The History Films of Rossellini : Blaise Pascal

At the crossroads of theology, superstition and reason.

May 16, 2009

This is the first article in a series of critiques of Italian director Roberto Rossellini's historical films.

Toward the end of the director’s life Roberto Rossellini focused on historical figures of the Western tradition, mainly via a series of made-for-television films. Loosely structured, poetic and atmospheric, these films were the consummation of Rossellini’s desire to explore historical personages through the mystery of their humanity and the age of ideas in which they lived as opposed to resorting to the typical “timeline epics” of the commercial film industry.

Rossellini : An Obsession With Subjective Truth

Blaise Pascal is a cloistered picture. At every turn we see its hero confined not only by the garish enclosures of the aristocracy but by the dogma of those he sought to influence. There are no grand entrances, no structural ploys to inform us that the denouement is approaching.

This suffocation is no fault or act of self-indulgence on the director’s part. Rossellini tightly controlled every gesture, every instance of emotion, so that when Pascal finally releases his stirring monologue about faith and reason we at last feel liberated.

“Rossellini’s method with actors... is pure Murnau, the most stylized form of Germanic expressionism (usually considered the polar opposite of realism), in which the filmmaker’s psychoanalysis of the character is expressed by body posture, gesture, music, lighting and scenery. “**

The result, stylistically, is redolent of Bressons and Antonioni, who extracted great meaning from the mechanized movements of their actors even while prohibiting them a voice in the scene. However, do not seek “empirical truth” in Rossellini. These films are to be enjoyed as one might experience a dream influenced by the subject.

Faith and Reason In Blaise Pascal

Further giving ammunition to Tag Gallagher’s assertion that Rossellini was never concerned with Neorealism, Blaise Pascal is characterized by a highly stylized uneasiness. The camera does not follow the characters’ movements as they do in typical features. Instead characters are positioned uniformly in the center of the frame, the camera following their motions so as to eliminate the audience’s expectations of the omniscient 3rd person.

Further, Blaise Pascal, like Rossellini’s other historical films, is layered with eerie, discordant music. What is this cacophony of bells and bombinations suggesting? In scenes seemingly rudimentary, such as a conversation with a theologian about a newly invented thermometer, the soundscape crescendos, growing saturated with salient, strange perturbations. The effect is twofold, at once a typical way to instill tension in a scene and also a means to echo the intensity of curiosity and otherness that the protagonist experiences as he grows closer to discovery, persecution, alienation, and death.

The 17th century was not often an easy place to possess great intellect, especially when one’s beliefs ran against crown and church establishment. In Pascal we feel the intensity of a man who’s work, at least to those around him, must have appeared to encroach upon the very dominion of God himself, and Rossellini does not let us forget that God was still very much unquestioned, a force as real in the lives of his characters as gravity.

* NR = MC 2 : Rossellini, "Neo-Realism," and Croce.Tag Gallagher. Film History, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Winter, 1988), pp. 87-97

The copyright of the article The History Films of Rossellini : Blaise Pascal in European Films is owned by Jonah Gruber. Permission to republish The History Films of Rossellini : Blaise Pascal in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.