INDIA: MATRI BHUMI (Roberto Rossellini, 1958)

Artist and film critic Fred Camper has named Roberto Rossellini’s India: The Great Mother—but more widely called, simply, India—one of his three favorite films. Andrew Sarris called it “one of the prodigious achievements of the [twentieth] century.” And Jean-Luc Godard, no less, has likened it to “the creation of the world.” Last Sunday, I watched a restored version of it on DVD; this is the only time I’ve seen it in any shape or form. Rossellini’s first work post-Magnani/Bergman is, indeed, a tremendous thing.

Almost always classified as a documentary, this hybrid work fuses documentary and fictional elements. On the heels of a montage of stone sculptures, beginning with images of the Buddha, evoking ancient India, the film introduces India in the present day (1957-58), as a vast nation peaceably uniting many different peoples, languages and religions, in a documentary preface swarming with Indian humanity in the city of Bombay (today, Mumbai). Voiceover narration here and a bit later provides facts and figures—for example: “On just one-twentieth of the world’s surface live one-sixth of the world’s people.” (One is reminded of the documentary opening of Rossellini’s 1947 Germany, Year Zero.) Urban Indians are shown involved in an array of activities in the streets, including work of various kinds. One man, contemplatively reclined, we are told, “dreams”—a surmise; a subjective touch that slips in without stressing the objective reportage. We see the degree to which Indian life conjoins past and present—the old and the post-Independence new.

Following this opening, which is both efficient and bravura, a shot of rural forest accompanies an upward pan: a lone bird of prey in the sky and, just below, a lone monkey bounding across the tops of trees: figures which the film will eventually conjure facsimiles of, suggesting, perhaps, an eternal return to the origin of things. It is noted that “authentic Indians” live in its “580,000 villages.” Another montage follows, of temples and other buildings. Yet even a temple is allowed, in context, to suggest Nature. Elsewhere, we hear the “love songs” of tigers (and see elephants becoming romantic)—and hear in the voiceover narration: “The jungle is the temple in which are celebrated the rites of love.” Finally, the film bounds throughout India to present four fictional episodes—pseudo-mini-documentaries. (Here, we are reminded of the episodic structure of Rossellini’s 1946 Paisan.) The protagonist of the fourth episode, a monkey named Ramu, is female. The holistic vision of the natural universe that this film conveys, such as the connection between the snow-capped Himalayas and rivers below, exists in tension with the film’s episodic structure, which follows a course that darkens into old age and finally reaches the domain of death. The final image is of a lone, menacing vulture in the sky.

The first of the fictional episodes is the story of an elephant driver. My hearing is insufficiently acute at this point in my life to be certain, but it is possible that his is the voice of the narrator in the preliminary parts of the film. If so, his narration bounds over different parts of the film, uniting space. Both my hearing and eyesight are insufficiently acute at this point in my life to be certain, but it is possible that this is the same character who appears, transplanted for the sake of a different line of work, in the second episode. However, I may be dreaming all this.

The first episode has a number of themes. One is the close, affectionate, symbiotic relationship between an Indian elephant rider and his elephants. The narration notes that gentleness—again, peaceableness—has guided this relationship to fruition, which in this case means having the elephant work for his rider in the forest. We see, for example, the elephant fell a tree with its trunk and tusks, and carry and move the log as well. The relationship between the young man and the elephant reflects the human grasp of Nature in India.

Indeed, the realms of humanity and Nature are overlapping existential circles here—another one of the themes of the film. (While the film’s story and script were by Rossellini, Fereydoun Hoveyda, future Iranian ambassador to the U.N., and India’s Sonali Senroy DasGupta, Rossellini’s new wife, also contributed.) As such, both realms are alike in some respects and different than others. Culminating in the coincidental pregnancies of the elephant driver’s new wife and the elephant’s new “wife,” we follow the courtships of both unmarried couples. Male elephants tend to be shy, we are told (and I don’t doubt it!); but with this couple the female wastes no time getting down to erotic business. In the case of the humans, the driver and his future bride exchange blushing smiles, after which the boy arranges work so he can keep the girl within his gaze during the day. Progress to the temple wedding involves a good many formal arrangements, including a letter summoning his father from elsewhere in India, discussion between this man and his son, and between him and the father of the intended bride, and a cessation of contact between the boy and the girl. Rather than simple, direct erotic business, as with the elephants, the human way involves considerable business business: the future groom’s father presents specifics proving his son’s capacity to provide for the other father’s daughter. He saves the best for last: “We own a little land.” Throughout, a not entirely reassuring disparity exists between the minimal connection between the boy and the girl and the long, loving attention the boy gives daily to his elephant!

