Somehow the feelings of critics from that time linger in the mainstream. Rossellini is remembered in the US as the father of one other thing only: neo-realism. And even for that, the man who jump-started postwar cinema with Open City in 1945—and directed thirty films in thirty years after it—now unaccountably stands in the shadow of Vittorio De Sica and his 1948 favorite Bicycle Thieves. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, an 800-page critical biography of the director by Tag Gallagher, who also wrote what is likely to remain the definitive book on John Ford, should easily correct this situation if everyone who cares about the real history of movies reads it.

Gallagher paints a vivid picture of Rossellini's life and career by going through it film-by-film. He deftly negotiates the issues in film culture and postwar European thought that surround Rossellini's work, too. Firmly situating the films aesthetically and philosophically, Gallagher grapples with 20th century Italian history to show Rossellini's responses to a world in rubble that had to be re-imagined from the ground up. Rossellini started doing just that with Open City, a film about desperate lives in Nazi-occupied Rome during the last days of World War II. That film's now seen as the first in the style that came to be called neo-realism, a term still used as shorthand for any movie about working class poverty shot with a minimum of lighting or production value. Whether he's explaining the literary critic and historicist Benedetto Croce's influence on Rossellini, removing the accumulated fallacies encrusted over "neo-realism," relating the time Open City's star Anna Magnani dumped a bowl of soup on Rossellini's head in a hotel dining room after he got a telegram from Ingrid Bergman, or describing how Rossellini shot history movies like La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, Gallagher makes the experience of reading about Rossellini's life as compelling as the life itself.

Well and good; nobody wants to read droning academicism posing as film criticism anymore. The real achievement of this book, however, is that Gallagher manages to get across what it feels like to watch a Rossellini film, and to remind readers how seeing certain movies can wake you up to reality; not an easy thing to do considering how hard it is to describe Voyage in Italy in a way that makes sense to people. This has the effect of getting film criticism once again out into a world where films are actually made. The experience is like Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero. You're pitched into a world that's exhilarating and bleak.

Rossellini does that not by making films in some primitive or naïve way, but by not caring how other people's films are made. His films appear basic and loose, but can there be any film more concentrated or riveting than the first half of the two-part L'amore, where Anna Magnani sits on her bed and breaks down on the phone, only a dog sharing the screen with her? You imagine the kind of camera tricks that would be trotted out to fill that up today, and you realize what it's all come to. Once filmmakers can't think through a situation like that anymore, the door is open for any kind of piled-on effect. How can any filmmaker be expected to not fall victim to numb technologies and dopey computer-generated "imagery"? That's not the breach Rivette was writing about. No wonder there's been a reactionary return to an imagined neo-realism, but one where the filmmakers in their desperation now feel compelled to issue manifestoes about how they're not going to buy props anymore. Dogma, indeed. Rossellini was too busy working to issue any manifestoes, didn't care too much if critics thought he was blowing it, and ended up too curious about humanity to be contained by normal features, anyway.

There are surprising things in The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. I found out Gallagher lives near me, so I got his number and interviewed him.

HERMENAUT: What do you think the legacy of neo-realism is? Since much contemporary cinema is location-based and shot using complicated variations on the hand-held camera, there's a neo-realist gloss on a lot of things.

GALLAGHER: I can't answer that the way you're putting it because I don't believe that neo-realism exists other than as a notion invented after the fact by critics, which then became a prize in Cold War politics. Communists and British Labor people said neo-realism was street realism, exposing the plight of the lower classes and the structures of oppression; Catholic critics and French phenomenologists had completely different definitions; even the filmmakers themselves disagree radically about what "neo-realism" was supposed to be and whether it's a matter of content or style or of something else entirely.

If you go back before 1948, three years after Rossellini made Open City, the word "neo-realism" still isn't being applied to the new Italian cinema, and all the classic later so-called neo-realist films have already been made; there is no style or content common to these films by Rossellini, De Sica, or Visconti.

If neo-realism means shooting on location, with real people and their real problems, then this was done throughout the '00s, the '10s, the '20s, and most of the '30s. Rossellini was not inventing something new.

I don't like using words that are both devoid of meaning and misleading. We have to begin by cleaning the slate of everything and anything we thought we knew about "neo-realism." And, if we're lucky, of all notions of "realism." If I want reality, I don't have to buy a ticket for it. I try to show that Rossellini descends from filmmakers like Murnau, King Vidor, and Jean Renoir—people who looked at "real" situations but who were painters, actor/character-centered, and into rich photography.

