Das sacristias às alcovas como do teatro ao cinema

Título magnífico do texto do Gérard Legrand (Positif n° 157, março de 1974) sobre o Casanova do Comencini. Dois trechos:

Se o Casanova de Comencini se distingue de suas outras realizações recentes, as quais têm por centro de interesse, perigoso se alguma vez houve um, a infância, não é por contrabalançar esse tema, mas por multiplicá-lo pela própria construção do filme, que é essencialmente pedagógica, de uma pedagogia que se dirige tanto ao adulto quanto, neste caso, ao amador do cinema. (...)

(...) A preocupação pedagógica de Comencini transparece apenas sob a fluência da sátira: é o amante de sua mãe que revela a Giacomo a ilusão fundamental, graças à qual o conhecimento, e o cinema, são possíveis. O barco parece estar imóvel, pois anda devagar, pois "tudo está bem", e as árvores se movem às margens do rio, e no entanto é o contrário que se passa.

« TOURNEUR, ENTRE LA TERREUR ET L’EMERVEILLEMENT »
par Michael H. Wilson

Comment dire la beauté des films de Jacques Tourneur à qui n’a pas encore éprouvé leur pouvoir d’envoûtement ? Ce sont des films discrets, qui nous parlent sur le ton de la confidence. Ils conservent pourtant un éclat hypnotique longtemps après que leurs péripéties se sont estompées dans nos mémoires. Peut-être parce que l’ambition secrète du conteur était immense : nous prendre par la main et nous conduire sur le seuil de l’outre-monde. Aux limites de l’indicible. Ce qu’il attendait de son art : rien moins que de suggérer l’invisible.

Né et mort en France, nourri de culture française, Tourneur a fait l’essentiel de sa carrière aux États-Unis. Mais son oeuvre est trop fascinée par l’inconnu et l’ambiguïté pour ne pas déborder les deux cultures. Elle bat en brèche la tradition cartésienne : le réel est bien trop complexe pour être appréhendé et à plus forte raison expliqué rationnellement. Et elle fait fi du moralisme anglo-saxon : l’évaluation morale des actes est si aléatoire qu’elle décourage tout manichéisme. S’il y a une vérité, elle se dérobe dans une frange de clair-obscur où se déploient toutes les irisations du prisme.

La carrière du cinéaste témoigne à sa façon des voies capricieuses du destin : une carrière erratique, toute en méandres, scandée par des allers et retours entre l’Europe et les États-Unis, et qui après plusieurs faux départs, ne prend son essor qu’avec le défi, magistralement assumé, de « Cat People ». Des beaux jours de la RKO aux désillusions de la production indépendante, elle va connaître l’apogée et la déliquescence du studio system.

Son oeuvre nous donne, avant tout, une leçon d’humilité : le visible n’est qu’une infime partie de l’univers. Au-delà des apparences, il est des mondes parallèles qui ignorent nos catégories spatio-temporelles. Tourneur croyait en leur existence et à une communication possible avec eux. (La communication entre vivants lui paraissait bien plus mystérieuse.) Ses meilleurs films nous invitent à soulever un coin du voile. À sonder ce qu’un de ses personnages, le sorcier Karswell de « Night of the Demon », appelle le versant crépusculaire ou le demi-jour de la conscience.

Bien souvent, le voyageur qui se penche sur cet abîme recule et bat en retraite, ébranlé au plus profond. Qui ne serait pris de frisson ou de vertige quand il entrevoit - entrevoit seulement - une pluralité de dimensions incompréhensibles? Les esprits forts ont du mal à résister à cette commotion, toujours douloureuse. Tourneur n’aime rien tant que bousculer leurs certitudes. Les dépouiller de leurs préjugés. Leur arracher leurs dernières illusions.

Tentons d’esquisser l’itinéraire qui lui a inspiré ses plus beaux films : un individu ordinaire, arraché à son milieu et à ses habitudes par une circonstance fortuite, est précipité dans une épreuve à laquelle rien ne le prédisposait, mais au fil de laquelle il découvre un univers extra-ordinaire dont il n’avait pas soupçonné l’existence. Cet univers second peut être souterrain (films criminels) ou parallèle (films fantastiques), spirituel (Stars in My Crown) ou psychotique (The Leopard Man). Ce peut être le double ou le revers du sien, mais il en sortira marqué, retourné, humilié, sans doute plus désespéré qu’auparavant. Pour certains, il ne restera que le suicide.

