ROSI, FRANCESCO

(1922-)

Director and screenwriter. After abandoning law studies at university, undertaken only to please his father, and following various unsuccessful attempts at making a living as an illustrator of children's books and a vaudeville actor, Rosi began his film career in earnest as assistant toLuchino ViscontionLa terra trema(The Earth Trembles, 1948). A year later, when the film had failed dismally at the box office, in part because the authentic Sicilian dialect spoken by the nonprofessional actors was incomprehensible to general Italian audiences, Rosi was given the task of supervising the dubbing of the original film into standard Italian. Having acquitted himself well in the task, he served a further apprenticeship assistingRaffaele Matarazzoon two of the latter's most successful melodramas andLuciano EmmeronDomenica d'agosto(Sunday in August, 1950) andParigi e sempre Parigi(Paris Is Always Paris, before returning to work with Visconti again onBellissima(1951). His reputation as an assistant director now well established, he was called to work withMichelangelo AntonionionI vinti(The Vanquished, 1952) and to completeCamicie rosse(Anita Garibaldi, afterGoffredo Alessandrinihad abandoned the project, while at same time writing the story forLuigi Zampa'sProcesso alla citta(The City Stands Trial, 1952).

After further work as assistant director, screenwriter, and dubber, and having also produced a number of radio plays, he finally directed his first solo feature,La sfida(The Challenge, 1958). The gritty story of a young tough trying to wrest control of the Neapolitan fruit market from an already-established underworld network, the film was awarded the Special Jury Prize at theVenice Festivaland aNastro d'argentofor Best Original Story.While Rosi's next film,I magliari(The Magliari, 1959), the story of a group of Italian immigrant workers in Germany in the immediate postwar period, elicited a less-enthusiastic critical reception,Salvatore Giuliano(1962), a meticulous fictional reconstruction of the death of the famous Sicilian bandit that brought to the surface all the inadequacies of the official version of events, confirmed Rosi as one of the foremost directors of his generation. Stunningly photographed byGianni Di Venanzo, the film received a host of prizes including the Silver Lion at Berlin. What would become Rosi's characteristic tendency to use cinema to analyze the complex interplay between legal and illegal power networks within social processes again came to the fore inLe mani sulla citta(Hands Over the City, 1963), a brilliant close study of rampant real estate speculation in Naples, which again received a host of tributes, including the Golden Lion at Venice.

AfterIl momento della verita(The Moment of Truth, 1965), the portrait of a young man's ill-fated move from the country to the city in search of fame and fortune, set and filmed completely in Spain, and the rather uncharacteristic romantic fable,Cera una volta(More Than a Miracle, 1967), Rosi returned to a cinema of strong social commitment withUomini contro(Many Wars Ago, 1970), a film that deconstructed all the heroic myths regarding Italian participation in World War I. This was followed by another series of major and highly acclaimed films beginning withIl caso Mattei(The Mattei Affair, 1972), another inquest film, this time into the "accidental" death in the early 1960s of Italian entrepreneur Enrico Mattei;Lucky Luciano(1974), a portrait of the Italian American gangster that highlighted the way in which he was as much a tool of greater powers as a crime boss in his own right; andCadaveri eccellenti(Illustrious Corpses, 1976), adapted from a speculative novel by Leonardo Sciascia in which a policeman, investigating what on the surface appears to be the revenge killing of a number of judges, comes to find himself enmeshed in a much more complex web of governmental and political machinations. Rosi's next film, originally made as a four-part television miniseries, was a sensitive and effective adaptation of Carlo Levi's land-mark novel about southern Italy,Cristo si e fermato a Eboli(Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979). This was followed by a perfect blending of the personal and the political inTre fratelli(Three Brothers, 1981), an elegiac but unsentimental examination of Italian society at the beginning of the 1980s that was acclaimed not only in Italy, where it won three Silver Ribbons and fourDavid di Donatello, but also abroad, where it was nominated for an Oscar and received the Boston Society of Film Critics award for Best Foreign Film. Less directly political perhaps than Rosi's previous films but nevertheless an electrifying adaptation of Bizet's opera,Carmen(1984) was again swamped with prizes and awards, winning no less than seven Davids in Italy, a Cesar in France, and a Golden Globe in the United States. Following a fine adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel,Cronaca di una morte annunciata(Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1987), Rosi attempted a return to his more socially committed cinema in the early 1990s withDimenticare Palermo(The Palermo Connection, 1990).

Although coscripted by Gore Vidal, the film was generally judged to be less successful in laying bare licit and illicit power networks than many of his earlier films. In the wake of his disappointment at the reception ofPalermo, he directed only one other major film, a very creditable adaptation of Primo Levi's Holocaust-survivor memoir,La Tregua(The Truce, 1997).