New Left Review 78, November-December 2012
michael cramer
ROSSELLINI’S HISTORY LESSONS
Roberto Rossellini (1906–77) spent the last fourteen years of his career making what he called pedagogical films, principally for television. In his view, these works constituted a major break with existing cinema; they were a new form, neither art nor entertainment, and the director himself now wanted to be considered as an educator, not an artist. [1] Fereydoun Hoveyda and Eric Rohmer, ‘Nouvel entretien avec Roberto Rossellini’, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 145, 13 July 1963, in Rossellini, My Method: Writings and Interviews, ed. Adriano Aprà, New York 1995, p. 152. They included multi-part series on human historical development—the 5-hour The Iron Age (1964) and 12-hour Man’s Struggle for Survival (1967–69)—as well as portraits of innovators in the fields of politics—Cosimo de Medici, Louis xiv—and ideas: Socrates, Augustine, Descartes, Pascal. Rossellini’s account of Man’s Struggle for Survival, in a 1972 letter to the historian of American slavery, Peter Wood, gives a sense of the project’s ambitions:
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