Car le coeur est, lui aussi, un abîme inscrutable, parfois plus redoutable que gouffres et maelströms. Ceux qui le contemplent de trop près s’y brûlent corps et âme. Si les hommes ne peuvent comprendre leur univers, c’est qu’ils ne peuvent ni se comprendre entre eux ni se comprendre eux-mêmes. Il faut donc que la mise en scène y supplée par la composition du plan, la modulation des rapports spatiaux, la clarté de la profondeur de champ, le langage de la couleur: toutes « correspondances » qui traduisent, indirectement, et mieux que tout dialogue, émotions ou états d’âme.

Parce que le visible n’est qu’un voile, parce que les choses sont les signes d’autres réalités, la lumière, en particulier, est appelée à jouer un rôle primordial. Dramatiquement et symboliquement. C’est elle qui impose la familiarité de l’étrange ou l’étrangeté du familier. Un changement d’éclairage suffit à suggérer un pan de la surréalité qui nous entoure : le paysage connu devient source d’angoisse ; le paysage inconnu suscite l’illusion du déjà-vu ou du déjà-rêvé...

Pas un film de Tourneur où le protagoniste n’ait à actionner le commutateur électrique, à allumer une bougie, à se saisir d’une torche ou d’un flambeau... Donner de la lumière, ou l’éteindre, est un acte décisif, souvent une question de vie ou de mort.
Le cinéaste reconnaissait volontiers que c’était son « idée fixe » sur le plateau.

Mettre en scène, c’est peindre avec l’ombre et la lumière, l’une et l’autre se prêtant vie en une alchimie toujours renouvelée. Tourneur aimait que la source lumineuse soit visible dans le champ, parfois au premier plan, parfois en amorce, à la fois fidèle et fragile, banale et magique. Présence rassurante, mais aussi trompeuse puisqu’elle suscite autour d’elle des ombres plus profondes... et de nouveaux mystères.

L’ambiguïté « fantastique » en vient à contaminer tous les récits de Tourneur. Même quand l’énigme n’est pas d’ordre surnaturel, on perçoit un décalage entre les péripéties en surface et les forces obscures qui hantent la pénombre de l’arrière-plan ou du hors-cadre. Entre ce qui est contrôlé et ce qui est déchaîné. À tout instant tout peut basculer, et l’inquiétude virer à l’angoisse, voire à l’épouvante. La main de « Night of the Demon », qui se pose soudain sur la rampe de l’escalier, dans le dos de l’enquêteur, alors qu’il descend vers son rendez-vous avec la peur, pourrait être celle du cinéaste lui-même.

Ne faut-il pas s’émerveiller qu’un réalisateur aussi obligeant ait su éclairer la plupart de ses intrigues sous cet angle si particulier ? Il semble avoir hérité de Murnau, le voyant de « Nosferatu » et « Tabu », un sentiment tragique de la vie. « Il n’y a pas de beauté ici, seulement la mort et la pourriture », s’exclame le héros spleenétique de « I Walked With a Zombie », face au ciel constellé et à la mer phosphorescente. Si les poissons volants bondissent, c’est de terreur. Si l’océan scintille, c’est grâce à des myriades d’organismes en putréfaction. « Tout ce qui est bon meurt en ces lieux... même les étoiles ».
Qui croit entrevoir l’Eden doit aussitôt constater qu’il est irrémédiablement perdu.

Il y a, enfin, un mystère Tourneur. D’une remarquable modestie, il se considérait comme un menuisier : « Je faisais toujours de mon mieux avec ce que l’on me donnait, comme un ouvrier avec son morceau de bois ». Il ne se serait battu que pour une poignée de projets, comme « I Walked With a Zombie » et « Stars in My Crown ». Et pourtant, son oeuvre présente un univers singulier, des thèmes récurrents, des motifs obsessionnels. Et une écriture en pointillé, qu’il a du reste revendiquée : « Le parti-pris de suggérer l’horreur, ça c’est vraiment un apport personnel ».

Cet artisan est aussi un artiste profondément disponible. Il sait lâcher la bride à son instinct quand il aborde les genres les plus codifiés de Hollywood. Étant lui-même un spirite, il savait qu’en matière de création l’inspiration vient du subconscient : « Il se peut fort bien que vous soyez de plain pied inconsciemment avec un certain type d’histoires alors que vous pensez le contraire. Cette attitude vous oblige à être ouvert, réceptif à tous les genres, à toutes les formes de narration ».

