L'Amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Anna Magnani in the "Una Voce Umana" segment of L'Amore

Federico Fellini and Anna Magnani in the "Il Miracolo" segment of L'Amore

Una Voce Umana
The Woman on the Telephone: Anna Magnani

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Anna Benevuti
Based on a play by Jean Cocteau
Cinematography: Robert Juillard, Otello Martelli
Production design: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Il Miracolo
Nannina: Anna Magnani
The Vagabond: Federico Fellini
The Monk: Peparuolo
The Teacher: Amelia Robert

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini
Based on a novel by Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Cinematography: Aldo Tonti
Art direction: Christian Bérard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's L'Amore, designed as a tribute to Anna Magnani, comprises two short films, Una Voce Umana and Il Miracolo. The first is based on Jean Cocteau's monodrama La Voix Humaine and its cast consists entirely of Magnani as a woman whose lover is not only breaking up with her but also going off to marry another woman. In a long telephone call she pleads with and rages at him. Unfortunately, in the print shown by the FilmStruck Criterion Collection, the dialogue goes seriously out of sync with what's on screen for a long period -- a flaw also to be found for a shorter span in the other film, Il Miracolo. The English subtitles keep pace with the on-screen action, but those of us who have a little familiarity with Italian find the disjunction of sight and sound distracting. In Il Miracolo, Magnani is Nannina, a simple-minded woman who, while herding goats in the hills above her village, encounters a hiker whom she takes to be St. Joseph. He gets her drunk and leaves her pregnant. (The hiker is played by 28-year-old Federico Fellini, who doesn't speak a word in one of his few on-screen appearances.) When Nannina learns that she's having a child she takes it to be a miracle from God, but the townspeople, who already treat her as the village idiot, torment her so much that she flees into the hills, where she gives birth in what seems to be an abandoned monastery. In one of the landmark moments in the decline of film censorship, the Catholic National Legion of Decency charged Il Miracolo with sacrilege and persuaded the New York state film censors to pull it from release. The lawsuit brought by the American distributor, Joseph Burstyn, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1952 ruled that the ban was an unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech. Magnani's performance is fuller and more varied in Il Miracolo than in Una Voce Umana, in which she gives a lacerating performance that feels more theatrical than cinematic -- her torment becomes monotonous. But both films accomplish what Rossellini set out to do: showcase Magnani's intense commitment to her art.

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Edmund Moeschke in Germany Year Zero

Edmund Köhler: Edmund Moeschke
Herr Köhler: Ernst Pittschau
Eva Köhler: Ingetraud Hinze
Karl-Heinz Köhler: Franz-Otto Krüger
Herr Henning: Erich Gühne

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpé
Cinematography: Robert Juillard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's harsh, tragic vision of Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II is suffused with an odd mixture of sentimentality and Schadenfreude. Any film that centers on the experiences of a 12-year-old boy in the ruins of Berlin is bound to be touched with sentiment, of course, but Rossellini's Edmund Köhler becomes less a real human child than the embodiment of ideas about the war, its causes, and its legacy. At the film's beginning, Edmund is seen with a kind of documentary clarity as he's fired from a job as a gravedigger because he's too young, then on his way home encounters a crowd of people hacking meat from the carcass of a horse that has apparently fallen dead in the street. Shooed away from there, he manages to scavenge a few lumps of coal that fall from a passing truck. It's when he reaches home that he becomes a figure in a fable: His family, billeted by the authorities on the reluctant owner of an apartment house, consists of an invalid father, a somewhat petulant older sister, and a brother whose refusal to register with the authorities -- he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht to the bitter end and remains convinced that the Nazis were right -- deprives them of a stipend they need to survive. His sister cadges cigarettes -- a virtual currency in the postwar barter system -- from men in nightclubs but is too proud to prostitute herself, so Edmund is the primary support of the household. This eventually puts him in the literal and figurative clutches of an unfortunately stereotypical homosexual, a former teacher of his whose pederastic tendencies are manifest in his constant fondling of the boy. The nightmarish story of what happens to Edmund is well told, but Rossellini's determination to make it a kind of Götterdämmerung of the German people, deservedly punished for their crime of bringing Hitler to power, undermines what gives the film its real strength: its documentary vision of a city and a country in ruins.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel