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 […]
Tag Archives: Roberto Rossellini
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 […]
“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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Dennis Grunes 