Fereydoun Hoveyda: "Rossellini and his Project on Islamic Civilization"
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In fact, the idea of one or more movies on countries of the Middle East and in particular one on Islamic Civilization entered Rossellini's mind as early as 1954. He had just achieved  LA PEUR, (The Fear) - from a novel by Stephan Zweig. His marriage to Ingrid Bergman was on the rocks. He was also distressed by the commercial failure of his films with the celebrated Hollywood-Swedish actress. He felt the need to change his surroundings, ambience, and mostly the direction of his work.

During the autumn of that year, a common friend, Enrico Fulchignoni, who like me worked at the Unesco informed me that Roberto, to whom he had mentioned my name, wished to meet me. The renowned movie producer looked forward to visit India and wanted to travel with an automobile through, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. He needed to ask me for information on Islamic countries of which he knew nary little, and that all the more that India had a large Moslem community.

Fulchignoni asked if  I would consecrate a few evenings answering his questions. As one can imagine, I did not hesitate for a single second. As a matter of fact, when I arrived in Paris back in 1946, following World War II, two films had delighted me: "Citizen Kane and Rome Open City." In spite of the abyss that separated them, I found a little something in common between Orson Welles and Roberto Rossellini. This "little something" took shape in my mind many years later: Both authors were demystifyers. This is something I will come back to later on - should I have time.

Thus, I accompanied Fulchignoni to the hushed corridors of the Raphaël Hotel where Rossellini had taken residence. I felt a little uneasy. The very notoriety of the two cinema luminaries intimidated me. I don't know if you are acquainted with the Hotel Raphaël. It is quite different from modern palaces. The walls are adorned with imitations of the great Florentine masters and the high ceilings ornate with golden plaster motives. The subdued lighting, the thick carpets, in short the entire setup contributed, if I may say, to solemnize the atmosphere. I compared myself to an ambassador who follows the master of ceremony in order to surrender his letters of credential to some high and mighty head of state! Right away, the spectacle presented to me entirely washed away any sort of concern: A plump man in short sleeves, lazily stretched on a Louis XV sofa, the eyelids half closed, the hands joined on a towering belly. The words of Cocteau characterizing Rossellini surged in my mind: "a dozing fawn." With a tired gesture the master invited us to sit down. As soon as Fulchignoni began to enumerate my "points of competence, his features began to animate and from this moment on he did not stop shifting and talking.

He began with a praise to laziness: "compare he said, Greek statuary to Roman's. In Athens, the heroes stand up martially, muscles stretched, ready for action. In Rome the contrast is total: the emperors and generals present themselves seated to the public, and if they are standing, they lean to a wall or a column. He added: "God himself doesn't mind laziness, didn't he rest after the six days of creation, leaving humans to commit all the sins in the world?" As I would discover by the end of the evening, all that was nothing but craftiness in order to charm the crowd and mix up the tracks. The truth is that Rossellini was a tireless toiler. He had managed to convince his friends of the inverse. Thus, when he devised his system of panning optic commanded by a by a button near his hand, Fulchignoni joyously declared: "that's a product of his laziness. Now he can make a movie while stretched on a long chair."

Anyhow, Roberto quizzed me at length on Iran, Turkey and Arab countries where he wanted to make films alike Allemagne Année Zero (Germany Year Zero). For each country he coveted to listen on the happenings or anecdotes people were recounting. "These anecdotes and current events contain more truths than any scholarly analyse, he emphasized." For example, when on that first evening I informed him about the anecdote of the Shah of Persia assisting to a 1900 public execution on Boulevard Arago and urging to have the attorney general executed at the guillotine instead of the criminal, Roberto burst out: "What a marvelous description of oriental despotism!" In 1956, I reported to him on the case of a monkey exhibitor about whom my friend Chubak, a great Iranian writer, wrote a tragic novel. Roberto asked me to write a different scenario on a monkey educated by humans -- that returns among his free brothers… remained in the animal universe… That is exactly the fourth episode of INDIA 59. But let's turn back to our first encounter, Roberto kept us very late… We discussed about politics, culture, and religion. His curiosity was limitless, he assimilated information very quickly and several days later would bring it forth as if he had a magnetic sound recorder in his brain. Towards the early morning we were already on first-name terms!