Mieux que ses prestidigitateurs et sorciers, Tourneur mesure ses effets; il se contente de chuchoter ou de murmurer. Ses acteurs parlent à mi-voix ; il faut parfois tendre l’oreille pour suivre leurs échanges, un ton au-dessous des films ordinaires. Ce qui est proféré par le dialogue compte moins que l’intensité des silences, la suggestivité d’un effet sonore, le timbre assourdi d’une voix off. Une de ces voix auxquelles est accordé le privilège de ressusciter des charmes anciens ou de lointaines mythologies : « Oui, j’ai jadis marché avec un zombie »...

Tourneur lui-même disait n’avoir d’autre vocation que de raconter de belles histoires. Sa modestie, sa subtilité sont les vertus d’un conteur confiant en la toute-puissance de l’imagination. D’un poète qui fait la part de l’ombre et du songe. OEuvrant dans un cinéma de genres, il semble parcourir des chemins familiers, mais c’est pour mieux s’esquiver dans les sous-bois de « l’autre côté ».

À Hollywood, il fut l’un de ces « contrebandiers », peut-être le premier, qui ont sapé le récit classique de l’intérieur. Un explorateur en quête de « passages » qui ouvrent à l’esprit des perspectives inédites. Un promeneur attentif à l’inquiétante étrangeté de notre univers quotidien lorsqu’il révèle ses fractures. Et par là-même, extraordinairement solitaire tandis qu’il poursuit à l’insu de tous, protégé par son humilité même, une expérimentation qui va transformer le cinéma en profondeur.

Michael Henry Wilson
Extraits du prologue de « Jacques Tourneur ou la magie de la suggestion », à paraître aux Éditions du Centre Pompidou.

- En Italie, il existe un cinéma populaire très important. Pour quelles raisons selon vous ce cinéma n'existe pas en France?

- Vous pouvez le constater tout de suite: un film comme La Grande Bouffe sort et vous voyez les réactions! L'auto-censure, l'auto-contrôle, le total désintérêt de tous pour le cinéma? Vous croyez qu'il faut faire toutes ces discussions sur un film comme La Nuit américaine de Truffaut? Vous ne croyez pas qu'on s'éloigne toujours davantage de l'essentiel? La Nuit américaine est un film absolument inutile, un film très aristocratique, plein du mépris le plus absolu à l'égard des gens. Là, il est vraiment inutile de parler du rapport que l'on peut avoir avec le spectateur.

Marco Ferreri em Le cinéma italien, Jean Gili, livro de entrevistas com realizadores italianos.

Salvatore Giuliano

Michel Ciment


With Salvatore Giuliano (1961), Francesco Rosi developed the style and method that would make him, during the sixties and seventies, the greatest political filmmaker of his time. If Sergei Eisenstein could be considered the master of political cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, Rosi, in a way his peer, offers a totally different approach to the realities of power. Joseph Goebbels, allegedly an admirer of the Russian director’s films, would have been unable to endorse Rosi’s analytical conclusions. Eisenstein uses the tools of propaganda, playing chiefly on emotion and a Manichean view of the world. Rosi, though able to provoke deeply sensitive reactions from his spectators, always manages to make them think by tracking down and exposing the lies that obscure the inquiries and the scandals of our societies. His filmography can be viewed as a vast panorama of the historical past of his country, as well as its present.

Influenced by both Italian neorealism and the American crime-film tradition (from Jules Dassin to Elia Kazan), Rosi had worked as an assistant director with such filmmakers as Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Mario Monicelli before striking out on his own as writer and director with two films, La sfida (The Challenge, 1958) and I magliari (1959), the first situated in Naples and the second among Italian immigrant cloth sellers in Hamburg. Having mastered his craft, Rosi inaugurated with Salvatore Giuliano a new kind of realism that, while strongly influenced by neorealism, went beyond its immediate model by examining such issues as power and the relationships between the law and lawbreakers, while also shedding light on the causes and consequences that determine the ways in which society functions.

Salvatore Giuliano is set in the mezzogiorno, that southern part of Italy (including Sicily) that has been left on its own to struggle with poverty and exploitation. It is this region that dominates most of the director’s work, from Le mani sulla città (Hands Over the City, 1963) to Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) and Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976). Salvatore Giuliano was initially entitled Sicilia 1943-–1960, a title that reveals the director’s intention to create a portrait of the island, complete with its contradictions and its historical evolution. Salvatore Giuliano, the Sicilian bandit whose name was to become the final title of the film, is present only as a corpse in a courtyard in Castelvetrano, or on a slab in a morgue, or even as a figure in a white shirt running up and down the rocky slopes of the Sicilian mountains. By using the name of a more or less absent man as the title of his work, Rosi found an immediate way to stress his rejection of character identification and, even more strongly, of the hero worship that generally characterizes the storylines of the biopic.

