Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), an idealistic radical fighting the Nazi occupation of Rome, must flee the city after the Gestapo tracks him down. With his enemies closing in, he turns to Pina (Anna Magnani), his friend's fiancée, for help. Filmed in the wake of the Allied liberation of the Italian capital, OPEN CITY astonished postwar audiences with its honest, un-romanticized depiction of the resistance and largely nonprofessional cast, including German POWs.

Producer: Giuseppe Amato, Ferruccio De Martino, Rod E. Geiger, Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini. Cinematographer: Ubaldo Arata. Editor: Eraldo Da Roma. Cast: Marcello Pagliero, Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Harry Feist. 35mm, 108 min.

The last of Rossellini's three films commissioned by the Mussolini government, THE MAN WITH THE CROSS follows a Catholic priest serving on the Russian front, who braves the approaching Red Army to tend to a wounded soldier. Despite its obvious pedigree as fascist propaganda, the film is notable for its focus on the suffering of both Italians and Russians caught up in the conflict.

Screenwriter: Asvero Gravelli, Alberto Consiglio, G. D'Alicandro, Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Guglielmo Lombardi, Aurelio Attili. Editor: Eraldo Da Roma. Cast: Alberto Tavazzi, Roswitha Schmidt, Attilio Dottesio, Antonio Marietti. 35mm, 77 min.

The second installment in the director's postwar trilogy. Told in six vignettes, PAISAN explores the multi-faceted relationship between American GIs and the Italian people, from partisans to prostitutes. Like OPEN CITY, the film was shot on location with a mixture of professional actors and non-actors cast to play a version of themselves.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini, Rod Geiger, Mario Conti. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Klaus Mann, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hayes, Marcello Pagliero, Roberto Rossellini, Rod Geiger. Cinematographer: Otello Martelli. Editor: Eraldo Da Roma. Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Benjamin Emmanuel, Raymond Campbell. 35mm, 120 min.

Decades after the fact, Rossellini returned to the liberation of Italy for this gripping tale from the last days of the war. As the Allies and the Germans vie for control, a young Roman woman named Esperia (Giovanna Ralli) risks everything to hide three escaped POWs: American Peter (Peter Baldwin), Russian Fyodor (Sergei Bondarchuk), and Brit Michael (Leo Genn). Note the use of the zoom lens, which will reoccur frequently in the history films made later for television. This little-seen and underappreciated film is also known as BLACKOUT IN ROME.

Based on a story by S. Amidei. Producer: Giovanbattista Romanengo. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Roberto Rossellini, Diego Fabbri, Brunello Rondi. Screenplay: Mario Del Pala. Editor: Roberto Cinquini. Cast: Carlo Carlini, Leo Glenn, Giovanna Ralli, Sergei Bondartchouk, Peter Baldwin. 35mm, 142 min.

The third installment in the postwar trilogy turns from Italy to its former occupier. Twelve-year-old Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) and his ailing father lead a desperate existence in the rubble of Berlin just after the war. A chance encounter with a former teacher sends Edmund on a path of self-destruction to rival even the nightmarish city around him. Shot on location, GERMANY YEAR ZERO uses Berlin's bombed-out ruins as a landscape of desperation and hopelessness.

Producer: Salvo D'Angelo, Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini, Max Colpet. Cinematographer: Robert Julliard. Editor: Anne-Marie Findlesen. Cast: Edmund Meschke, Ernst Pittschau, Ingetraud Hintze, Franz Kruger. Presented in German dialogue with English subtitles. 16mm, 72 min.

Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) embarks on a fact-finding mission to American occupied Berlin (where director Billy Wilder himself lived prior to World War II). There the straight-laced politico finds more than she bargained for in a tangled web of romance and mystery involving a handsome GI (John Lund) and an ex-Nazi cabaret performer (Marlene Dietrich). Wilder's satire of American naivete v. European cynicism was shot on location in Berlin around the same time as GERMANY YEAR ZERO and even includes a brief, humorous homage to Rossellini's film.

Producer: Charles Brackett. Screenwriter: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Richard L. Breen. Cinematographer: Charles B. Lang. Editor: Doane Harrison. Cast: Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, John Lund, Millard Mitchell. 35mm, 116 min.