Any statement you can find about "neo-realism" is false: that they didn't use actors, didn't use sets, didn't have scripts, were less arty in style, had finally told the truth about Fascism. Gibberish.

Why is this the case? Because we live in a world more interested in theory than experience. You can introduce the same movie to two different audiences and tell one audience it's a comedy, the other it's a tragedy. Watch what happens.

It's not a question of having your own "ideas" about a movie, but your own experience, and faith in that experience. This is one of Rossellini's favorite rants in interviews; it's valid for watching any movie, reading any book, meeting any friend. It doesn't mean anything if one uses the term "neo-realism"; it's just hollow intellectual hucksterism. We have to make an effort to say what we mean.

In the end, all terms like that are pretty useless. There is really no such thing as "genre" or even "narrative convention," the idea o "invisible editing" is specious, ultimately there's not even such a thing as a closeup, only a John Ford closeup or a Mizoguchi one, and therefore there really is no such thing as cinema, only cinema as made by people, by specific people.

In Rossellini's case I think "neo-realism" means "new reality": His movies are an adventurous quest for a new reality. The postwar period in Europe (and Rossellini all his life) was concerned with building a better society, a "new reality." A new "realism," on the other hand, is what all art must aspire to; if it really is art, it will embody a unique way of looking at life.

Humanity could make a giant leap forward, at least in the field of cinema, if we would get rid of these notions of "realism" as desirable. Cinema is good or bad pretty much in relation to how much it's stylized—to how much real things are transformed and made personal or expressive. Look again at the last episode of Paisan—certainly "The Po Delta" is one of the most "powerful" pieces of cinema—and how it is photographed. This may be the last word in "realism" but it has nothing to do with physical realities or the way things actually look.

Today, when the films Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman are shown, they still cause as much confusion as when they came out. How do you think people should approach them?

With humility and openness. What got in the way of critics and audiences then are the same obstacles as today. People want one kind of film and when they get another kind instead, they tend to dismiss it as flunking the guidelines. Originality usually looks impoverished at first glance. I have no idea why so many intelligent people have watched Voyage in Italy and declared that there is no acting and that nothing is happening, whereas for me there are earthquakes and sea changes every few seconds. I conclude they're not paying attention; something else, some other movie, is getting in the way.

In the history films that occupied the last period of his career, what was Rossellini trying to do? In the book, you write that the films are at odds with his stated goals in making them, and often transcend those goals without accomplishing them. Do you think the main problem facing the viewer is the subtitles, which in your book you pinpoint as something that takes away from emotional involvement in the films and turns watching them into a literary experience, or is it something else?

The subtitles are not a problem in the four-hour Age of the Medici or the five-hour Acts of the Apostles, because they're in English. The problem then is that they're dubbed, the dubbers are often poor, and the lack of ambient sound makes it harder to get into the full fantasy of their story worlds. Thus people conclude that they don't have story worlds; that, at best, they are somehow "above" all that, and that therefore they're "Brechtian."

There are other problems with "production values" as well, and with the relative casualness with which the scripts were assembled. All of this reflects Rossellini's self-indulgence at times, his tiny budgets, but also his insecurities about himself as an artist. Some days he didn't feel like shooting, so the results are boring—the movies are uneven. Which isn't a problem once you accept it. Good books can have dull sections. But the movies do not meet the standards of PBS, and they annoy audiences for that reason. For example, they never give dates, or bother telling you who the people are or why what they're doing should concern you. Rossellini would say he wanted to give you experience rather theory, that he doesn't want to chew your spaghetti for you. Of course, he is chewing it: He has an ornate aesthetic style, extremely rich. But he's doing different things. And not the things most viewers, like PBS's, feel they have a right to expect. In one sense, you can learn more about Pascal from a brief entry in a desktop encyclopedia than from the two hours of Rossellini's movie on him—which tells you none of the things the encyclopedia prioritizes.

And instead tells or shows you what?

For the two-cent answer: the vibes, a sense of what it was like to be a human being in those times, for those people. Rossellini's idea in the history movies, so he said, was to use TV to educate the masses; but perhaps his real goal was to make come alive the things he was reading.