Rosi scales back dramatization and achieves the effect of alienation through his unorthodox treatment of the storyline. Shaking up the chronological order, the director juxtaposes disparate narrative blocks, thus creating a back-and-forth movement in time that sheds light on the causes and effects. In the first part of the film, Giuliano’s death (the discovery of his body at Castelvetrano in July 1950; the police report; the anguish on his mother’s face as she identifies the body on the altar at the morgue) serves as the film’s present tense. But the surrounding scenes (Palermo in 1945 and the Sicilian separatist movement; Giuliano’s partisans, the pisciotti, attacking the armed forces; the roundups organized by the military among the inhabitants in the village of Montelepre; the massacre of the communists on May 1, 1947, at Portella della Ginestra) are not treated as flashbacks (as in Citizen Kane, for instance) but rather as fragments of a mosaic that bit by bit reveal their meaning. In the second part of the film, the events at Viterbo—where the pisciotti and their leader, Gaspare Pisciotta, Giuliano’s right-hand man, were put on trial—become the film’s present while allowing the director to clarify other preceding events, such as the betrayal of Giuliano by Pisciotta or the removal of the bandit’s body by the carabinieri. The final sequence is a flash forward that takes us to 1960 and the assassination of a Mafioso implicated in Giuliano’s death. Rosi concludes the film with a scene reminiscent of the film’s opening—another man left for dead by an unseen shooter.

The political and philosophical decisions involved in this type of structure also evolved from an ethical decision by Francesco Rosi, who refused to invent or imagine events of which he had no knowledge. His method, which included exhaustive research into documents (trial minutes, photographs, testimony, newspaper articles) followed by on-site verification, led him to include his doubts, his questions, and even the inevitable gaps in his investigation in the narrative structure. Although shot at least ten years after the events in question (a necessary separation in time can also be found in Rosi’s other docudramas, Il caso Mattei and 1974’s Lucky Luciano), Salvatore Giuliano still ran up against the law of silence in the collusions between the Mafia, the legal system, political parties, the army, the police, and the bandits. But it is precisely these uncertainties that give the film its complexity and its aura of mystery. Asking questions rather than providing answers, Salvatore Giuliano was able to reach far beyond the usual boundaries of political cinema, which all too often simply seeks to reassure its audiences.

The impact of Salvatore Giuliano and the authenticity of its images have led some to see it as a documentary. But if Rosi made a documented film, what he shows us is the result of a patient and inspired reconstruction. There has never been a film that aimed more strongly at destroying romantic illusions, at deflating the very spirit of the epic, while at the same time offering more beauty, more potential to inspire a kind of epic passion in the viewer that at any moment can carry political awareness into a new dimension. A Neapolitan by birth, Rosi brings together the two cultural tendencies of his native city: rationalism inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and an emotional drive that turn towards death and tragedy. His filmmaking brings about a fusion of the realism of the Rossellini of such films as Paisà (1946) and the formal splendor of the Visconti of La terra trema (1948). From this we can conclude the following: Truth is beauty; Beauty is truth.

In Salvatore Giuliano, Rosi used only two professional actors, Frank Wolff (Gaspare Pisciotta) and Salvo Randone (President of the Court of Assize). The remainder of the cast was gathered from the Sicilian population. By asking the Sicilian natives to relive traumatic moments of their own history, the director was thus able to create psychodramas of overwhelming emotional impact: Giuliano’s mother wailing over his body; the procession, complete with horses and flags, across the valley of Portella della Ginestra as gunshots ring out from the surrounding hills; the roundup in Montelepre, with mothers and wives demanding that the army give them back their men; the pisciotti, imprisoned behind bars in the courthouse, standing with pride against the bourgeois system of justice.

By analyzing a specific situation in minute detail, Rosi, through the depth of his approach, was able to give his film a universal quality. In Salvatore Giuliano one can in fact witness the opposition between the north and the south, the disinherited—those left behind in the economic development—pitted against the impersonal power of Rome as manifested in the legal system, the army, and the police. One also sees how the outcasts of the earth are manipulated and deceived by the local powers-that-be, whether Mafia or landowners. No wonder then that from the moment they appeared in the early sixties, Salvatore Giuliano and Rosi’s next film, Hands Over the City, became immediate references for fellow filmmakers such as Elio Petri and Gillo Pontecorvo, whose The Battle of Algiers was co-written by Franco Solinas, one of Rosi’s screenwriters for Salvatore Giuliano. The latter film was also a strong influence on Brazilian Cinema Novo directors such as Glauber Rocha (Black God, White Devil [Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, 1964]) and Ruy Guerra (The Guns, [Os Fuzis, 1964]), as well as on the Hungarian Miklos Jancso (The Round Up, [Szegénylegények, 1965]) or the Greek Theo Angelopoulos (The Reconstruction, [Anaparastasis, 1970]).

