Rosi's films still relevant in Italy

After all, the Italian government fell last month following a corruption scandal in the southern Campania region, just as its capital city, Rosi’s native Naples, was submerged in smelly uncollected garbage, and the governor in Sicily resigned after being found guilty in a Mafia case.

“In Italy, one of the greatest problems has always been having an underdeveloped South and an overdeveloped North,” Rosi, 85, told Variety.

Italy’s so-called “Southern Quagmire” forms the core of Rosi’s intensely passionate, politically charged filmography: works such as 1962 Berlin Silver Bear winner “Salvatore Giuliano,” which rigorously reconstructs the perverse criminal power play ruling postwar Sicily; “Hands Over the City,” which takes on rapacious real-estate developers and their political cronies in Naples; and “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” in which the gradual passing of peasant culture in a tiny Campania village becomes emblematic of the condition of the South.

“When I addressed the Southern ills, I tried to analyze them not just in terms of what was happening when I made the film, but also to cover what came before and also what would continue to go wrong if

something wasn’t done about it,” Rosi explained.

Rosi began his 50-year career as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on “La Terra Trema,” the neorealist classic about exploited Sicilian fishermen, an experience Rosi described as “a complete apprenticeship.”

“The lesson of neorealism was to use real people and to get their immediacy and natural feel on film,” he said.

But Rosi also cites American helmers with a social conscience of that day, especially Elia Kazan and John Huston, as influences on his

early works which, following his 1958 debut “La Sfida” (The

Challenge), about a Neapolitan hood who challenges the local crime syndicate’s grip over the city’s vegetable market, evolved towards “a type of critical realism,” as he puts it, which introduced a new form

of investigative cinema.

Four years later, with “Salvatore Giuliano,” a portrait of a Sicilian bandit in which the protag is hardly seen while the complex causes of his death are meticulously probed, Rosi broke new ground with a work

still very relevant, and not just to the present state of Italy.

“The ambushes and assassinations in ‘Salvatore Giuliano’ contain the seeds of terror we have been witnessing in the new millennium, from Pakistan to the Middle East, from Algeria to Northern Ireland,” said

film author and former Variety international editor Peter Cowie, who will pay tribute to Rosi today Rosi fondly remembers that Huston asked to meet him after seeing “Salvatore Giuliano.”

“For a young director like me to generate interest from John Huston was really like getting a magna cum laude degree from the world’s

best film school,” he said.

Having made a splash, Rosi had a very prolific period during the 1970s when in rapid succession he shot “The Mattei Affair,” which won the 1972 Cannes Palme d’Or, and “Lucky Luciano,” and then “Illustrious Corpses,” all in the investigative style that had become his trademark.

“I define my movies as being investigative movies,” said Rosi. “I have tried to know and understand Italy; to describe it in its real aspects, but also to shed light on the evil intrigues between its

state institutions and criminal powers.”

“With their explosive power, Rosi’s films are still persuasive today,” said Berlinale topper Dieter Kosslick, who called them

“classics of politically engaged cinema.”

But there is also a more lyrical, intimate, emotional side to Rosi’s filmmaking, exemplified by “Three Brothers,” which in 1981 portrayed three estranged brothers who return to their southern village after their mother’s death. And also by his most recent feature, “The

Truce,” shot in 1997, based on the memoir of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and starring John Turturro.

Rosi described “The Truce” as being about “the return to life.

“Moments of joy, of love, of peace; even comic moments. It’s about finding the pleasure of being back in the world.”

“I think film is the most powerful medium for communication, for knowledge, and to ask questions about the perplexities we have in regards to many events in our lives,” he said.