|
| THINGS FALL APART |
 |
1947 |
|
THE WAR WAS OVER. Hitler had blown his brains out
and was burned and had his ashes scattered across the smoking, broken bricks
of Berlin. They'd still be hauling away debris a dozen years hence. The
Italians were happy to be under control of the American Army but abashed to
find they were considered an enemy to be occupied rather than victims who'd
been liberated. They were doing better than the Germans, but it would be a
long time before life was anywhere close to normal. Like so much else, the
Italian film industry was in ruins. Cinecittà studio in Rome had been used
for war storage, then as a refugee camp. Any filmmakers crazy enough to
think they might like to make a film at this particular moment faced
unimaginable obstacles. Yet there's rarely been a shortage of crazy
filmmakers, and a few began hustling together funding, cast and crew (from a
labor pool war-weary but hungry enough to sign on). They shot on location,
sometimes with amateur actors, in a documentary style that became the flavor
of the month. It lasted as long as the extenuating circumstances, and then
when times got better, most of the notable practitioners went on to do other
things; it was a phase in a few extremely varied careers.
Of course, that "phase" became one of the most significant influences in the
history of cinema, a continually-renewing inspiration that has invigorated
filmmakers around the globe ever since. Our series will focus on a cycle of
films by a particular Italian filmmaker, for whom the postwar period was less
a phase than a culmination, an intense incubation for the rest of his career,
and a novitiate in an ascetic discipline he continued to follow, inspiring
many a disciple of his own.
Before we talk more about "neorealism" and Roberto Rossellini, it seems
important to sketch well the background from which his postwar journey
emerged. Moreover, if some way can be found for us to make a personal
connection to this setting, we're better situated to follow the journey.
Bear with me, then, as we begin with a little musing on that most
philosophical topic of rubble.
For, indeed, some of these and other films made immediately after the war
were called "rubble films," just like some of the novels of the period were
known as "rubble literature". The literary profile of rubble was more
prominent on the landscape due to notables like Nobel-Prize winner Heinrich
Böll, whose fiction described the humbled and broken Third Reich as a nation
in post-traumatic stress. Somehow just talking about it, describing the
survivors emerging from the ruins — physical, psychological, ideological
— pointed the way toward a certain kind of hopefulness, a sense of green
shoots groping toward the sun from between shards of blood-stained bricks.
Hitler wanted his official architecture designed with an eye to leaving
magnificent, eternal ruins; he didn't realize they'd so soon leave ruins,
that survivors would so long to wipe every trace off the face of the earth,
and not leave behind that stately Nazi forum for the tourists and the poets.
On the one hand, there's always been something haunting and somehow
comforting about certain kinds of ruins: they stir us to deep thoughts of the
longness of time and the shortness of man, perhaps give rise to a sense of
Presence that watches over all. But of late we are surrounded by ruins, an
endless devastation that seems grist less for romance than despair. The
splintered, muddy remains of tsunamis, hurricanes, natural disaster. The
perpetual ruining of Baghdad, Gaza, and Sudan. The ruins run together in our
heads and leave us with a sense that everything is turned to rubble. The
world is filled with refugees, and these include all of us who feel driven
from psychological and spiritual homes — the security of Western
civilization and its ideals, Christendom, the fragmentation of the Grand
Narratives of Enlightenment Rationalism, the world of universals and wholes.
Of course, nostalgia for wholes is what drives so many in their quest for
purity against one another to create more ruins. The twisted remains of the
World Trade Center looms large already against the horizon of our brand new
century. Broken promises, broken homes, some of us never knew an intact
family, but all of us are still haunted by a lost Golden Age, even just "the
pre-9/11" world. Everything is "post". Postmodern, post-structural,
post-critical, post-Christian, post-Evangelical. Books are titled After
Auschwitz, After Virtue. We can only identify ourselves by what
we've lost, unable to name the era in which we live. Homelessness is a state
of mind: though, no doubt, it's easier to ponder that if you've got a roof
over your head: for so many people, homelessness is so perpetual as to be…
home.
Inside the rubble of a house in Pompeii was found scratched the graffiti:
"Nothing lasts forever."
But somehow, as we've always heard and the rubble films and literature make
clear, life goes on. Succisa virescit — "Cut it down, it grows
up stronger" — is the motto of Montecassino. The monastery south of
Rome was founded by St. Benedict in the 6th century, just after the fall of
the empire. From that place began the great movement wherein the
Benedictines preserved Classical culture and were ultimately able to transmit
it to a new European civilization. The monastery itself was razed by
barbarians fifty years after it was founded. It was rebuilt, sacked and
burned to the ground by the Saracens, rebuilt, reduced to rubble again by an
earthquake. Rebuilt. During World War II, art treasures, including those
recovered from Pompeii, were stored there — and moved out just in time,
as the monastery was shattered into a heap of debris by American bombers.
(Some of these flew out of a temporary airfield built near Vesuvius, where
they were destroyed during the 1944 eruption.) After the war, the abbey was
rebuilt once again. A tail-gunner on one of the bombers that destroyed Monte
Cassino went on to write a famous science fiction novel, A Canticle for
Leibowitz, about the rise and fall of civilizations, the senseless cycle
of wreck and rebuilding, with no end in sight. Succisa virescit. But
it sure is wearying.