This film, actually a compilation of two short features, marked a decisive break with the pseudo-documentary aspects of Rossellini's "war trilogy." Anna Magnani the leads in both of parts of the film, first as an anguished woman on the telephone in an adaptation of Cocteau's one-woman tour de force The Human Voice. The second part proved controversial, with Magnani as a peasant woman who, after being impregnated by a vagrant (played by Federico Fellini), believes she will give birth to the messiah.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Robert Julliard. Editor: Eraldo Da Roma. Cast: Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini. 35mm, 79 min.

Despite Rossellini's reputation as an arch-realist, this film constitutes a rare turn for the director: comic fantasist. When an idealistic photographer discovers that his camera has the power to petrify its subjects, he vows to use it to rid his village of evildoers. To the misfortune of his neighbors, rich and poor alike, the magical vigilante begins to notice a bit of the sinister in everyone.

Based on a story by Eduardo de Filippo and Fabrizio Sarazani. Producer: Roberto Rossellini, Luigi Rovere, Rudolph Somsen. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Giancarlo Vigorelli, Franco Brusati, Liana Ferri, Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Tino Santoni. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Gennaro Pisano, Giovanni Amato, Marilyn Buferd. 16mm, 83 min.

An imaginative love letter to Roberto Rossellini from daughter Isabella, who plays all the parts.

Producer: Jody Shapiro. Screenwriter: Isabella Rossellini. Cinematographer: Len Peterson. Editor: John Gurdebeke. Cast: Isabella Rossellini. 35mm, 17 min.

Karin (Ingrid Bergman), a Lithuanian woman recently freed from an Italian internment camp, frets that her spirit is being crushed by her unrefined, fisherman husband (Mario Vitale) and his conservative neighbors. The film is the first of the great Rossellini-Bergman collaborations, but it has mostly been seen in this country in a drastically shortened version that the filmmaker called "proof of Hollywood's brutality". We will be presenting the original, uncut version.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Gian Paolo Callegari, Renzo Cesana, Art Cohn. Cinematographer: Otello Martelli. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti, Roland Gross. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale, Renzo Cesana, Mario Sponza. 35mm, 105 min.

DVD, 25 min.

In this biopic of Saint Francis of Assisi, Rossellini paints the founder of the Franciscan monastic order as a man who meets the dark and disheartening aspects of the world around him with faith and humor. Out of an extreme simplicity, Rossellini fashions an absorbing and powerfully moving recreation of St. Francis' life and philosophy. The film was one of Rossellini's most influential, praised by Truffaut and Godard; Pasolini's GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW owes a profound debt to this film.

Producer: Angelo Rizzoli. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Felix Morloin, Antonio Lisandrini. Cinematographer: Otello Martelli. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Arabella Lemaitre. 35mm, 93 min.

This romantic costume drama is based on a Stendhal short story set in the 1820s. The title character is a Roman princess who falls in love with a young anti-papal revolutionary working for a unified Italy. VANINA is thus set in roughly the same period as Visconti's SENSO, and as in that film, Rossellini's heroine is soon caught in a web of conflicting politics, family ties and passion.

Based on the short story by Stendhal. Producer: Moris Ergas. Screenwriter: Jean Gruault, Monique Lange, Diego Fabbri, Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Luciano Trasatti. Editor: Daniele Alabiso, Mario Serandrei. Cast: Sandra Milo, Laurent Terzieff, Paolo Stoppa, Martine Carol. 35mm, 118 min.

A prelude to the historical dramas that would define Rossellini's later career, the film follows famed revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi (Renzo Ricci) as he liberates southern Italy from the Bourbon monarchy. Made for the centenary of the unified Italian nation, GARIBALDI eschews the "de-dramatization" of Rossellini's later historical films for an epic sweep and splendor.

Producer: Oscar Brazzi. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Antonio Petrucci, Diego Dabbri, Antonello Trombadori, Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Luciano Trasatti. Editor: Roberto Cinquini. Cast: Renzo Ricci, Paolo Stoppa, Franco Interlenghi, Giovanna Ralli. 35mm, 90 min.