The protagonist of the second episode—who may be, as I say, the same guy as in the first—is an engineer working on the construction of the Hirakud hydroelectric dam, on the Mahanadi River: humanity bending Nature to its will, its impulse toward progress. But the engineer, himself, must bend to the will of others: he has been reassigned to another project by his employer. His narration anticipates his wife’s “whining”; she forever wants to “settle down” somewhere rather than continually being uprooted and moving elsewhere and on. (A key image in the film is of a tree, its exposed roots grasping the earth.) When she does “whine,” he gives her an irritated push. Doesn’t she understand how proud I am of the work I’ve done here, how I’d prefer to see it through to completion? Doesn’t she get that it isn’t up to me whether we go or stay? On the other hand, although he himself refers to the 1947 Partition, doesn’t he understand that his serial relocations so stress his marriage because they revive his wife’s childhood memory of the Partition and the human displacements it forced? The tragedy of this marriage is the tragedy of India.

In the third episode, whose protagonist is an elderly man, iron prospectors—like the oil drillers in Robert J. Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948)—disrupt the natural environment with their blasts, sending fauna, in terror, to flight. Two creatures stay behind: a tiger and a porcupine. Famished, the tiger lethally attacks the porcupine, wounding her/himself on the porcupine’s protective quills, becoming a looming terror to the human inhabitants of the region, including the elderly man. Nature, then, has taken a darker turn, the result of capitalistic presumption and invasion, reviving memory of Colonial India’s ordeal.

Rossellini’s searing fourth episode seals the status of his India as a towering achievement—and a beauteous wedding gift to his bride, Sonali Senroy DasGupta, his wife until his death twenty years hence. This final episode is terribly moving, and it contains a haunting image that is the film’s finest. In an arid stretch of land, an old, old man, a figure of composure and perfect dignity, walks toward the camera, Ramu the monkey, his companion, perched on his shoulder. All of a sudden the man drops down dead, leaving Ramu startled, disoriented, bereft: a figure encapsulating the depth and dimension of inconsolable loss and a lifetime’s love. Hers is the loss of India as a result of the Partition; there is a hole in Ramu’s heart. Who knows? Perhaps hoping against hope that her companion will revive and return to her, nervously protecting his body from the gathering and approaching vultures, Ramu reflects the price Nature pays for domestication. But Ramu is not done; there is adventure ahead—and perhaps a new home.

I am grateful to The Movie Detective for making this film available for me to watch and savor. It is both spacious and exacting—miraculous, really. Now having seen it, I cannot easily let it go. India has made me feel born again.

 

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WE, THE WOMEN (Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Luigi Zampa, Gianni Franciolini, Alfredo Guarini, 1953)

Called in the U.S. either We, the Women or Of Life and Love, Siamo donne is a composite film from Italy whose overall idea legendary screenwriter Cesare Zavattini originated. Each of four segments showcases a major star/actress; one tedious segment, with a labored postmodern spin, a starlet. The four “celebrities,” each ostensibly playing herself, are Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani, Isa Miranda and Alida Valli. Each segment is directed by someone else; for instance, her husband, Roberto Rossellini, directed Bergman’s segment, while Luchino Visconti directed Magnani’s.

Giving an exquisite performance that borders on delicate tragedy, Valli also is beauteous and glamorous almost beyond belief in her segment directed by Gianni Franciolini. (It is ironically launched by an unflattering glimpse of Valli as she is readied for the party that occupies most of the segment.) However, gossip-mongers as we are, our principal anticipation centers on the two titans who successively shared Rossellini’s bed: Magnani and Bergman. One disappoints; the other soars.