The cycle repeats even in Holy Scripture: destruction, exile, reconstruction
— of city walls, the temple. From an individual standpoint, one is
grateful for persistent images of reconstruction from scratch: most of us
have had to do our share of starting over. But considering the literal
destruction in ceaseless repetition — it's almost enough to reduce
one's faith to rubble.
That the original calling of St. Francis was to "Rebuild my church, which is
falling into ruin" is enough to make one believe it was a talking crucifix
which so commissioned him. That Roberto Rossellini instinctively fixed on
this patron saint of Italy after World War II is enough to convince one that
(despite any personal and aesthetic irregularities) Rossellini was on to
something — in fact, he'd grabbed a central thread of the history of
Western Civilization and followed it through a series of films whose
significance and power remain, alas, quite relevant.
ALONG WITH THE TRAGIC FAMILIARITY OF THE SETTING,
the other aspect of these films that makes them so particularly compelling is
the close relationship between their content and their form. We'll have
plenty to discussion about connections, for example, between Francis of
Assisi, his way of seeing and the way of seeing involved in both creating and
appreciating Rossellini's film about the saint. Neorealism makes a special
claim upon reality, an approach that unites fact and fiction, life and
art, and our lives with this art in ways that promise a unique, even
personal, significance.
The style was certainly born less of theory than of necessity, and invented
on the fly. Before the Germans had even been completely chased out of Italy
by the invading Allied Army, Rossellini made a film about Italian Resistance
to the Nazis in Rome. Open City was the film that introduced
neorealism and made famous Rossellini to the world. The fact that any film
could be made under those conditions, the fact that a film made under those
conditions took it to a place no film had ever gone, combined to make the
film a great success internationally and even was said to have influenced the
reception of Italy, a former enemy, back into the community of nations. But
if Open City put Rossellini on the map of world cinema, he immediately
started driving off the edges. In his next film, Paisan, he continued his
practice of shooting on location, with mostly non-professional actors,
improvising scenes as he went along. Open City, despite the newness
of how it was made, was a fairly conventional film in style and structure.
In Paisan, Rossellini began to let go of cinematic conventions as they
got in the way of what he was after.
What he was after was that elusive quality we'll call the "Holy Moment." In
Richard Linklater's film Waking Life, there's a scene where two people
discuss the cinema via the approach of one of the cinema's first and most
significant thinkers, André Bazin. The answer that Bazin gave to the
question he titled his most famous book What is Cinema? is that
cinema is a medium with a unique ability to capture and present the real
world; that cinema should be less about plot and imposing a story or meaning
upon the raw material of the world than in creating space for nature and the
world to communicate its own message, one that transcends all our
manipulation of it. Bazin was a theorist; he became Rossellini's biggest
defender, even after the director kept evolving, refusing to abide by
whatever rules everyone quickly decided made for "neorealism". Rossellini
was intuitive: he wasn't even the most articulate or trustworthy when he
talked about why he did what he did, but his instincts and the soundness of
his vision have inspired generations of artists and audiences who have
acquired, thanks to filmmakers like him, a taste for the Holy Moment and an
interest in and ability to open themselves up to he message of reality.
Of course, "reality" is a problematic notion and there's plenty of people who
think differently and their perspective will make itself felt I'm sure as we
continue to watch and discuss these films. In his own lifetime, Rossellini
was dismissed as a fool, a fraud, incompetent. In his own way, he was, like
Francis, a Holy Fool: he was tuned into frequencies not everybody picked up
on — so they thought he was crazy. He broke the rules, and so called
the rules themselves into question. We'll talk about Rossellini and
neorealism as we go. For now, it may be helpful to think of him as a Holy
Fool who made films in pursuit of Holy Moments. Sometimes his films were
actually about Holy Fools. You may have to become a bit of a Holy Fool
yourself in order to make a connection.
For some, the challenge may be something akin to entering a monastery. For
those used to Hollywood style, slick production values, certain rules of
conventional story structure, acting, and various technical expectations this
series may seem like being asked to sleep on the floor, wake before dawn to
pray, and maybe even care for lepers (some of these prints and transfers are
in abominable condition). That sort of experience has always been known to
provoke some to flee screaming; but for others, it has been the setting which
has made possible a real breakthrough. The coincidence of content and form,
of reality and fiction, the elliptical quality which requires your
participation, all suggest a unique opportunity for simultaneous
breakthroughs: in both your appreciation for films, but also in what can in
this context only be called your spiritual journey. That's what makes these
films so special, and so particularly meaningful in my own experience.
"Neorealism," said Bazin, "is a description of reality conceived as a whole
by a consciousness disposed to see things as a whole… {It's] not so much
concerned with the choice of subject as with a particular way of regarding
things". In making these films, Rossellini disposed his consciousness to see
things as whole; in watching them, our task will be the same. The openness
required to enter into these films is similar to what some might associate
with "regaining the childlike perspective". Again, the appropriateness of
St. Francis in this connection is striking, for the openness of Francis to
the whole of experience is what made him Francis.
