Roberto Rossellini is commonly regarded as the founding father of Italian neorealism. It's a lofty label, since the movement was among the most influential in all of film history, but also one that doesn't quite do justice to his long, multifaceted career.
The intense and unadorned films that Rossellini directed as Italy was emerging from the rubble of World War II -- "Open City" (1945), "Paisan" (1946), "Germany Year Zero" (1948) -- sealed his international reputation. Comparatively neglected, especially in this country, are the works that followed as he moved away from the supposed tenets of neo-realism and started to dabble in melodrama and artifice.
He is known for marrying Ingrid Bergman, who abandoned Hollywood for him, but the landmark films they made together in the 1950s, such as "Stromboli" and "Voyage in Italy," are not available on American home video.
He embarked on yet another chapter in the 1960s: a cycle of television movies that set out to educate viewers on nothing less than the history of Western civilization and the evolution of Western thought.
It can be hard to keep the Rossellini legacy in focus these days, partly because of the confounding volume and variety of his output and partly because many of his films have been unseen for so long, prints having fallen into disrepair and out of circulation. He died in 1977, at age 71, and an overdue revival began in 2006, the centenary of his birth.
A large-scale Rossellini retrospective toured North American repertory houses that year, and his daughter, Isabella Rossellini, teamed with director Guy Maddin to produce a poignant tribute called "My Dad Is 100 Years Old."
Now, some of the less-traveled byways of the Rossellini filmography are coming to light on DVD. Lionsgate recently issued a pair of obscurities, "Where Is Freedom?" (1954) and "Blackout in Rome" (1960). This week the Criterion Collection releases the best-known of his late films, "The Taking of Power by Louis XIV" (1966), along with a boxed set, on the midprice Eclipse label, of more historical works from the 1970s.
Rossellini's career-capping project came about from a crisis of confidence and what he perceived as a crisis in the culture at large. In 1963, he called a news conference in Rome and announced that "cinema is dead." From that point on he would make films for television, a more democratic medium, and devote himself to history lessons of a sort: portraits of great leaders and thinkers.