Despite the satirical brilliance of their collaboration with Bellissima (1951), Visconti and Magnani are involved in a forced farcical episode where, en route to the theater where she is performing, Magnani is being driven around Rome, where she is dispensing diva-dimensional gaiety and (intentionally) ill-fitting glamor at different stops. What a downer all this is—and coming at the tail end of the film. Filmmaker and star fail to conjure the comic fantasy they intended; spirits never quite lift off the ground.

But Rossellini’s contribution had me wiping away tears of laughter. I know, I know: Rossellini—funny? On this occasion, the generally tragic artist, as he and his wife go about debunking her myth, are a dazzling riot.

Bergman, expecting guests for lunch, discovers a crime on her grounds: her carefully groomed rose-bed has been utterly ruined! Did the kids do this? The dog? The culprit turns out to be her neighbor’s chicken! The spectacle of Bergman’s pursuit of the dumb bird, urged to the boiling point by her irresponsible neighbor’s condescension, unfolds outdoors and in-; in addition to providing an unexpected vision of Bergman engaged in lovely slapstick, the ordeal also provides superlative respites where she speaks directly into the camera. At the last she explains she wasn’t really trying to kill the chicken, at which she has directed her dog, but hoping to give it a good scare, even if this meant—for the chicken—a heart attack! Wait till the U.S. Congress hears about this!

Bergman’s agile, beautiful acting, lightning-quick yet throughly relaxed, is a sight to behold. This is by far her best comic performance, including the  one that brought her her third Oscar.

 

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A PILOT’S RETURN (Roberto Rossellini, 1942)

“I need a depth of field which perhaps only the cinema can give, and to see people and things from every side, and to be able to use the ‘cut’ and the ellipsis, the dissolve and the interior monologue. Not, of course, that of Joyce, but rather that of Dos Passos. To take and to leave, inserting that which is around the fact or event and which is perhaps its remote origin.” — Roberto Rossellini

In Roberto Rossellini’s wartime so-called Fascist Trilogy, each work focuses on a different branch of Italy’s military: its navy, air force, infantry. The middle and perhaps most powerful entry, Un pilota ritorna, proceeds from a group portrait to a young pilot who is new to the squadron, and from him to a wider and deeper portrait, in which he is enmeshed, that depicts the environment of suffering that war imposes. As we would expect him to, cinema’s greatest humanist transcends the patriotic intent of the original story, by the son of Italy’s dictator Mussolini, to create a vision of war’s capacity, not only to maim and kill, but also to thwart, even crush, the simple aspirations of the individual. Michelangelo Antonioni was among those who contributed to Rossellini’s characteristically evolving script, which includes a remarkably casual passage in which squadron members openly mock the “heroism” of fighter pilots that newspaper headlines, in blindly rapid succession, extol.
     In 1941, during Italy’s war with Greece, Gino Rossati, the film’s protagonist, is shot down from the skies and interned in a British camp before becoming a prisoner of the Greeks. There, he meets and falls in love with Anna, a teenaged prisoner whose composure in assisting her father in a makeshift leg amputation, as well as her kindness to the patient afterwards, somehow in the midst of war promises a respite, even an antidote. In one of the film’s bravura 360° pans, each of which surveys a restricted environment that manifests the incursion of war into people’s lives, Anna sits by the amputee’s bedside and reads aloud to him; by the time the camera, having noted the faces of others in the shelter, has returned to her, Anna has fallen asleep from exhaustion, by extension, from war’s burden. Unselfishly, Anna urges Gino to attempt the escape he desires, asking only that he at some point of safety find her again; Gino, stealing a plane, does escape. (The tight confinement of the cockpit is, for us, sorely ironic.) Gino is shot by his own side—he is, after all, piloting an enemy plane—but manages to land safely. Amidst countrymen rejoicing, learning of Greek surrender, perhaps he wonders whether he and Anna will reunite. Perhaps he will forget her.
     Like all stories, this one admits its clichés; but the hard, detailed realism that Rossellini pursues, tempered by the sensitive hopefulness of the beginning romance, and the ordinariness of the young pair’s lives and of the lives of others that we glimpse all point to the new lifeblood that Rossellini was helping to inject into Italian cinema. Intriguingly, Massimo Girotti is cast as Gino; that same year, he also starred in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, thus linking the two founding works of the Neorealist movement. Its masterpiece, about the postwar toll of war, would come five years hence: Rossellini’s unconquerable Germany, Year Zero (1947).

