Roberto Rossellini

The camera that went outside

Neorealism has a founding image, and Rossellini shot it: a priest and a Communist tortured in the same building the Nazis had not yet left, in a Rome so freshly liberated that the rubble in the frame is not a set. Rome, Open City (1945) is usually filed as the movement's first masterpiece, but the deeper claim is procedural. Rossellini treated the camera as a recording instrument aimed at the actual world rather than a brush for composing an imagined one — non-professionals, real streets, available light — and in doing so handed the next forty years of art cinema its permission slip. François Truffaut called him, in a 1963 essay, the father of the French New Wave. That is not flattery; it is lineage.

Rome to Rome

He was born in Rome on 8 May 1906 and died there on 3 June 1977, of a heart attack at seventy-one — the whole life bracketed by one city. His father built Rome's first modern cinema, the Corso, which opened in 1918 and gave the boy unlimited free access to the screen. He entered the industry through its technical trades before directing a Fascist-era trilogy for the wartime state — The White Ship (1941), A Pilot Returns (1942), The Man with a Cross (1943) — the compromised apprenticeship out of which the anti-Fascist work erupted. After Rome, Open City, co-written with the young Federico Fellini, came Paisà (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948): the War Trilogy, three films that measured a shattered Europe with almost documentary coldness.

Then the second act, which nearly cost him the first. In 1948 Ingrid Bergman wrote offering to work with him; Stromboli (1950) followed, and so did a pregnancy, a Mexican marriage, and an international scandal that briefly made him unemployable in Hollywood terms. The Bergman films — Europe '51 (1952), Journey to Italy (1954), Fear (1954) — were dismissed on release and later canonised by Cahiers du Cinéma as the birth of modern cinema. His third act retreated into television and the long, austere history films, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966) among them; unlike most directors, he grew stranger with age, not safer.

What the numbers say

Our library holds 16 Rossellini films and ranks him #47 among all directors at a composite 13.50 — five slots ahead of his neorealist confrere Vittorio De Sica at #52. Rome, Open City leads at #180 (2.82), cited by 7 of our sources, the founding film also the durable one. But the internal order argues with the textbooks. Second is Paisà at #318 (2.17) — drawing the same 7 citations as Rome, Open City yet trailing on thinner intensity of regard — and third is not Germany, Year Zero but Il generale della Rovere (1959) at #423 (1.91), his commercial comeback. Most striking: Journey to Italy, the film Godard's generation treated as scripture, sits at #446 (1.82), and Stromboli — the scandal picture — collapses to #4188 (0.27). The aggregate honours the war reporter over the metaphysician; the Cahiers revaluation, it turns out, never fully propagated into the wider consensus our sources sample.

Where to start

Rome, Open City for the shock of the real, then Germany, Year Zero for how far he would push it into a child's ruined face. Save Journey to Italy for last — the quietest and, to my eye, the most influential thing he made, whatever our ranking says. Martin Scorsese titled a documentary after it for a reason.