Rossellini’s reputation has ebbed and flowed more perhaps than that of any other leading director. In part this has been because of the nexus between politics and film criticism in Italy, in part because of changes in fashion and taste, in part because of the personal scandals which have punctuated Rossellini’s career. Nevertheless, looked back on now, from the near peak of his achievement, The Seizure of Power by Louis XIV, his work shows a remarkable consistency, thematically and stylistically. He has persevered on his own path; sporadically this has criss-crossed with the stampede of popular and critical taste.
Rossellini’s themes are fundamentally Italian, indeed Southern Italian. The humus from which his themes spring is that of traditional Catholic (superstitious and semi-pagan) Southern Italy about to be sucked into the vortex of Northern Europe, with its entirely different kind of civilization, cultural and social. Thus we find at the centre of his work the antagonistic couplets North v. South, cynicism v. innocence, positivism v. spirituality, etc. His Bergman cycle, for instance, is dominated by the theme of the Northern woman coming south and undergoing a spiritual crisis, from which she emerges with a kind of religious faith. It would be misleading to call this faith Catholic: in many ways, with its emphasis on acceptance, it is Oriental (Buddhist or Hindu) and, of course, this becomes explicitly apparent in his film India. In terms of Christianity, Rossellini’s vision of sainthood is close to the Dostoyevskian holy fool, to Simone Weil (whose influence Rossellini acknowledges) or to a kind of legendary Franciscanism, alluded to in several films, including of course his version of The Little Flowers.