'Roberto Rossellini is perhaps the greatest unknown director who ever lived. Andrew Sarris has stated flatly that Rossellini "must be accorded the top position in the Italian cinema." Vincent Canby has claimed that "when the history of cinema's first hundred years is recollected in tranquillity—say in about 150 years—Rossellini's films will be seen as among the seminal works of what, for lack of any more definite term, can be called the New Movie." But as Robin Wood has rightly pointed out, though Rossellini "belongs, with Eisenstein, Murnau, Welles, Godard, among the key figures of film history," curiously "with no other director is there such a discrepancy between the estimate of his achievement by a handful of experts and the apathy or scorn of non-specialist critics and the public at large."
Certainly, the sheer variety of Rossellini's achievement is astounding. Such films as Open City and Paisan make him a central, founding figure of neorealism, the startling return to reality in postwar Italian filmmaking that has drastically influenced all subsequent cinema practice. In his imaginative, purposeful use of what might be called "antinarrative" devices such as dead time and dedramatization, he is also an obvious forerunner of Antonioni and other filmmakers who began to be noticed in the early sixties. Unfortunately for Rossellini, the intellectual world was unable to accept these techniques in 1950. Thus, while many have thought Antonioni demanding, he has always been considered "artistic"; Rossellini was simply thought to be amateurish and incapable of making a competent film. His grand television project—to provide information to a mass audience about its collective history—was a courageous feat that, if theoretically inconsistent, will never be equaled in scope and audacity. Despite these formidable accomplishments, however, Rossellini is primarily known to the average educated filmgoer over forty as the man who seduced Ingrid Bergman. To those under forty, he seems hardly to be known at all.'
'This study in no way purports to be a biography. I have included biographical information where I thought it illuminated Rossellini's films or his thinking, but I have sought primarily to develop critical readings of the films themselves. I should say right away, however, that I have no desire to provide untainted, original, formalist readings that pretend to spring from an unmediated encounter between text and critic. It just does not work like that, and along the way I try to show why. The readings I offer seek to explore Rossellini's films rather than provide organic, unified interpretations of them. To my mind, traditional criticism all too often achieves consistency by repressing textual evidence that does not fit preformed interpretive paradigms. I want to open up these texts in order to hear their multiple voices, and thus I apply poststructuralist techniques when they seem to "work," when they seem to "illuminate" the specific characteristics of a film. I can provide no final justification for such terms, of course; it is simply where I must construct my imaginary ground, posit my assumptions, in order to proceed. I sometimes also use what has come to be known as deconstruction to approach Rossellini's inveterate humanism and his accompanying need to essentialize. What he wanted, finally, was a formless content, an essential image, and it is this ancient urge, as we shall see, that can be more easily understood from a deconstructive point of view.'
