Francesco Rosi is one of the few indispensable filmmakers of our time. From complex political dazzlers like Salvatore Giuliano (1962) and Hands Over the City (1963) to poetic inquiries into Country vs. City like Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) and Three Brothers (1980), he's confronted the contradictions of modern life head-on, with robust style and passionate conviction. Along the way, he's made the essential movie about bullfighting, The Moment of Truth (1965), and arguably the supreme opera film, Bizet's Carmen (1984). Movie directors so often get frozen into their early specialties that for a man like Rosi to expand his talent and be able to articulate his evolution is, to borrow one of his movie titles, more than a miracle. (That 1967 film exemplifies his versatility: It's a luxurious, magically droll fairy tale, aptly called Cinderella -- Italian Style in Britain, with the romantic team of Omar Sharif as a medieval prince and Sophia Loren as a peasant woman.)
Although the propulsive immediacy of Rosi's cinematic broadsides startled filmmakers worldwide and made his '60s work a beacon for political auteurs in Europe, he's not even as well-known in America as his mentor, Luchino Visconti, who started him out as an assistant on the neorealist epic La Terra Trema (1948). Perhaps that's because subjects like those of Salvatore Giuliano (a bandit who fell in and out of league with Sicilian separatists and Mafiosi) and Hands Over the City (corrupt city development in Naples) are superficially "local" while his treatment of them is cosmopolitan and multifaceted. In Salvatore Giuliano, the title character is seen either as a distant guerrilla leader in a dashing white raincoat, or a corpse; the chapters of his career emerge in jagged flashbacks between the identification of his bullet-marked body and the trial of his henchmen. Hands Over the City, an expose of the circumstances behind a building collapse, seems to encompass every sleazy financial and election deal and moral compromise that can undermine a capitalist democracy.
When these films and Lucky Luciano (1974) play as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival's tribute to Rosi, highlighted by his acceptance of the Akira Kurosawa Award on Friday, May 2, audiences may be taken aback by their up-to-the-minute impact. The '90s have only deepened the resonance of Rosi's examinations of what Norman Mailer called "the paradoxes of a society of crime" in Lucky Luciano; of bipartisan "consensus" at all costs in Hands Over the City; of the partnership of Mafia, bandits, and police in Salvatore Giuliano. The prints that Cinecitta International has struck for the touring tribute to Rosi will make even die-hard Rosi fans feel as if these literal blasts from the past, filled with cataclysms and explosions, are also blasts of pure aesthetic oxygen.
During his 1982 visit to L.A. to promote Three Brothers, I interviewed Rosi in person and found his English muscular and vivid. But he recently said he was intimidated by the prospect of doing a phone interview in English before his San Francisco appearance. The solution was simple: I faxed him 10 questions; he wrote out the answers and had an associate, Silvia Bizio, the West Coast correspondent for La Repubblica, translate them. He writes the way he talks, and the way he makes movies: precisely, and with force.
Sragow: The first Kurosawa Award was given to Kurosawa himself. On the night of the ceremony the festival showed his 1960 film The Bad Sleep Well, which, like your own Hands Over the City, is about corrupt government housing. Have you ever seen it?
Rosi: I am sorry, but I have never seen this movie of the great Kurosawa. Unfortunately, many of his movies have never been distributed in Italy. I wouldn't see clear connections between his work and mine, at least judging from the works of his that I know, were it not for a common epic emphasis in certain movies. The multiple points of view of Rashomon create an "obscurity" that relates to the soul while the "obscurity" of Salvatore Giuliano or The Mattei Affair relates to facts. But I do believe that great movies like Rashomon establish a communication, if probably only unconscious, among filmmakers.
Sragow: Reportedly, you feel like a brother to the American director Elia Kazan. Did his On the Waterfront move you to cast Rod Steiger in Hands Over the City and Lucky Luciano? How did you communicate with Steiger? (Did the Method get in the way?) And is Kazan as controversial in Italy as in the United States?
Rosi: To be precise, it was Kazan who said he regarded me as a younger brother. This was for me a cause for pleasure, since I've always admired his work. My choice of Rod Steiger for Hands Over the City was determined by the impression he made interpreting his roles in Kazan's On the Waterfront and Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife. With Steiger and me, there was always great understanding based on reciprocal esteem. And we became friends. He adapted with flexibility and intelligence to acting with the partners I'd chosen for him, among people who had never acted before, even in the leading roles. Carlo Fermariello, his antagonist in the film [Hands Over the City], was a city councilor, and secretary of the Chamber of Commerce in Naples. I communicated with Rod in my body English, in Italian, in Neapolitan, with gestures and with silence beyond any acting "method." Kazan's work continues to be admired in Europe.
foam order.com
