The 80th anniversary of Roberto Rossellini’s film, Roma, Città Aperta (Rome, Open City), falls this year. The story goes that Rossellini was offered a substantial amount of money by a rich old widow to make two films, one on the unprotected street children of Rome and the other on a martyred Catholic priest executed by the fascists. What Rossellini did was to fuse the two stories into one, in the process producing a memorable document that brought to sharp focus the emerging theology of liberation, which was to prove to be a crown of thorns for the Vatican Establishment. As in the case of Pier Paolo Pasolini, his foremost protégé, Rossellini’s best films were often ennobled by mystical/spiritual qualities.
Looking through the lens of the so-called guru-shishya parampara — the Italian variation — serious viewers are likely to be drawn to the common interest in India that the two masters harboured. Both Rossellini and Pasolini made documentary films on India, reflecting their appreciation of a land of ancient achievements and many contradictions, but in markedly different styles and aesthetics. Rossellini, a man of refinement and almost obsessed in his love for cultures and civilisations, felt a passionate pull towards India, in both its hoary past and its proud but troubled present following the departure of the British. When he put forth a proposal to make a film on the diverse peoples and histories of India, the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, showed active interest in the venture. The director was promised all official help and the now-disappeared Films Division advised to put its invaluable archival collection at the disposal of the visiting master. That Rossellini film, called India: Matri Bhumi and made in 1958, proved to be a work of considerable artistic merit combining documentary and dramatic elements to tell a story of the co-existence of tradition and modernity in a newly-independent country.
Pasolini, true to his contrarian nature, went about making his India film in a style that reminded the viewer of a dense and daring prophet. It was shot in Bombay and Delhi in December 1967 and January 1968, respectively, a whole decade after the appearance of the Rossellini film. Produced by RAI RadioTelevisione Italiana, Pasolini himself did the photography for this 34-minute documentary called Appunti per un film sull’India (Notes for a film on India). The film describes the plan to produce a longer film based on an ancient Indian legend. Unfortunately, the proposed longer film was never realised.
Where Rossellini recorded glimpses of the physicality of the country’s chain of histories from the immemorial past to a present struggling to overcome the vestiges of the raj, Pasolini was perhaps contemplating more about the mystical and the philosophical possibilities of engaging with his deeply complex subject. However, what united the two geniuses was their abiding curiosity to record and decipher a land which profoundly and obstinately refused to be easily understood.