Isabella Rossellini celebrates her father’s films and St. Francis

“If someone like St. Francis lived today, would we recognize his sainthood, or view him as eccentric?”

That profound question was asked by Isabella Rossellini during an interview about St. Francis of Assisi’s legacy, of which her father, Italian film director Roberto Rossellini, explored, a pioneer of Italian neorealism.

On Oct. 3, Plaza Cinema & Media Arts Center will celebrate the 800th anniversary of St. Francis’s birth with three films: “Miracle” and “The Flowers of St. Francis,” starting at 1 p.m.; and “Europe 51” will be shown at 7:30 p.m., starring Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini’s mother, with a discussion of her father’s work and the completion of a feature film about the Poor Clares following. The event introduces an annual “Faith in Film” series.

“My father made ‘The Flowers of St. Francis’ that he co-wrote with Frederico Fellini. There’s humor in it and a little surrealism, as well as his charming innocence. They emphasized that also because of the poverty that he chose for his life,” Rossellini explained.

St. Francis was born to rich parents in Assisi. A reluctant student and party boy who wanted to become a warrior, that changed after a battle against Perugia, when he was taken prisoner, lived underground, and began to receive visions from God. Eventually, he was released.

“A lot of the saints are martyred,” Rossellini said. “But St. Francis was different.” Famous for taming a wolf terrorizing a village, he also preached to birds and other animals who responded to his words.

“Now, he is the protector of the Earth and the environment,” she added.

Rossellini explained that her father worked with priests on the movie. “He was known for working with one big actor. So, if you wanted fishermen in a movie (you used them in the film), they knew how to fish.” All Franciscan characters are played by monks.

In his article, “The Message of St. Francis,” Rossellini wrote that he chose to focus on the Franciscan experience and its freedom that the spirit finds in poverty and in an absolute detachment from material things.

When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 1956, it was celebrated by a packed house. When it premiered in America in October, not so much, but the New York Times said, “It sends one forth from the theatre feeling kindlier towards his fellow man.”

“The Miracle,” with Anna Magnani, another film made with Fellini, is about a simple-minded goatherd who believes she has seen Saint Joseph, her favorite saint, on a rocky hillside. She confronts the stranger she believes to be him; after he plies her with wine, she finds herself pregnant and has the child, convinced is blessed by the Holy Spirit. Condemned by the Catholic Church and the New York State Board of Censors at the time, with a legal censorship battle that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, it’s celebrated as a pivotal film of neorealistic cinema. The court reversed the ban.

As for the “Europa 51” film, “it was the beginning of the Cold War,” Rossellini explained. “And the question was, would you become capitalist or communist? Italy was caught trying to get morality on the right path.

“My mother (as the wife of an American industrialist living in Rome) finds solace in giving up her money,” explains Rossellini. As the mother of a son who dies, she finds peace after his death in helping others.

“In the 1950s, Italy started its recovery. And the question was, ‘where is happiness?’ There was an existential longing. My father was interested in capturing the mood of that era. He wasn’t interested in politics. He didn’t go to church, but was interested in the big questions of life. That’s why his films weren’t so successful. It was often a question that didn’t have an answer.”

Interestingly, Rossellini’s interest in animals was initiated by her father. “He’d read this book, ‘King Solomon’s Ring,’  by Konrad Lorenz. The author won a Noble Prize for his study of animal behavior, ethology, and he gave it to me. I said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ When my work slowed down, I went to university and at the same time started Mama Farm.” Mama Farm was established in 2013 in Brookhaven; Rossellini obtained a master’s in animal behavior and conservation in 2019 at Hunter College.

“I find it so rich because of it, film or farm,” she said. “Life at the farm is interesting.”