Rome, Open City was shot on black-market film just months after liberation
Roberto Rossellini began his career making films for Mussolini's navy, then made Rome, Open City with borrowed money and black-market stock as soon as the Nazis left. It turned him into the leading voice of Italian neorealism, and Truffaut later hailed him as the father of the French New Wave.
Rossellini was born in Rome in 1906. His father, who ran a construction firm, built the Corso, the city's first modern cinema, which opened in 1918 and gave young Roberto a free pass for life. After his father's death he learned filmmaking from the bottom, taking on every supporting job from sound effects upward. His first features, beginning with The White Ship in 1941, were sponsored by the navy's propaganda office and are sometimes grouped as a Fascist trilogy; his friendship with Vittorio Mussolini may have helped him get early work.
When the regime fell and Rome was liberated in June 1944, he started preparing an anti-fascist drama with Federico Fellini helping on the script and Aldo Fabrizi as a priest. Shooting began in January 1945, funded mostly by loans. Rome, Open City was an instant hit, followed by Paisà, cast with non-professionals, and Germany, Year Zero, shot in Berlin's French sector. He preferred untrained performers partly because he disliked fighting with actors, and he reshaped scripts around their own lives, dialects and clothes.
In 1948 Ingrid Bergman wrote offering to act for him, joking that her Italian stretched only to the words for I love you. Their affair on Stromboli, while both were married to others, caused a scandal that deepened when she became pregnant; they married in Mexico in 1950 and had a son and twin daughters, one of them Isabella Rossellini. Their films together mostly flopped at the box office, though Journey to Italy has admirers. A 1957 invitation from Jawaharlal Nehru to film in India ended when Rossellini's affair with the screenwriter Sonali Dasgupta forced Nehru to ask him to go.
From 1966 he worked mainly in television, beginning with a film on Louis XIV's seizure of power, and he later taught a course at Yale called The Essential Image. A heart attack killed him in 1977, aged 71. Martin Scorsese gave his films a central place in the documentary My Voyage to Italy.
Source: Roberto Rossellini
