The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (362 page)

After the divorce, he settled for documentary—despite such exceptions as
Il Generale della Rovere
, with de Sica playing a wartime swindler—and for historical reconstruction. Thus, after
India
, he concentrated on the history of Italy in
Viva l’Italia
and
Vanina Vanini
. These films employed his own invention, Pancinor, a sophisticated zoom that frees the camera for even more elaborate setups. They also took great pains to be authentic and to reduce the obvious sources of drama.
Viva l’Italia
follows Garibaldi’s unification of Italy, inspired by a feeling for landscape filled by skirmishes and the precise ebb and flow of struggle. Increasingly, Rossellini chose historical subjects to be filmed for television. As early as 1950, in the film about St. Francis, he had worked out a form that tried to reconstruct history.

“History,” he said, “through teaching visually, can evolve on its own ground rather than evaporate into dates and names. Abandoning the usual litany of battle, it can surrender to its social, economic and political determinants. It can build, not on fantasy, but on historical knowledge, situations, costumes, atmospheres, and men who had historical significance and helped the social developments by which we live today. Some characters then, considered from a psychological viewpoint can, through their human qualities, become the embodiment of action.”

That has the optimism of an encyclopedist in an age when film studies await their enlightenment. Rossellini—with his studies of iron, Louis XIV, Socrates, and St. Augustine (not to mention the earlier periods of his work)—will appear one day as the Diderot of the cinema.

Robert Rossen
(1908–66), b. New York
1947:
Johnny O’Clock; Body and Soul
. 1949:
All the King’s Men
. 1951:
The Brave Bulls
. 1954:
Mambo
. 1955:
Alexander the Great
. 1957:
Island in the Sun
. 1959:
They Came to Cordura
. 1961:
The Hustler
. 1963:
Lilith
.

As a young man, just out of New York University, Rossen wrote and produced for the theatre. It was his own play,
The Body Beautiful
, that took him to Hollywood as a scriptwriter. He worked at Warners, and was formed by the socially conscious thriller:
Marked Woman
(37, Lloyd Bacon);
They Won’t Forget
(37, Mervyn Le Roy);
Racket Busters
(38, Bacon);
Dust Be My Destiny
(39, Lewis Seiler);
The Roaring Twenties
(39, Raoul Walsh);
A Child Is Born
(39, Bacon);
The Sea Wolf
(41, Michael Curtiz);
Out of the Fog
(41, Anatole Litvak);
Blues in the Night
(41, Litvak);
Edge of Darkness
(43, Lewis Milestone);
A Walk in the Sun
(45, Milestone);
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
(46, Milestone);
Desert Fury
(47, Lewis Allen); uncredited on
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(47, John Huston).

Like Huston, Rossen developed as a director in those years after the war. His association with actor John Garfield and writer Abraham Polonsky (in Enterprise Productions), and his subsequent fate at the hands of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lends a pinkish glow to his films that the unprepared viewer would have difficulty in seeing. Rossen favored intelligent psychological stories in realistic settings, but that is a long way from political preoccupation, and shows how tentative the “Marxist” element in American cinema has always been.
They Won’t Forget
is a more blatant criticism of American society than any of Rossen’s own films.
Body and Soul
, written by Polonsky and starring Garfield, is an honest boxing story, but its view of corruption was itself conventional and comfortable. Even
All the King’s Men
, based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel about a Southern demagogue, contents itself with melodrama, unfamiliar, real locations, and a bravura performance from Broderick Crawford. Indeed, as all through his career, these early films profit from good acting and scripts. Rossen was his own scenarist and he always retained an ability for drawing more than usual out of his players. Those two early films have fine performances from Lilli Palmer and Mercedes McCambridge.

The Brave Bulls
, made in Mexico, heralded Rossen’s enforced exile from America. His wandering films are without any consistent theme and are deprived of Rossen’s feeling for American locations and characters. He returned to America for the interesting failure
They Came to Cordura
, a study of courage and cowardice. But Rossen regained his early form with
The Hustler
, a poolroom story about winners and losers, crammed with atmosphere and cleverly cast. It is a gripping movie but a superficial one, unconscious of the way George C. Scott emerges as a more interesting character than Paul Newman’s hero. It showed Rossen’s virtues and limitations. Given an intense man’s world, he had a flair for the details of timing, talk, and rivalry. But the meanings of his films are commonplace and signaled in advance. Nevertheless,
The Hustler
was a deserved success as entertainment, if only because the pool scenes had a unique place in the filming of sports and games.