You note in your book the tremendous influence the Hegelian philosopher, literary critic, and historian Benedetto Croce had not only on Rossellini's character and his thinking, but over all of Italy's. How would you characterize that influence?

Maybe I was wrong to call him Hegelian. Croce was an historicist, which was a rich vein before being co-opted by postmodernism. Americans tend to think of reality as physical; Italians think of reality as the social world in which we live, which is a reality made by humans, and thus one that can be changed. This is one of the deceptions of the term "neo-realism," and a good example of how theory will always destroy you. We think of realism as a technique for photographing a rock or a tree; Italians think of it as an almost novelistic way of describing society or personal experience. Croce's mantra was that we have to free ourselves of our tendency to accept society's definitions. If we don't like the world we live in, we can change it.

Historicism is the idea that reality changes, and human nature isn't a fixed thing. Croce was anti-essentialist, but also anti-existentialist. He believed in the I-thou as a real dialectic. He wouldn't have said I-thou but he would have ranked knowing—"intuiting"—a person above knowing a thing, as superior knowing. Postmodernism questions the possibility of knowledge and doubtless finds Fellini more appealing than Rossellini because Rossellini never has such problems. He's marked by direct intuition, just as Croce says, without self-doubts or doubts of the process.

Croce divided things into art and science. Science is, say, organizing documents. Art is intuition. History is an art, not a science, for Croce. Later he modified his view, but it's the original insight that's striking. Philosophy is a branch of history: Its job is, for example, to determine what Socrates (who Rossellini also made a film about) meant by "wise." Because ideas only really have their pristine sense; afterward they become platitudes, conventions, prosaic.

Croce is so out of favor that he's forgotten, and it's curious, because he's what appeals to people in postmodernism, but much deeper.

Just as Rossellini was Catholic from the cradle, so too he had his father's Liberalism and what I call Crocean attitudes—being against theory; seeing reality as something that humans have created

and can change; taking an historicist approach to studying humans. On

one hand, this was a typically Italian combination of ideas, even if

they in fact contradicted each other (faith plus God-is-dead: which

makes life fun), and later were contradicted by elements in Italian

life like Fascism, the Resistance, the Communist Party, and the

Christian Democrats. Rossellini always made alliances but stayed

outside the Parties as much as possible. That meant he could never

count on Party backing, which was normally essential for success in

Italy, so he was always being buffeted by contrary currents. In

someone as stubborn as he, this reinforced his temperament.

Early in his film career, Federico Fellini was a close associate of Rossellini. You write that Fellini represents the "exasperation" of Rossellini. What do you mean by that? How do you account for the perennial popularity of Fellini vs. the relative obscurity of Rossellini?

Maybe I meant that with Rossellini one has the feeling of a person, an eye, intensely curious about whatever's going on. Usually what we actually mean when we say "realism" is that we're aware of the presence of the filmmaker. Not surprisingly, the more we're aware of the perceiving subject, the more we're aware of the perceived object. But inevitably the subject turns inward, the dialectic I-thou becomes I-me, and that's what you have with Fellini. Critics were accusing Rossellini of similar "involution" during his Bergman movies, which were light-years less narcissistic than 8 1/2. Rossellini would reply that it's always difficult to get outside yourself, or outside the world others have made for us, but that one has to try.

Fellini is not a moviemaker whom I have ever felt much kinship with, watching his movies, so I don't feel "qualified" to make pronouncements about him. Maybe what I've written is unfair, or too much from the Rossellini perspective—except that Rossellini's dismissal of Fellini and Antonioni (at a point where he wouldn't even watch their pictures!) wasn't based on involution but on the realities they chose to focus on‹the alienation and anxiety they found all around them.

People see Voyage in Italy as "important" because it paved the way for Antonioni, but that's more of the pseudo-thinking of Film Studies, this notion that a movie is important because of a later movie that it influenced. There's a value-oppressive assumption there which is never questioned, that L'avventura is "better" than Voyage in Italy.

