"I don't want to teach. I only want to look." - Roberto Rossellini
Of all the films he directed, Roberto Rossellini regarded "Viva l'Italia!" as his favourite, an idiosyncratic epic which stars Renzo Ricci as Giuseppe Garibaldi, the famed revolutionary who liberated southern Italy and played a large part in "il Risorgimento", the political/social movement which saw different "states" within the Italian peninsula coalesce into the single Republic of Italy (see Visconti's "The Leopard").
The film anticipates Rossellini's later biographies, Garibaldi's anti-clericism, distrust of the Papacy (ironic, considering the way history virtually deified him) and Republicanism echoing the heroes of Rossellini's "King Louis", "Pascal" and "Descartes". Unique amongst Rossellini's filmography, though, are the film's battle sequences, which possess the kind of scope you don't typically associate with the director. In this regard, much of "Viva l'Italia!" observes from a distance as Garibaldi's forces struggle to conquer the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, his army of volunteer red shirts landing in Marsala and proceeding to very systematically overthrow King Francis II. Other battles follow, but for the most part Rossellini's camera adopts a detached, cosmic tone, wandering about war-torn landscapes while battalions of men, tiny and ant-like, collide or jostle for position. These sequences are grand and painterly – a moving, roving painting, Rossellini's camera capturing the sheer size of the campaign and the sheer simultaneity of many events – but the film ultimately amounts to an inferior version of Miklos Jancso's "The Red and the White", another epic which finds a curious, disembodied camera eavesdropping on clashing armies. Of course Rossellini's thematic intentions are completely different to Jancso's (while Jancso detests all conflict, Rossellini adores Garibaldi, sees his victory as fated and ends his film triumphantly with an Italian flag), but the aesthetic intentions are nevertheless very similar.
"I am only a man," Garibaldi says throughout the film, but Rossellini is clearly aiming for hagiography. His Garibaldi is a god, a hero, and the film never goes beyond the level of popular myth, a stance which Rossellini explains away by stating that he is "more interested in the artifacts of history" - i.e. Garibaldi's image as it exists today – than "actual history". So remaining unsaid is why Garibaldi's invasion takes place, the socioeconomic reasons for his exhibition, why his staff objected to peasant participation and the political roles of other figures like the count of Cavour (a leading figure in the move to Unification) and Giuseppe Mazzini. The film remains trapped at the level of folk-myth, a problem which Rossellini's later films attempted to rectify.
8/10 – Worth one viewing.
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