Word: rossellini
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...THINGS are there," Rossellini has said. "Why manipulate them?" To this end he has restrained his camera, withholding it at the limits of impartiality. His mise en scene is open and anti-compositional. Improvisational. Accidental. Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as events of everyday life. He is the antithesis of baroque, while the famous royal style of Louis XIV is baroque itself. Baroque elevated to the level of classicism. Dramaturgy, glorifying in each new detail it brings under its sway...
Here is a comedy, pretending not to be. The war of oil against water. It is as if Rossellini scoured history to find an aesthetic most antithetical to his own, and once he had found it he let it run amuck. For this reason, Louis differs from almost every other hero of rise and/or fall narratives in that he is totally devoid of development. The same logic that complains his refusal of Mazarin's legacy in reel one, explains his disdain for forks in reel three. Money, forks, meats, music, for Louis it is a question of quantity...
...Rossellini in the shadows, Alice-in-Wonderland aghast with mock horror. He follows Louis's lead, loosening his camera to the dervishes of baroque pageantry, treating his subject with an iconic, reverential frontality. Only at the very end does he reassert himself. We see Louis at last in private. Suddenly the film is thrown back on the chaos of its own beginning. We see the spectre of Louis's future in the dying Mazarin. We see that even the Machiavellian Louis cannot escape the clutches of his own deceit. That his philosophy is made feasible only by what it ignores...
...minute when the "All in Red" theme of one of Porto Rotonda's costume parties was announced. He draped himself in red sarong, Belafonte shirt and red beads. Also spied at the fashionable new playground were those now-quite-grown twin daughters of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, 18-year-old Isabella and Isotta...
There are also some film programs sponsored by Harvard. Ivy Films, at Carpenter Center, will show movies by directors like Chaplin, yon Stroheim, and Rossellini at 7 and 9 p. m. on Thursdays during the Summer term. Film Studies is doing a series on great American directors, also at Carpenter Center, at 7 p. m. on Sundays. And there will be a series of classic films shown at Emerson 105 at 7 p. m. on Fridays...