An Interview with Roberto Rossellini

Although Europa 51 (1952) was the most commercially successful of the films Roberto Rossellini made with the Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman, the reception by the Italian press was largely negative. Many critics focussed on what they saw to be the ‘unreal’ or abstract quality of the films portrayal of the postwar urban milieu and on the Bergman character‘s isolation from the social world. This article looks at how certain structures of seeing that are associated in the classical style with the woman as star or spectacle - e.g., the repetitious return to her fixed image, the resistance to pulling back from the figure of the woman in order to situate her within a determinate location and set of relationships between characters and objects - are no longer restricted to her image but in fact bleed into or “contaminate” the depiction of the world she inhabits. In other words, whereas the compulsive return to the fixed image of the woman tends to be contained or neutralised by the narrative economy and editing patterns (ordered by sexual difference) of the classical style, in Rossellini‘s work this ‘insistent’ even aberrant framing in relation to the woman becomes a part of the (female) characters and the cameras vision of the ‘pathology’ of the urban landscape in the aftermath of the war.

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La camera della morte : quand Roberto Rossellini et Vittorio De Seta filment la pêche aux thons

Itinéraires de Roberto Rossellini ◽

10.4000/books.ugaeditions.1112 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 115-134

Author(s):

Vincent Sorrel

Keyword(s):

Roberto Rossellini

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Roberto Rossellini Documentarista: una cultura della realtà

Historical Journal Of Film Radio and Television ◽

10.1080/01439685.2013.852753 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 155-157

Author(s):

Regina M Longo

Keyword(s):

Roberto Rossellini

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Saints, Scandals, and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini

SubStance ◽

10.3368/ss.45.3.16 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 45 (3) ◽

pp. 16-32

Author(s):

Lisabeth During

Keyword(s):

Simone Weil ◽

Roberto Rossellini ◽

Politics Of Love

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Intertextuality and Mise en Abyme in Nobuhiro Suwa’s H Story and A Perfect Couple. Between European Modernity and Japan

Arts ◽

10.3390/arts7040057 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (4) ◽

pp. 57

Author(s):

Miguel Muñoz-Garnica

Keyword(s):

Case Studies ◽

Complex Relationship ◽

Alain Resnais ◽

Mise En Abyme ◽

Feature Films ◽

Roberto Rossellini

Nobuhiro Suwa, often called “the most French of Japanese directors”, has a complex relationship with European cinematic modernity. His two feature films H Story (2001) and A Perfect Couple (2005) can provide useful case studies, as they were created in dialogue with two key references of that modernity: Hiroshima mon amour (1959, Alain Resnais) and Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1954, Roberto Rossellini), respectively. Both films tend to confront and gloss their previous pairs, but they are also continuations of their concerns and their aesthetical discoveries. The presence of intertextuality elements connecting those films, as well as the use of myse en abyme structures are deeply analyzed in this article to attain a greater understanding on how this process of transcultural dialogue works. Besides, both films exemplify different ways of developing the references on which they are built, namely deconstruction for H Story and reconstruction for A Perfect Couple.

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