Rossen was in poor health, and the idea of illness and weakness figured a lot in
The Hustler
. It dominated
Lilith
, a very ambitious reworking of legend, set in a mental institution and built around beautiful performances from Jean Seberg and Warren Beatty. Rossen did not seem to have the stylistic depth that the film strived after; many of its supposedly lyrical moments are ill judged. But it is an oddity, the only one of his films that seems passionate, mysterious, and truly personal. The other films will look increasingly dated and self-contained, but
Lilith
may grow.

Tim Roth
, b. London, 1961
Tim Roth had his face right at the beginning—a nasty, lean, mean attitude, street stink, and an embedded air of grievance. See him as the juvenile delinquent in
Made in Britain
(83, Alan Clarke) and the whole act is there, its strutting dance, its lust for danger, and the total authority of the hopeless outsider who refuses to give a fuck. Since then, Roth has repeated himself, on both sides of the Atlantic, he has made adventures into period and biopic, he has even played Charlie Starkweather for TV in
Murder in the Heartland
(93, Robert Markowitz). But he is and always will be a terrific piece of South London, rancid yet fresh, treacherous yet driven by his own punk integrity.

He was snapped up by Mike Leigh for
Meantime
(83) and Stephen Frears for
The Hit
(84), where he is very good as John Hurt’s sidekick. Since then, he has done
A World Apart
(88, Chris Menges);
To Kill a Priest
(88, Agnieszka Holland);
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
(89, Peter Greenaway); with Gary Oldman in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
(90, Tom Stoppard); as van Gogh in
Vincent and Theo
(90, Robert Altman);
Jumpin’ at the Boneyard
(92, Jeff Stanzler); undercover and soaked in blood for
Reservoir Dogs
(92, Quentin Tarantino);
Bodies, Rest & Motion
(93, Michael Steinberg); with Amanda Plummer as his pumpkin in
Pulp Fiction
(94, Tarantino); with Julia Ormond in
Captives
(94, Angela Pope); as Marlow in the TV
Heart of Darkness
(94, Nicolas Roeg); a little beyond his class in
Rob Roy
(95, Michael Caton-Jones), though it got him a supporting actor nomination;
Little Odessa
(95, James Gray); and as the unfortunate bellboy who had to be in all the episodes of
Four Rooms
(96, Tarantino, Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez).

His brave choices have led to several unreleased pictures, as well as his unruly intrusion in
Everyone Says I Love You
(96, Woody Allen);
Gridlock’d
(97, Vondie Curtis-Hall); Dutch Schultz in
Hoodlum
(97, Bill Duke); and
La Leggenda del Pianista sull’Oceano
(98, Giuseppe Tornatore). But nothing prepared us for the stark beauty and restraint of
The War Zone
(99), the first film he directed. There was a clear debt to Alan Clarke and a steadfast respect for horrifying material. The film alarmed many critics, but in its imagery, its pacing, and its use of professional and novice actors it is one of the great debuts of the nineties.

Somehow he convinces as an international star, but surely that stretch for versatility misses his point:
Vatel
(00, Roland Joffé);
Lucky Numbers
(00, Nora Ephron); the heavy in
Planet of the Apes
(01, Tim Burton); very awkward in
Invincible
(01, Werner Herzog);
The Musketeer
(01, Peter Hyams);
Emmett’s Mark
(02, Keith Snyder); in a short,
Whatever We Do
(03, Kevin Connolly); and as Cromwell in
To Kill a King
(03, Mike Barker);
Beautiful Country
(04, Hans Petter Moland);
Silver City
(04, John Sayles);
The Last Sign
(04, Douglas Law); William Pitt in
Nouvelle France
(04, Jean Beaudin).

As an actor, he has lost only England:
Silver City
(04, John Sayles);
Don’t Come Knocking
(05, Wim Wenders);
Dark Water
(05, Walter Salles);
Even Money
(07, Mark Rydell);
Youth Without Youth
(07, Francis Coppola);
Funny Games
(08, Michael Haneke);
The Incredible Hulk
(08, Louis Leterrier); on a TV series,
Lie to Me; Skellig
(09, Annabel Jankel).

