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Citizen Rosi

Panel Discussion:Anotnio Monda (Professor) Gary Crowdus (Editor-Cineaste)Antonio Monda (Prof.)John Turturro (Actor/Director)

presented by Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton University)

Due to the widespread interest in the April 17 event Citizen Rosi, Registration is now closed as it has already reached maximum capacity.Thank you so much for your interest and we hope you will join us for future events.Francesco Rosi’s films occupy a unique place in postwar Italian, indeed postwar world cinema.His seventeen feature films are known for their extraordinarily consistent formal balance and their unflinching look at the historical events and cultural traditions that have shaped the Italian national character. They thus represent a body of work of inordinate importance for both the cultural history of Italy and for a realist theory of cinematic representation.Rosi’s films are best understood as cinematic investigations of the most notorious mysteries haunting the collective unconscious of the Italian Democratic Republic: from the enigmatic murder of the legendary bandit Salvatore Giuliano to the unexplained death in a plane crash of oil tycoon Enrico Mattei, to the paradoxes of a society of crime in the portrait of Mafia boss Lucky Luciano, to the illustrious corpses of political conspiracy in the mid-1970s. He has tackled volatile social and political subjects and power groups: the Neapolitan camorra, the Sicilian mafia and the political body, the enigma of the Mattei affair, the Italian Army and the horrors of war.A Promethean figure of Italian cinema, Rosi has worked outside of the studio system since the late fifties; he has endured the ordeals of filming exclusively on location even when it meant shooting in the scorching heat of the Columbian countryside or in the ragged environment of Giuliano’s homeland, Montelepre, with hundreds of non-professional actors, and, in his last film, under the extreme cold winter of the Ukraine. As many critics have noted, and Rosi himself has observed, it is a cinema di testimonianza civile (of civic witness).Born in Naples in 1922, Rosi was thirty-five years old when he directed his first feature film, La sfida. His encounter with the cinema was almost by chance: in 1948 Luchino Visconti engaged him as an assistant director of La terra trema. During the next ten years Rosi worked on two more films by Visconti, and also assisted Michelangelo Antonioni and Mario Monicelli, among others. His early work showed promise, but it took him a long time to discover a method of inquiry grounded in documents and experimentation. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, the Neapolitan director was forging his new and original cinematic language from Salvatore Giuliano to the great films of the detective inquiry (Il caso Mattei, Lucky Luciano). In Le mani sulla città, Rosi develops a visual and aural rhetoric to denounce civic corruption in the figure of a ruthless property developer and his political allies. What follows is Il momento della verità and Uomini contro, exposing the cruelty of bullfighting and trench warfare. Cadaveri eccellenti attests to Rosi’s profound civic conscience as he investigates politically provocative situations in the form of a murder mystery. With Cristo si è fermato a Eboli Rosi enters a more reflective phase. He tackles old themes in a new light: he subtle use of camera placement and composition as it investigates the distant world of the South in Tre fratelli; the violence of societal codes in Cronaca di una morte annunciata; a re-visitation of the political (personal and collective) unconscious in Diario napoletano and La tregua.Over the years, Rosi has offered us films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His cinema is a cinema of social consciousness that transcends geographical boundaries but also opens our minds to mysteries that have no obvious solution. Rosi’s cinema, subject to the narrative conventions of fiction, is a vehicle for pondering our relationship with the present as well as the past.