Early Years, Early Films

Rosi's cinematic sensibility was influenced by his father's photography and sketching, his formative years he spent in Naples, and his apprenticeship with Visconti. La sfida (The Challenge, 1958), his debut work, which shows great affinity with the work of Cartier-Bresson, announces Rosi's future themes: the seductions and traps of power, the collusion between organized crime and business, the harsh social reality of Italy's South. His second, more ambitious work, I magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), is one of the first Italian films confronting the cultural and ethnic issues arising from southern Italian emigration. The film, which alternates documentary-like scenes with popular Italian comedy, is enhanced by the location shooting that will become a hallmark of Rosi's cinema. Rosi departs from the overly melodramatic style of La sfida and develops an aesthetic characterized by a realist exactness of space and penchant for exploring psychological states of mind.

Labyrinths as Figures

Rosi’s groundbreaking trilogy Salvatore Giuliano, Il caso Mattei, and Lucky Luciano addresses the profound cultural and political transformations of postwar Italy. In Salvatore Giuliano (1962), which concerns the enigmatic death of the legendary folk hero, Rosi offers a complex portrait of Sicilian society violently ruled by the Mafia in collusion with the police and the state. Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) investigates the suspicious death of one of the most influential figures in the postwar economic boom. Lucky Luciano (1973), the treacherous figure of organized crime, is at the center of Rosi’s inquiry into the Mafia’s labyrinthine web of political alliances. Deploying his own metodo dell'inchiesta (“method of inquiry”), Rosi digs beneath the surface of official accounts of these public scandals, unearthing an underlying pattern of corrupt and lethal connections. His open endings attest to his belief in the director’s ethical responsibility to create an actively engaged spectatorship.

Voices from the South

In his adaptation of Carlo Levi's Cristo si é fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979), Rosi continues to confront the problems of the South—emigration, cultural marginalization, poverty—while reclaiming its rich, forgotten culture. The film signals a shift of Rosi's style, later evident in the slow-paced Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1987), an epic adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez' 1981 novel that, like Cristo, is structured as an archetypal journey back to the past. In Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981), Italy's chronic political instability is reflected in the tale of a self-assured judge, an idealistic teacher, and an angry factory worker and labor organizer. Summoned home for their mother's funeral, the brothers revisit their peasant roots, confront their present, and imagine their future. The film's concluding wide shot, which unites two generations, indicates Rosi's return to ahistorical values.

Operatic Microhistory

Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth, 1965), a thematic departure from earlier films, is a bold experiment in shooting “freely” without a script. The film, informed by a keen sense of class consciousness and Rosi's penchant for location shooting, centers on the career of a matador, Miguel Mateo “Miguelín,” a peon who leaves the country for the city to escape poverty. Visually, Rosi’s searing exposure of the corruption and exploitation rampant in contemporary Spain is achieved through the use of a long 300mm lens. Sacrificial rituals also lie at the heart of Carmen (Bizet’s Carmen, 1984), Rosi's only experiment in opera adaptation. Also shot in Andalusia and featuring actual soldiers, gypsies, and locals, Carmen counterposes realistic settings to staged theatricality.

Disorder and Chaos

Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City, 1963), Rosi’s indictment of local civic corruption, maps the labyrinthine spaces and power hierarchies of Naples, the city that exemplified for him scandalous urban developments in postwar Italy. The film, which exposes the rapacity of land speculators operating in collusion with local government, features spectacular collapse and eviction scenes that reflect Rosi’s rapport with Neapolitan theater and his aesthetic ties to Cartier-Bresson. Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976), adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s Il contesto, is Rosi’s noir on the Mafia’s ascendancy to a de facto partner in national government. The film, which unfolds around a series of unsolved murders of distinguished jurists, reflects Rosi’s political unease with the “historic compromise.” To capture these political maneuverings, Rosi breaks with “documented” realism and devises a neobaroque view of the South as an iconic site of corruption, doubt, conspiracy, suspicion, and visual theatricality.

The Hazards of History

Uomini contro (Just Another War, 1970), one of Rosi’s most undervalued films, exposes the barbarity of war and the absurdity of military dogma by focusing on the plight of the common soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Great War, many of whom resorted to mutiny, desertion, and self-mutilation to resist being sent on suicide missions. Rosi’s obsession with the moral as well as the physical hazards of war finds new expression in La tregua (The Truce, 1997), adapted from Primo Levi’s memoir of his return home after Auschwitz. The film is stylistically notable for the eschewing of visual and theatrical effects and the concentration on the ordinary experience of a heterogeneous group of people, Jews and non-Jews alike, confronting the uncertainty of what awaited them as free beings. Claiming that he wanted “to turn Levi into an eye,” Rosi also aspires to the role of a timely witness.

City of Memory

Since he had left Naples in the winter of 1946–1947 Rosi had never felt tempted to return but somehow always looked for creative projects which would lead him back. In 1992, he films Diario napoletano (Neapolitan Diary), an intimate narrative documenting a personal and collective journey. In 2003, Eduardo De Filippo’s art, deeply rooted in human suffering rather than the virtuosity of the stagecraft, persuaded Rosi to direct Napoli milionaria! at the San Carlo Theatre for the Compagnia di Teatro Luca De Filippo. Rosi’s vision of historical continuity between cinema and the theater is embodied in a city where poverty favors corruption, crime, and an insatiable longing for power. For Rosi, Eduardo's play is an appeal for action aimed at recapturing the fundamental values of life: love, honesty, solidarity. Three years later he staged Le voci di dentro and in 2008 Filumena Marturano.