Only those with a memory know that he once directed an “unforgettable” film—
The War Zone
. Look it up.

Jean Rouch
(1917–2004), b. Paris
All films are documentaries, except (f). 1947:
Au Pays des Mages Noirs
(codirected with Jean Sauvy and Pierre Ponty). 1948:
Initiation à la Danse des Possédés
. 1949:
Les Magiciens Noirs
(codirected with Marcel Griaule);
La Circoncision
. 1951:
Bataille sur le Grand Fleuve; Les Cimetières dans la Falaise; Les Hommes Qui Font la Pluie; Les Gens du Mil
. 1952:
Alger—Le Cap; Les Fils de l’Eau
(anthology of previous films). 1955:
Les Maîtres Fous; Mamy Water
. 1957:
Moro Naba
. 1958:
Moi, un Noir
. 1959:
La Pyramide Humaine
. 1960:
Hampi; Chronique d’un Été
(codirected with Edgar Morin). 1962:
Monsieur Albert Prophète; Urbanisme Africain; Abidjan, Port de Pêche; Le Miel; Pêcheurs du Niger; La Punition
. 1963:
Les Cocotiers; Le Palmier à Huile; Rose et Landry
. 1964: “La Gare du Nord,” episode from
Paris Vu Par;
“Marie-France et Veronique,” episode from
La Fleur de l’Age ou les Adolescentes; Les Veuves de Quinze Ans; Le Tambour des Dogons
. 1965:
La Chasse au Lion à l’Arc
. 1966:
La Goumbe des Jeunes Noceurs
. 1967:
Jaguar
. 1968:
La Signe
(codirected with Germaine Dieterlen). 1969:
Petit à Petit
(f). 1976:
Babatou/Babuta, les Trois Conseils
. 1979:
Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet; Funerailles à Bongo: Le Vieux Anai
. 1981:
Ambara Dama
. 1984: “Dionysos,” an episode from
Paris Vu Par … 20 Ans Après
. 1987:
Brise-Glace; Enigma
. 1988:
Boulevards d’Afrique; Folie Ordinaire d’une Fille de Cham
. 1990:
Cantate pour Deux Généraux
. 1993:
Madame L’Eau
. 1997:
Faire-part: Musée Henri Langloss; Moi Fatigué Debout, Moi Couché
. 2003:
Le Rève Plus Fort Que la Mort
(d).

It is a tribute to the intellectual and academic acceptance of cinema in France that Jean Rouch had such an influence on film theory and feature movies during the 1960s. Rouch came to “cinema” by a roundabout way. He was a literature graduate turned civil engineer who went into ethnology and anthropology in the early 1940s. It was during the war that he first visited West Africa. Repeated trips, especially to Nigeria, Senegal, and the Gold Coast, became equipped with a secondhand 16mm camera that Rouch used to record tribal rituals. He was convinced that the camera would inevitably replace verbal reports in describing fieldwork. But it was in the gradual application of this method to European peoples that Rouch’s work became widely interesting.
Moi, un Noir
was a more conventional documentary on the life of a black stevedore in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. The film was silent and Rouch fell upon the innovation of having the stevedore himself improvise a commentary as he watched the film. That proved a creative extension of amateur or underground filmmaking. It meant that the subject of a film might digest the draft, comment on it, expand the finished film, and learn something about himself. The practice has by now left its mark on journalistic film, on cinema verité, and on Godard and Warhol.
La Pyramide Humaine
was made with students at Abidjan and worked toward a spontaneous group psychodrama. The same approach, allied to Edgar Morin’s sociology-based interviewing, was applied to Paris in
Chronique d’un Été
, a film that carefully uncovers the layers of fiction in real life.

As a feature-length director, Rouch knew his limitations.
Petit à Petit
is a slight but charming account of a Niger businessman’s perplexity in Paris. But in
La Chasse au Lion à l’Arc
, especially, he went back to African anthropology, and produced a brilliant study of a tribe’s need to make a legend to sustain its own primitive existence. That film,
Chronique d’un Été, Moi, un Noir
, and
La Pyramide Humaine
ensure Rouch a key place in the history of documentary, and the discovery that it was an unexpectedly complex form.