The godfather

Coppola, Scorsese, Stone and Loach have all been influenced by Francesco Rosi. Michel Ciment pays homage to Italy's greatest living film director

Saturday December 3, 2005
The Guardian

Together with Michelangelo Antonioni, Francesco Rosi is arguably the greatest living Italian director. His 16 films, spanning more than four decades, represent a highly coherent body of work. His aim is to portray the world of politics from the broadest possible angle, which includes social and economic contexts. His influence in the field has been paramount, and practitioners of the genre, from Costa-Gavras and Gillo Pontecorvo to Oliver Stone and Ken Loach, have often acknowledged their debt without equalling his achievements. In fact, taken as a whole, his filmography tells the history of his country in the 20th century, from the first world war (Uomini Contro), fascism (Christ Stopped at Eboli), the liberation of Italy (Lucky Luciano), the return from the concentration camps (The Truce), banditry and the issue of Sicilian autonomy (Salvatore Giuliano), the oil market and the exploitation of the third world (The Mattei Affair), the confusion between private and public interests in local politics (Hands Over the City), terrorism and the threat to political stability (Illustrious Corpses) up to the drug trade (To Forget Palermo), which had already been dealt with for an earlier period in Lucky Luciano.

In many ways, Rosi is the heir of two very different artists who helped give birth to neorealism. From Luchino Visconti - whom Rosi was assistant to on La Terra Trema (1948), for which he sketched every shot, and Senso (1954), for which he directed the second unit battle scenes - he has inherited an interpretation of history and a sense of plastic composition without ever falling (as his master sometimes did) into the merely decorative. From Roberto Rossellini's films he learned a sense of immediacy, a close relationship to the contemporary world and a vivid feeling of reality. But though Rosi's films start from a documentary point of view, they are never documentary in approach. They rarely take place in the present but rather in a not too remote past, as if a certain distance were necessary to distinguish the superficial from the essential, to better illuminate the roots of a problem and analyse the chain of cause and effect.

His first two films, La Sfida (The Challenge, 1958) and I Magliari (The Outlaws, 1959), belong to the tradition of the American thriller with a social conscience as exemplified by Elia Kazan, John Huston or Jules Dassin. Later, as another example of cross-cultural influences, the Italian-American film-makers who gave a new impetus to their national cinema - such as Francis Coppola, a constant admirer of Rosi, and Martin Scorsese ("To me he is one of the great masters of contemporary cinema") - would draw inspiration from his films.

Whatever the quality of his early features, it was with Salvatore Giuliano (1962) that he found his own way, his real originality. This took the form of a critical realism, a realism both heightened and enlightened. "My method, which is a movement of the pendulum between reality and a reflection on reality, I really mastered while shooting in Sicily. The inhabitants of Montelepre wrote scenes for me which I could never have imagined. The fact of shooting in the village where Giuliano was born and lived, or where his mother and his family still lived, where everybody could control my work contained the enormous risk of plunging me into total despair. But at the same time, I wanted to be submitted to this control because I did not want to invent. The episodes, the settings are authentic. I cannot afford to invent if I decide to deal with historical facts, but on the other hand I must interpret this reality."

In spite of appearances, Salvatore Giuliani, The Mattei Affair and Lucky Luciano are not biographies. They use historical figures to better understand the fabric of Italian political life, to see what is under the surface, to encompass reality in all its contradictions. Rosi does not offer easy solutions but prefers to end his films with question marks. What leads him is a search for the truth. He attempts to corner the lies, to unveil the deceptions of a society that acts in the shadow. No wonder the mafia return again and again in his films, which allowed Norman Mailer to call Lucky Luciano "the finest movie yet made about the mafia". Most of his works deal with the ambition of politicians, the thirst for power, the control over society and its people - whether through war, organised crime or plain politics; themes all too rarely explored but which a Bertolt Brecht or a Fritz Lang had dealt with earlier.