It's like how it's taken for granted as an obvious truism in almost all academic criticism of Hollywood these last 30 years that films got more sophisticated up through the '70s, and that things were primitive and simple in the '30s. James Agee wrote even in 1941 that movies hadn't discovered the value of character yet! So people take that attitude in with them when they sit down to watch a movie. They say, "It's a western so I already know everything I need to know about it. It seems like Rossellini met with nothing but opprobrium and bad reviews every time a new film of his came out. How was he able to keep on working? People were charmed by him. His movies didn't cost much. There was always the chance he'd make another Open City. Sometimes there was Ingrid Bergman as part of the package. Even so, note that he was having trouble getting backing after Paisan in 1946 until he got Bergman in 1949; then after commercial failures—and amazing movies!—with her, he again became producers' poison and couldn't work until he got the chance of General Della Rovere which was a huge hit; then again, after three more pictures, he was poison again and went for years without a film; then he got rescued by TV for the history films.

He didn't have an easy life. He had the most dogged persistence. Your life of Rossellini is inspiring. What do you think we can get from reading about it? Does such a life even make sense in the climate we find ourselves in today? The basic problems haven't changed. How to get anything accomplished without surrendering. Is there a particular Rossellini film you think would be an ideal introduction to his work?

Nope. They're so different. By the time critics decided Paisan was a masterpiece, Rossellini was making his Bergman films and the critics were deriding him for not making more Paisans; by the time they decided the Bergman movies were masterpieces, he was making his history movies and they were deriding him for not making more Bergmans. Theory blocks experience again.

So there's no particular Rossellini film you recommend for people who've never seen one?

They should take care of that for themselves. A life of adventure and discovery awaits them.

Adventurous moviegoers have recently been discovering Iranian cinema, and some, especially professional ones like critics for mass-market magazines, have been finding in it all the things associated with neo-realism: the poverty, the location shooting, the year-zero production values, the cute kids like in De Sica, the downbeat humanism that is an affirmation of life, and most importantly the comforting Otherness associated with a culture not hip enough to know that movies like The Matrix are the future and allegorical real-time dramas of life under the mullahs aren't. It's great to know, these critics seem to feel, that somewhere movies like this are still being made—by the enemy, no less!—by people who live in the kind of repressive, theocratic police state where censorship is de rigeur. Who would've guessed?

If any film can put an end to this kind of weird aw-gee attitude, it's Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry. Kiarostami's masterful 1998 study of a man who wants to commit suicide is firmly in the tradition of Rossellinian investigation. It has things in common with postwar Italian filmmaking, but it's unsentimental and bracing and therefore has the same effect on the perceived simplicities of Iranian cinema that Germany Year Zero—Rossellini's relentless pursuit of a kid driven to take his own life—has on Bicycle Thieves. By Taste of Cherry's end, it becomes clear to even the most eco-touristy of viewers that this isn't about that at all. No kids trying to save money for shoes here, just a guy digging a hole to die in and looking for someone to throw the dirt back down.

Taste of Cherry is deceptively transparent, like Voyage in Italy. A man (Homayon Ershadi) drives around the desolate outskirts of Tehran and offers people money if they'll check to see if he's dead after he attempts suicide. Among them: a soldier, a seminary student, a man who works in a museum. Kiarostami leaves out several things that would normally be considered essential (proving that they're not); the main one is the reason this guy wants do himself in. Ershadi's stoic performance is moving; the film's lyricism is never more effective than in the scenes where he just looks at a drab world. Kiarostami makes his characters slightly threatening or uneasy and places them against uniform sand piles and lack of brush everywhere. Then, their nuanced exchanges as they drive through this mundan landscape subtly increase awareness of a place it would be foolish to leave. Evidently, Kiarostami filmed these scenes by sitting in the driver's seat himself and speaking to the actors as if he were Ershadi.

Not exactly Dogme 95; he probably bought props, too. The result is a masterpiece from a country that makes great films not because they're poor there, or somehow because of censorship, but because they still use the cinema to figure out if life is worth living. Taste of Cherry's ambiguous ending—which do more with black leader and the sound of rain then most films do wit even the biggest budgets—is instantly deepened by the completely unexpected formal coda that follows it. Scored with "St. James Infirmary," it's video footage as boom shadow; it jars viewers loose from the carefully constructed world of the movie and turns it back on them so they can see what's it's really all about: not an isolated Iranian slice-of-life, but a physical despair that threatens us all. Taste of Cherry is a triumph of Kiarostamian cinema over any ideas about how films like this are supposed to be. It reminds us that there aren't two kinds of movies, some "realistic" and some artificial, but that the only real difference between movies is that some are extraordinary and the rest aren't even trying.