The Cinema of Francesco Rosi

Francesco Rosi is one of the great realist artists of post-war Italian, indeed post-war world cinema. In this book, author Gaetana Marrone explores the rich visual language in which the Neapolitan filmmaker expresses the cultural icons that constitute his style and images. Over the years, Rosi has offered us films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His films show an extraordinarily consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national self. They rely on a labyrinthine narrative structure, in which the sense of an enigma replaces the unidirectional path leading ineluctably to a designated end and solution. Rosi's logical investigations are conducted by an omniscient eye and translated into a cinematic approach that embraces the details of material reality with the panoramic perspective of a dispassionate observer. This book offers intertextual analyses within such fields as history, politics, literature, and photography, along with production information gleaned from Rosi's personal archives and interviews. It examines Rosi's creative use of film as document, and as spectacle). It is also a study of the specific cinematic techniques that characterize Rosi's work and that visually, compositionally, express his vision of history and the elusive "truth" of past and present social and political realities.

Gaetana Marrone is Professor of Italian at Princeton University. Her books include New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema, The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, and Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies. Marrone has also produced award winning films.

Preface Acknowledgments List of Photographic Reproductions Introduction PART ONE. FRAGMENTS OF HISTORY: POWER, POLITICS, REPRESENTATION 1. Early Years, Early Films 2. Labyrinth as Figures: Logical Investigations and the Open Work 3. Disorder and Chaos: Framing the City, Framing the Everyday 4. Operatic Microhistory PART TWO. FABLES OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: IMAGE, MEMORY, IMAGINATION 5. Voices from the South 6. The Hazards of History 7. City of Memory: A Conclusion Notes Filmography Bibliography Index