According to the modest attention that our domestic media devoted to the fact that he passed away, one would think that he was a minor Italian filmmaker. However, he was a giant of European and international film whose ties to our parts were not unimportant



In February 2008, the daily Corrierre della sera published a list of a hundred Italian films that have been reflecting the collective memory of that country in the period between 1942 and 1978 and that should be preserved for eternity. The titles are all famous, from the neorealist manifests such as Rome, Open City
and Bicycle Thieves to 1900, but it is most interesting to note with how many films some directors are represented in this list and which filmmakers have managed to dig under the Italian social reality in the most impressive manner?

The director with the most number of films is Federico Fellini with seven titles, followed by Luchino Visconti with six and the third place is shared by Vittorio De Sica and Francesco Rosi with five films each. Is that also the list of the best Italian directors? Not necessarily, as there are only three films by Michelangelo Antonioni because he was always more interested in the individual than the society as a whole. As expected, Sergio Leone is not even included in the list because America, even the made up one, was more important to him than Italy. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Rosi holds such a high place among the directors who have delved into the Italian national identity in the most intriguing ways. Rosi recently died in Rome at the age of 93 and according to the modest attention that our domestic media devoted to the fact that he passed away, one would think that he was a minor Italian filmmaker. However, he was a giant of European and international film whose ties to our parts were not unimportant. In 1970, in Istria he filmed the powerful anti-war drama Men Against..., which was never distributed in Italy due to the fact that it denounced the class stratification on the Italian and Austro Hungarian border. Is film The Mattei Affair, which won the Golden Palm in Cannes in 1972, we could not believe that the censors missed the scene when the hero, the powerful Italian industrialist, flies over Yugoslavia and the military planes warn him that he has to land in Belgrade because he does not have the proper license for use of the air space. Mattei is similar to Charles Foster Kane from the legendary film by Orson Welles and does not allow anything to stop him in carrying out his plans. He just laughs and says to the Yugoslav air control: “I am in a hurry to get to a meeting in Italy and I am friends with your minister Ranković. I am sure he would not mind the fact that I do not have the proper license.” Mattei got what he wanted, flew away and we were impressed by how liberal our country could be, because at the time the name of Aleksandar Ranković could only be mentioned in the worst context. The fact that the charismatic Italian (portrayed by the great Gian Maria Volontè) was on such good terms with him did not fit the existing concept of demonizing the man. In addition, in Rosi’s last film from 1997, The Truce based on memoires by Primo Levi, chemist and writer who was imprisoned in Auschwitz in WW II, the main actors are John Turturro and Rade Šerbedžija; this films also seems like it was filmed in our parts. However, war was just finishing here so the director preferred locations in Ukraine.

It is not like all of us forgot about Rosi because when in the middle of the past decade American publisher Criterion released DVD box sets with his most famous films Salvatore Giuliano (1961) and Hands Over the City (1963), that made him famous on the international festival scene (he won his first Silver Bear in Berlin and the second Golden Lion in Venice), domestic collectors went crazy about them. And for a good reason as his films from the 1960’s represent the turning point in the more apparent wave of politically engaged films and it became obvious that they were directed by an outstanding filmmaker who skillfully managed to integrate professional and non-professional actors into a fascinating whole. Rosi knew what neorealism was all about as he was assistant director to the most famous representative of that trend, to Visconti on his film The Earth Trembles. Afterwards he collaborated with the same director on his two completely different films, Bellissima and Senso, and so in his debut film La sfida from 1958, which takes place among the members of Camorra, the Naples mafia, he reveals himself as filmmaker who was brought up on neorealism but who nurtures a style closer to the American film noir. Salvatore Giuliano was especially radical because the hero, the legendary Sicilian renegade, spends most of the film lying on the dusty ground or his death bed, while the plot was not chronological but rather fragmented so as to fill in the blanks concerning his mysterious death. Rosi managed to create such playfully suggestive scenes so that at one point even his director of photography Gianni Di Venanzo could not believe what he had filmed: farmers from around the Sicilian village where the bloody events of May 1st, 1947 took place (Giuliano’s bandit murdered 11 people) were so much under the impression of the events they were filming that they really fell on the ground, cried and ran away from the fake bullets. This is also reminiscent of neorealism but Rosi’s scenes were so suggestive, almost as if they were carefully prepared by a visual artist. The director allowed himself the freedom to keep the fact who actually killed Giuliano unclear but rather presented it as a possibility and only made it apparent that the official version of his death was an apparent lie made up by the carabiniers, politicians and mafia. Hands Over the City is an equally unconventional film that focuses on a construction tycoon (portrayed by the American actor Rod Steiger), who bought himself his political position and does not allow to be pushed around by different parties and corrupted civil servants. There is no questioning of motives in the film, it is as if you are watching a documentary about the fight for power. There are scenes with about fifty actors and it is not always clear how they were even filmed. The only obvious thing is that it could all be achieved only by somebody with a huge amount of energy who is equally good in filming mass scenes as well as unpleasant confrontations of only two characters.