Rosi's films have sometimes been referred to as cold. They are, in fact, bristling with sensuality and emotion, which he always keeps at bay. It is a mixture of passion and reason probably best explained by the contradictory influence of his childhood. He was born in Naples in 1922. This southern city was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the enlightenment and it is the birthplace of many lawyers. But it is also a highly emotional town, sensuous and superstitious. One finds in Rosi a balance between a very concrete, physical sense of reality and an abstract, cerebral attitude that allows him to analyse it. One also senses a dialectic between a powerful energy and an intellectual scepticism, what the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci has called "the optimism of the will and the pessimism of the mind".

In his films Rosi has gone back again and again to the south of Italy - this mezzogiorno that the Italians have called their Africa, stereotyped for its backwardness, poverty, violence and mysticism. However, under Rosi's eye the south has become a microcosm not only of Italy but of the world. It has often been said that violence gives birth to history; this has never been so much the case as in that part of the peninsula where the old must give way to the new, where underdevelopment and an agrarian society wait for access to the industrial era and the prosperity of the north.

Salvatore Giuliano takes place in Sicily, La Sfida and Hands Over the City in Naples, C'era una Volta (More Than a Miracle) in the country around it. Enrico Mattei, the industrialist who wanted to disrupt international oil policy for the benefit of Italy, dies in Sicily. The family in Three Brothers live in Apulia province, and the three sons return to the farm for the funeral of their mother and ponder over the contemporary ordeal of their country. In Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi, the liberal painter from the north, is sent into political exile under the Mussolini regime to the small village of Lucania; his journey is the discovery of the poor, superstitious world of the south by a rational leftwing intellectual. The Italian-American politician of To Forget Palermo comes back to the native city of his ancestors to be shot dead by the mafia. And if Rosi leaves southern Italy it is to shoot in Spain (The Moment of Truth, Carmen) or in Latin America (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), not forgetting that his birthplace was for three centuries occupied by the kingdom of Spain, which left its indelible mark.

The insistent presence of death in Rosi's films should have warned the critics early on that a purely social and economic interpretation of them would be misleading. Vivir Desviviendose was the first title chosen for his film on bullfighting: "To live while unliving" in a body (human or social) covered with wounds through which life leaks out and loses itself. The Moment of Truth was the title finally adopted, and it applies to other films as well when the director's scalpel does the autopsy. Who is really responsible for the death of Salvatore Giuliano, of the inhabitants of the Via San Andrea buried in the collapse of their hastily built houses (Hands Over the City), of the lieutenants Ottolenghi and Sassu in Uomini Contro, or the oil tycoon Enrico Mattei in the plane crash near Bescape, or Lucky Luciano at the airport, or the judges, magistrates and the inspector Rogas, or those "illustrious corpses" with which Rosi's films are literally strewn? His precise and careful dissection of reality is linked to a sense of metaphysical anguish.

The themes orchestrated by Rosi are so potent and still in tune with our time that one sometimes overlooks his aesthetics. As the American critic Pauline Kael wrote: "Rosi has one of the greatest compositional senses in the history of movies." One cannot forget the massacre of the peasants in the valley, or the mother crying over the corpse of her son (Salvatore Giuliano), the bluish night lit by the explosions of the trench war (Uomini Contro), the beauty of modern architecture (The Mattei Affair), the visit to the crypt of the mummies (Illustrious Corpses), the sudden discovery of the village perched in the mountain (Christ Stopped at Eboli) or the murder of Carmen in the bullring. No artist seems further away from the Romantic sensibility than Rosi, yet the closing lines of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (whose title aptly associates death with the Mediterranean) may have the last word on the director's work: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

· Michel Ciment is editor-in-chief of the French cinema magazine Positif, and author of a monograph on the director, Le Dossier Rosi. Francesco Rosi Complete Retrospective is at Ciné Lumière at the Institut Français, London SW7, until December 8. Box office: 020-7073 1350.