With the help of then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Rossellini spent much of 1957 traveling in India and filming. INDIA is a highly poetic mixture of fiction and documentary examining the developing democracy through its people as they interact with nature, tradition, modernity, and one another. The film marks a turning point in Rossellini's career between the Ingrid Bergman films and the more commercial period to follow.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini, Sonaly Senroi Dasgupta, Fereydoun Hoveyda. Cinematographer: Aldo Tonti. Editor: Cesare Cavagna. 35mm, 85 min.

Vittorio De Sica stars as a con artist who survives by swindling the desperate relatives of victims of the German occupation. The Nazis , until the Gestapo forces him to use his "talents" to impersonate a slain resistance leader in hopes of ensnaring others. The film was seen at the time as a return to form by Rossellini, and it forever changed the Italian cinema's treatment of war with its often comic or ironic tone, its anti-hero protagonist, and its questioning of the myths of the Resistance.

Based on the short story by Indro Montanelli. Producer: Moris Ergas. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Diego Fabbri, Indro Montanelli. Cinematographer: Carlo Carlini. Editor: Cesare Cavagna. Cast: Vittorio De Sica, Hennes Messemer, Sandra Milo, Giovanna Ralli. 35mm, 139 min.

This historical drama, one of Rossellini's most celebrated later films, was originally produced for French television. Jean-Marie Patte plays the infamous "Sun King," who learns to wield the power of the French throne to tame his country's squabbling nobles. Rossellini's perceptive and subtle use of historical events and period detail raise the film out of the genre of costume drama and make a compelling case for the use of cinema as a means for recounting history.

Screenwriter: Philippe Erlanger, Jean Gruault. Cinematographer: Georges Leclerc. Editor: Armand Ridel. Cast: Jean-Marie Patte, Raymond Jourdan, Giulio Cesare Silvani, Katharina Renn. Format TBA, 98 min.

Another television production, Blaise Pascal follows the adult life of the titular French thinker. After achieving fame as one the world's most gifted scientific minds, a mystical experience transforms him into one of its most influential religious philosophers. Here Rossellini uses the life of the 17th-century French philosopher and scientist to illustrate the conflict that runs through so much of his own work: that between science and religion, reason and belief.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini, Marcella Mariani, Luciano Scaffa, Jean Dominique de La Rochefoucauld. Cinematographer: Mario Fioretti. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Pierre Arditi, Rita Forzano, Giuseppe Addobbati, Christian De Sica. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. DVD, 131 min.

This tender and loving portrait of Ingrid Bergman by Rossellini finds the actress recounting a humorous anecdote involving the titular barnyard fowl.

Producer: Alfredo Guarani. Screenwriter: Cesare Zavattini, Luigi Chiarini. Cinematographer: Otello Martelli. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Renzo Rossellini, Isabella Rossellini, Isotta Rossellini. 16mm, 17 min.

When wealthy couple Alexander (George Sanders) and Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) visits Naples to close a relative's estate, this unpleasant chore triggers reflection on their loveless lives. This reflection happens largely internally; we witness only the external events. In a cinematic tour de force. Rossellini communicates volumes although very little happens on the surface. This controversial film was profoundly misunderstood, even reviled, at the time of its initial release, but much of contemporary moviemaking would be unthinkable without it.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini, Adolfo Fossataro, Alfredo Guarini. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini, Vitaliano Brancati, Antonio Pietrangeli. Cinematographer: Enzo Serafin. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders, Marie Mauban, Anna Proclemer. Presented in English dialogue. 35mm, 82 min.

This noirish tale of infidelity and blackmail, laced with touches of expressionism, concerns an unfaithful wife (Ingrid Bergman) driven to the emotional brink by her lover's jealous ex-girlfriend. Shot simultaneously in English and German, FEAR is the last of the Bergman-Rossellini collaborations, a powerful vision of a woman entrapped by her society.

Based on the short story by Stefan Zweig. Producer: Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Franz Graf Treuberg. Cinematographer: Carlo Carlini, Heinz Schnackertz. Editor: Walter Boos, Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Mathias Weiman, Renate Mannhardt, Kurt Kreuger. Presented in English dialogue. 35mm, 82 min.