Salvatore Giuliano can be seen as the cast from which Rosi struck all of his subsequent films, all of them reflections on power and death, all of them chapters in the history of twentieth-century Italy, all of them acts of courage and fountains of beauty, the work of a man, a poet, and a citizen.

A Transparent Parable

by Gérard Legrand

The film Hercules Conquers Atlantis poses a complex question. We have to deal with the "rescue" of a paganistic story under the cover of a transparent parable that wants to "demystify" one of the few myths entirely belonging to the 20th century.

I would like to make myself clear: Plato did not invent the myth of Atlantis out of the blue. In contrast to what the "broad public" and many "naives" - more or less interested in his work - think, Plato was the one who shaped and humanised the older and undefined outlines of the myth. Some of these are a reminiscence of the last prehistoric catastrophes, a confusion between the name of Titan Atlas and the name of a mountain that roamed almost everywhere before stabilising in North Africa, legends about the ancient owners of the Mediterranean and their "orphic" lifestyle; the whole, beautified by an eccentric choice from the body of the mythical nomenclature. However, all these together would not be sufficient to form the allegory Plato wanted, if it were not for "Egypt" (known as the "wonderland" of ancient times) and the relative luxury of the fanciful "precision", which flourished by the salon - explorers and the invincible divers (without having the least idea of Platonic philosophy).

We took pains to find all the places where the later geographers located Atlantis; these places cover the whole planet, including Spitzburg and Oceania. Even "magic" participated in the story: some American sects trying to find a Gospel purified of any Judaic elements and, later, the Nazis, commenced an insane trend for the search of the citizens of Atlantis. Was this nostalgia for the lost paradise and the nation of the chosen ones? On the eve of the Second World War, the myth of Atlantis dominated and had spread, like a contagious disease, over this civilisation; a civilisation supporting progress and excessive modernism. The only thing the myth did was to discover some laughable archaeological scrolls.

Hercules in Conquest is even more spectacular than the one of Revenge as he destroys everything.1 He may not care for the fight in the tavern but he, his son and his friend, the King of Thebes, fight over a dancer. However, Hercules arrested together with the King, stands alone in front of the red light threatening to destroy life. He continues to sleep until the momentΙ I will not to refer to all the beautiful scenes comprising this Atlantis; an Atlantis of much higher quality than the one George Pal haphazardly put together 2 or the one Edgar Ulmer 3 ostentatiously tried to modernise. The denunciation of the "blond superhuman" race, the fascist robots without eyes and the denunciation of the slave crowds who only know to attack their masters, without a strategic plan, and end up slaughtered - these two observations, although utterly pessimistic, shatter the crypto-Hitlerite Atlantis (that of the film Morning of the Magicians) which is later annihilated by beautiful images of volcanoes, scenes borrowed from Haroun Tazieff's documentaries. The masochistic Atlantis by Pierre Benoît has nothing to say to defend itself. Antinea (Fay Spain) who trafficks drugs and secret nuclear weapons will be defeated by her daughter (the wonderful Laura Altan) and Hercules, who, having defeated Proteus, in a Nietzschean tone says: "We, the other Greeks, love nature as it was delivered to us by Gods: benevolent and frightening at the same, harsh and very sweet."

According to its creator, Hercules Conquers Atlantis is the result of a liberal spirit based on the philosophy of comics. This film is the most balanced and elegant, in terms of the writing, peplum I know. It is an extremely beautiful film although one cannot clearly find many surprising elements, typical of the director's earlier "little films". One may wonder if Cottafavi lost some of his inspiration when demystifying the hero fighting injustice and the lost continent. I refuse to believe that we can possibly be so clever any longer. However, perhaps, in this case, the real culprit is the rhythm of the "chronicle"; a genre that does not favour difficult situations.

"Positif", issue no. 50-52, March 1963.

1 Reference to Cottafavi's previous film The Revenge of Hercules (1960)
2 Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961)
3 L'Atlantide (1960), modern remake of Pabst's film (1932) which was also a remake of a Jacques Feyder's film (1921) - all based on Pierre Benoît's exotic novel.

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.