"New York Anthology Film Archives" - June 1998

India (1958) 90 minutes.

Directed by Roberto Rossellini. Produced by Aniene Film (Rome) and Union Générale Cinématographique (Paris). Written by Rossellini, Sonali Senroy das Gupta, and Fereydoun Hoveyda from a story by Rossellini.   Photographed in Gevacolor/Kodachrome by Aldo Tonti Indian music adapted by Jean Danielou. With non-professional actors.

Aspects of India in 1957/58 seen in four documentar episodes; 1) the marriage of a peasant and a peddlar's daughter; 2) a laborer bids farewell to the dam at Hirakud ( which he helped to build for five years; 3) an old man tries to save a tiger from hunters; 4) the travails of a monkey whose master has died.

"The consistency of the themes tackled and the diversity of material investigated irresistibly recall the huge synthetical task of October." Although India does not strictly use the resources of montage, at least in the traditional sense it is conceptually even more elaborate than Eisenstein's film. With a conscious economy of means, Rossellini achieves richer and more complex association than Bresson or Resnais. India repeats the stylistic principle of Viaggio in Italia, which can seem superficial to a spectator lacking in concentration; it takes the form like a musical movement that manages at the same time to be very fast and very slow."
-Jose Luis Guarner

Rossellini's INDIA by Fereydoun Hoveyda

I met Rossellini in 1954 at a time when he had just finished the shooting of  La Paura, after Stefan Aweig's short story.  Like his previous movies with his wife Ingrid Bergman, this was a failure at the box office as well as among most film critics. He deeply felt the need for a change both in his private life and artistic undertakings. He had always been attracted to the "East." He decided to travel to India by car through Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, and to make films about these countries. We spent many nights in 1955 and 1956 exchanging ideas about them. Several story outlines emerged ftom our discussion£. In late 1956 we had to limit his project to India because of financial shortcomings.

Rossellini envisaged a Paisan type of feature with four or more vignettes and a series of "Cine-oeil" (Dziga Vertov) documentaries. He was interested in what he used to call "actual and real India," not in exoticism and western invented myths such as "spiritualism" and other tourist attractions: yoga, "serpent charming" or "rope climbing." He intended to debunk all the coinmonplaces and platitudes the media spilled about India. I worked with him on several story lines for the feature. He liked very much one on monkeys.

Hiding with his cameraman, Aldo Tonti, in the street or on apartment balconies of many cities, he accumulated hundreds of hours of images, while working at the same time on the feature. In Bombay he met his "future" wife Sonali Das Gupta, a married woman who helped him develop vignettes for the film. As she changed many of our previously agreed stories, Rossellini used to call me over th telephone to discuss some points about the scripts. His relationship with Sonali, who asked for a divorce and abandoned her family, erupted into a scandal which forced Roberto to leave India hurriedly before completing his feature. Additional scenes had to be shot in studios in Italy and in France. He himself edited most of the documentaries in a small  makeshift editing room given by Henri Langlois at the French Cinemathèque.

Originally the feature was titled, India 57. But as the release was delayed, the distributors dropped the year mention. Yet as one of the "inventors" of Neo-Realism, Rossellini liked to "date" his productions as in the case of Germany Year Zero and Europe 51.

Rossellini wanted to convey the problems facing Indians as their country struggled on the path of development, especially the "conflicts" between tradition and technology, even at the level of animal life (the stories of the tiger and the monkey, for instance). The film might seem "incomplete" (one of the stories conceming land reform was dropped and others had to be completed in Europe). In any case it has to be seen together with the documentaries which were produced and shown by the French Television under the title, J'ai fait un beau voyage, with Rossellini himself answering questions by a journalist. In the ten programs, Rossellini covered a wide variety of subjects: architecture, costume, Bombay, the south, Kerala, the Malabar laguna, Varsova, Nehru, Animals of India, the Hirakud dam, etc.

Working with Rossellini was a joy. He was not interested only in the work at hand, but in every aspect of life: art, love, food, politics, traditions, science... and the "future." He could not resist beauty (especially as incarnated in women). To him cinema was not everything. It was just a medium to express ideas, to inform and to educate. That is why in the sixties he definitely abandoned "commercial" film-making and inaugurated his television features: History of Iron; Pascal; The Messaiah; The Medicis; etc. At the time of his death he was preparing Karl Marx. Entertainment for the sake of entertainment was at odds with his conception of cinema. The absorption of the Nouvelle Vague in commercial cinema saddened him....
Fereydoun Hoveyda, New York, 1998.

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