaves her husband; while in
Europa ’51
she is a mother whose child commits suicide, who in remorse tends the sick and deprived and who is confined in an asylum by her husband. It is clear that such roles suit Bergman’s instinctive agonizing; less clear, but likely, that they reflect the strain of what was a notorious liaison between Latin and Nordic temperaments. Bergman and Rossellini together seem now as unlikely, yet rewarding, as the pairing of Bergman and Sanders in
Viaggio
.