Rosi was born in Naples and often revisited that area as well as the nearby Sicily in his films. When he was a boy his father took such good photographs of him that they won a competition for the Italian version of the young American star Jackie Coogan and were supposed to travel to Hollywood. His father could have become a successful director of photography or a director and he an actor, but nothing came out of it because the mother said no. The father went back to the shipping industry and his son swore that he would never again allow anybody to shatter his dreams.

Rosi could not feel bad about how he had spent his life as from an early age he was crazy for films. At first he watched mostly French and American films, mostly crime dramas and musicals with Fred Astaire. Even though he became famous in the 1960’ and 1970’s with political films, he never allowed to become a stereotype. After his film Hands Over the City he made the great pseudo-documentary The Moment of Truth (also published by Criterion) in which the Spanish toreador Miguelin plays a character whose destiny is similar to his own, and blood flows much more than in Rosi’s gangster dramas; the overall impression is even more unpleasant as this was his first film in color. He returned to Spanish landscapes in the film adaptation of the opera Carmen from 1984 (sung by Julia Migenes and Plácido Domingo), in which some scenes were indeed reminiscent of The Moment of Truth. Among some of his more unusual creative breakthroughs were the fairy-like More Than a Miracle starring Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif and the costumed melodrama Chronicle of a Death Foretold based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Three Brothers from 1981 was the only film that was nominated for an Oscar, but this well done family drama was not the peak of his career. Norman Mailer thought it was Lucky Luciano from 1973, starring Gian Maria Volontè (one of their five collaborations), because, as he claimed, he had never seen such a realistic and authentic portrayal of the gangster milieu (screenwriter Tonino noted that one of Rosi’s main traits is that he portrays criminals very effectively but does not ever mythologize them). Nevertheless, maybe his best title is the film Illustrious Corpses from 1976, thriller about a policeman from Rome (Lino Ventura) who is sent to Sicily to investigate several murders of highly positioned judges but his finding end up not corresponding with the versions that are expected by his superiors. Certainly the most provocative scene in the film is the one in which the hero is shocked to find the leader of the young anarchists, sort of a Red Brigade, at a party prepared for the social and political crème. He gets the explanation that all the segments of the society have to cooperate closely even though they are presented as enemies in public. The film was made during the time when paranoia-thrillers were very popular, but the difference between its American versions such as Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View in which the viewer eventually guesses who pulls the strings, in Rosi’s film the answer is withheld because it is so in real life too. The visual style of the film is fascinating and it is not surprising that one of its fans is the rigorous aesthet Martin Scorsese, and it is probable that Paolo Sorrentino saw it a few times before creating his The Great Beauty. Undoubtedly, Francesco Rosi was a great director – and we should never forget that. (Nenad Polimac, Jutarnji list)