The relation between the wholeness of Francis and the fragmentation of the
ruins is further proof that Rossellini was on the right track, but to get
onto that track we have to begin in the rubble.
IN HEINRICH BÖLL'S NOVEL, The Silent Angel,
a returning German soldier finds his hometown in ruins. Böll describes in
detail the wreck of a church: chunks of stone, broken masonry, piled-up
debris, a door blown off its hinges, cracked walls, birds nesting in a nave
whose ceiling is open to the sky. As he steps carefully among the rubble,
the soldier surveys the carnage of broken statues of saints: headless,
legless, cracked, mutilated, one with belly ripped open and bits of plaster
trickling down like blood. The altar is buried in debris and the choir
stalls toppled. After cleaning off a bench, he sits down and thinks about
the last time he'd been in a church, during the war:
… it seemed an eternity ago, although hardly a month had passed… He tried to
pray, but as he did, he was startled: he heard singing, beneath him. It was
coming out of the earth. His shudder quickly passed as he remembered the
crypt that was no doubt still undamaged, and he listened to the singing. The
voices sounded delicate, filtered, angelic, they seemed few in number. They
were singing a capella, and as he recognized the text of the song, and the
melody as well, he remembered that it was May, still May — the month the
war had ended…
Rossellini's centennial year of 2006 is also the 800th anniversary of the
founding of Dresden, Germany. Dresden was the most beautiful city in
Germany, and one of the most beautiful in all of Europe. The town was
utterly destroyed by fire from the sky — like Pompeii — in a
massive Allied air raid near the end of the war. Just in time for the
anniversary celebration, reconstruction of the city's most famous church, the
Frauenkirche cathedral was completed — from the original plans, with
as many of the original stones as had been salvaged from the ruins. The
rebuilt Dresden synagogue, burnt to the ground during the Nazi Kristallnacht,
was opened in 2001. "So it goes," to quote Kurt Vonnegut, a survivor of the
original firebombing as an Allied prisoner of war — though Vonneguts'
trademark use of that phrase is in connection with violence and ruin, not the
reverse. But one certainly seems to follow the other in perpetuity through
human history, as dependably as Good Friday leads to Easter… and leads back
in turn to Good Friday.
Even still, Christians call it "good" Friday — a fearful mystery
indeed, worth pondering. Germany: Year Zero is a Tenebre
service. Latin for "shadows," Tenebre is a Good Friday observance,
where believers gather soberly to remember their Savior's Passion and death.
During the service, candles are gradually extinguished and at the end, the
congregants depart in darkness and silence. The story is left unfinished
because the happy ending hasn't yet come: it is the dark night before the
dawn. Art films are sometimes accused of being depressing, and sometimes
that simply means they defy people's expectations for closure and vicarious
triumph. This one is bleak on most of these accounts, though, I would argue,
offers a certain hope in its examination of hard questions, its refusal to
demonize the Germans, and its failure to impose any sort of moralistic
resolution in the face the Unspeakable. In that way, it renews one's faith
in humanity and the future in a way that escapist films with their false
promises never really can do.
After making Open City and Paisan in Italy, Roberto Rossellini
went to shattered Berlin in 1946 to make this third part of his postwar
trilogy. Just prior to Rossellini's arrival, facing their first winter after
the war, the defeated German populace huddled amid the ruins and a terrible
coal shortage. Douglas Botting, in his The Ruins of the Reich: Germany
1945-1949 relates that
"There could be no more crushing demonstration of Germany's' abject condition
after VE-Day than this. It was, as the Germans themselves called it, die
Stunde Null, hour zero: the moment of hiatus when the people of a nation
that had ceased to exist touched rock-bottom, when the hands of the stopwatch
were rest to zero and began to tick toward an unthinkable future… Germany
was a surrealist tableau of disasters, a land of ruins peopled by ghosts,
without government, order or purpose, without industry, communications or the
proper means of existence. It was a nation that had forfeited its
nationhood, and had sunk to a level unknown in the western world for a
hundred years."
In another time, following another sort of devastation, after a confluence of
failures and disappointments, a young man named Francis Bernardone reached
the lowest depths of his own life: his own "Year Zero". He escaped to a cave
outside town to think things over, face himself and God alone. "It was his
blackest moment," says Chesterton in his biography of the saint, "the whole
world had turned over; the whole world was on top of him."
"It was by this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from the dark
nothingness of his own deserts, that he did come to enjoy even earthly things
as few people have enjoyed them. … So arises out of this… abyss the noble
thing that is called Praise, which no one will ever understand while he
identifies it with nature-worship or pantheistic optimism… The mystic who
passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense
behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else…
In a fashion, he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of Job; in
some is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the morning
stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy."
Year Zero, the point at which it can't possibly get any worse. If you're
going to lay a new foundation, this seem like the place to dig. I invite you
to find a personal connection with these survivors in their ruin, and follow
the postwar journey of Roberto Rossellini from the beginning.
|
| |