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THE MAN WITH A CROSS (Roberto Rossellini, 1943)

The rough, powerful conclusion to his so-called Fascist Trilogy, Roberto Rossellini’s L’uomo dalla croce revolves around an Italian priest, a humble military chaplain, who ministers to the wounded and the dying, and Russians scrambling for refuge after being shelled from their homes, in a bombed-out shack on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Throughout an apocalyptic night, artillery fire, outside, flashes darkness into bursts of light. At dawn, the chaplain, himself dying, crawls to deliver the message of God’s love to a dying man half of whose face has been shot and burned off; their deaths dove-tail in time. The camera finds the pocket on which the chaplain’s insignia, the cross, is sewn.
     The opening panning shot is phenomenal: doves populating a tree, mixed company at a distance in and hovering near a lake, young men reclining on the ground, soaking in the sun. This seeming image of leisure and tranquility is overturned when the men put back on their military uniforms. The film to follow provides a gripping portrait of war.
     The imprint of Mussolini’s political intent bears down mostly in the onscreen script that ultimately appears. Only an insane person would find this film as offensive, say, as Hollywood’s warmongering Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Indeed, Rossellini’s humanism opposes war, passionately, and expresses full compassion for all its victims.
     It is largely the urgency of Rossellini’s nascent neorealism that assists the film in eluding the script’s schematic quality and labored ironies, for instance, the death of a man as a baby, only yards away, is being born. The chaplain abandons this dying man in order to baptize the newborn, returning in time to pronounce the man dead. For me, at least, human responsibility weighs in, here, problematically.

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“Envy” from THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)

I cannot tell you what goes on in Colette’s 1933 story “La chatte,” upon which it is based, but Camilla, the newly married woman in Roberto Rossellini’s “Envy,” has no rational basis for her antipathy for her husband Olivier’s adorable Saha. Although he could be more sensitive to the “period of adjustment” that Camilla is undergoing in their marriage, while his maintenance of his lifestyle can make him seem at times infuriatingly self-contained, it is certainly not the case that Olivier (in the story, Alain, and based on Colette’s own brother) loves his pet more than he does his wife. And even if this were the case, how does that accrue to the fault of the cat? Rather, I would say that Olivier loves Olivier best—a truth about Italian husbands long before Olivier even had a cat. For the record, Rossellini himself had married Ingrid Bergman less than two years earlier. The couple made films together in English because English, which originally belonged to neither of them, was a language that they both knew.
     “Envy” is Rossellini’s contribution, one of two Italian entries, to the Franco-Italian anthology, or portmanteau film, Les sept péchés capitaux, which is most famous for Claude Autant-Lara’s “Pride” starring (as daughter and mother) Michèle Morgan and Françoise Rosay. Gérard Philipe’s appropriately, though unexpectedly, vulgar, animated carnival barker imposes a delightful semblance of continuity on the far-ranging material. Rossellini, who had a hand in the script of “Envy,” is the only “heavy hitter” in the comedy’s roster of directors.
     Spectacular are the inserts of the snowy white cat upon which Camilla projects volition for the undermining of her marriage. What is wrong with Olivier? Why is he blind to Saha’s intent?
     The inserts of the cat keyed to Camilla’s point of view—call them reaction shots—grease the film’s slide into subjectivity. Camilla pushes Saha over the ledge of the couple’s high-rise apartment, provoking Olivier’s attentive nursing; gently, he strokes Saha’s paws, condemning Camilla’s envy as an ever tighter closeup of Camilla’s hateful face further indicates herself as the actual source of this condemnation. From what we see, Camilla is a vampire vis-à-vis Saha, a sweet and innocent creature domesticated for comfort, companionship and humanity’s pleasure. Perhaps Camilla is terrified that her own role in her marriage is no different. Postwar, however, perhaps the difference is largely up to her. Perhaps Italian patriarchy, now shook up, can no longer be dependably blamed for every inequity under the sun—especially in a universe, like Rossellini’s, where the Church isn’t automatically invoked to shore it up.

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