Rossellini's five-episode miniseries chronicles growth of Christianity during the thirty years following Christ's death and resurrection. The early Christian community faces persecution and martyrdom, and the Apostle Paul is imprisoned and sent to Rome for trial.

Based on "Acts of the Apostles" and other books of the New Testament. Producer: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio Bonicelli, Renzo Rossellini. Screenwriter: Jean Dominique de La Rochefoucauld, Luciano Scaffa, Vittorio Bonicelli, Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Mario Fioretti. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Edoardo Torricella, Jacques Dumur, Bepy Mannaiuolo, Renzo Rossi. 35mm, 290 min.

Fascinated by Francis of Assisi even after making a biopic of the saint, Rossellini decided to try his hand at imagining the fate of someone of Francis' conscience and integrity in the modern world. Ingrid Bergman here plays wealthy housewife Irene Girard, whose struggle against the stifling alienation and injustice of her bourgeois milieu makes her an outlaw and a martyr.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis. Screenwriter: Sandro De Feo, Mario Pannunzio, Ivo Perilli, Brunello Rondi. Cinematographer: Aldo Tonti. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Alexander Knox, Ettore Giannini, Giulietta Masina. 16mm, 112 min.

In this biting satire, beloved Italian comic star Totò plays Salvatore, an ex-convict unable to adjust to life in postwar Italy, who schemes to return to the simplicity of life behind bars. Like Irene in EUROPE '51, Salvatore is an innocent at a loss in a corrupt modern world, but if Irene's revolt is sublimely tragic, Salvatore's rebellion takes on the earthy cast of black comedy.

Producer: Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis. Screenwriter: Vitaliano Brancati, Ennio Flaiano, Antonio Pietrangeli, Vincenzo Talarico. Cinematographer: Aldo Tonti. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Totò , Nita Dover, Vera Molnar, Leopoldo Trieste. 35mm, 91 min.

Filmed in English, this three-part tale of Renaissance Florence chronicles the exploits of political leader Cosimo de' Medici and brilliant thinker Leon Battista Alberti, who would transform the city into Europe's artistic and intellectual capital. Rossellini's juxtaposition of these two men presents them as an example of the perfect synthesis between art and politics.

Producer: Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini, Luciano Scaffa, Marcella Mariani. Cinematographer: Mario Montuoni. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Marcello Di Falco, Virginio Gazzolo, Tom Felleghi, Mario Erpichini. Presented in English dialogue. DVD, 254 min.

Ingrid Bergman plays the doomed French soldier-saint in Rossellini's version of French composer Arthur Honegger's 1938 oratorio. The film, Rossellini's first in color, grew out of a production of the work he staged in Naples. While JOAN OF ARC is primarily a filmed record of the production, it does give Rossellini the opportunity to experiment with some special effects. He would later be quoted in the pages of Cahiers du cinema defending the film as "in no way filmed theater but… neo-realist cinema in the way I have always understood it."

Based on a poem by Paul Claudel, "Jeanne d'Arc au bucher.". Producer: Sergio Criscuolo, Franco Francese. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Gabor Pogany. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti, Robert Audenet. Music: Arthur Honegger. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Tullio Carminati, Giacinto Prandelli, Marcella Pobbe. 35mm, 80 min.

A young woman finds herself overtaken by jealousy over her husband's devotion to his work—and his cat.

Based on "La Chatte" by Collete. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini, Diego Fabbri, Liana Ferri, Turi Vasile. Cinematographer: Enzo Serafin. Editor: Louisette Hautecoeur. Cast: Orfeo Tamburi, Andrée Debar, Nicola Ciarleta, Nino Franchina. 16mm, 21 min.

Rossellini made his last film before his work for television for the anthology film ROGOPAG; the episode tells of an Italian stewardess, who films her travels, confronting the unwanted advances of an American businessman.

Producer: Alfredo Bini. Screenwriter: Roberto Rossellini. Cinematographer: Luciano Trassati. Editor: Daniele Alabiso. Cast: Rosanna Schiaffino, Bruce Balaban, Gianrico Tedeschi, Maria Pia Schiaffino. 16mm, 33 min.