In order to have a better grasp of his project on Moslem civilization, it is fit to place it in the context of films he produced for television. Immediately following the showing of INDIA, in the spring of 1959, Jacques Rivette and I interviewed him for the "Cahiers du Cinéma". At a certain juncture, Rivette asked him: "Why not a simple documentary, in the Flaherty way?"

Roberto answered: "What matters to me is man. I tried to depict the soul, the light that is inside these men… with all the meanings of things which surround them. For the things around them have a sense (and I underline it), since there is someone who watches, or at least this sense becomes unique by the fact that someone watches… If I had made a strict documentary, I would have been obliged to abandon all that happened inside, in the heart of these men. (Cahiers, April 1959). Here Rossellini rejoins, before the letter, one of the consequences of modern physics by which recent theorists affirm that the universe could not exist without the men - and evidently the women- who observe it.

With Rivette we then asked him: "What you in India, do you think that one make it just as well in Brasil, or even in France, in Italy? "It is then that Rossellini revealed a vast project of which his Indian adventure constituted the experimental prototype. For him the modern means of diffusion delivers to the public nothing more than false problems. "Before all, he said, it is necessary to know men as they are… Now that the world has become very minuscule, one continues not to know each other. Today we live shoulder-to shoulder. It is very important to begin to know each other. Only then will we find a solutions to problems…" For Rossellini a new world was in the process of being born and scientific and technological developments were about to over-shadow a civilization that we knew up to now. These extraordinary advances confronted us with immense problems. It was necessary therefore to begin by knowing one another." Then, he concluded: "Why not make the effort to go and see men everywhere, of telling them, showing them that the world is full of friends and no not full of enemies, even if there are some foes. The function of real cinema and television is to confront people with these realties - as they are, and to inform people of other men and other problems." He added: "I began to make some broadcasts for television. There, I can no only provide the image, but also say and explain some things. I have thus contributed to the knowledge a world very close to us, amounting to more than 400 millions men (India in 1958). Maybe my television broadcasts will be able to help in the comprehension of my movie. The film helps discern a country through emotions rather than statistics … That probably allows to penetrate it much better." …

And these movies he projected, he didn't have the intention to produce them all himself. He had rich people interested to his ideas and projects he said, - some philanthropes he ventured without mentioning any name. He asked many of us to present him with scenarios in conformity to his ideas and directives as described to briefing with Rivette and yours truly. I suggested for the Iran a simple story entitled "The Thirteenth Day of the Year." He was enthusiastic. He acquired it for an advance of one hundred thousand francs and made me to sign a contract to realize it by 1960. But for some reasons that would be too long to explain in the framework of this conference, the project remained stationary, and an evening by the end of 1959, Roberto phoned with a diminutive voice: "Feri, he said, do you still have the one hundred thousand francs? Can you lend them to me for I am in difficulty. I will give it back next week…" Needless to say, the weeks, the months, the years passed … without restitution. I don't know what is at present the legal statute of my scenario, and frankly I can't care less! I have published a few months back my cinematographic will in the United States, and have no intention to return to the cinema or to critic. In any case, the incident with Rossellini didn't tarnish in the least our friendship.

And, during the course of the years we wrote together several scenarios of which one concerns indirectly, if I may say the Islamic culture, it is about marriage and the number of the wives. Like Jean Renoir who, in La Règle du Jeu, (The Rule of Game,) made allusion to this aspect of Islam by the slant of Marcel Dalio. Roberto thought that the Moslems had solved the problems of couples. Curiously, the character of our scenario was an aviator like Roland Toutain in The Rule of the Game. But that's other story that I may narrate one day. Anyway the project on Islam in which he wanted me to collaborate is highly vaster than the question of couples in the countries of the Orient.

Evidently I was not the only source to Rossellini on the Islam. He was a tremendous reader and read books and articles at amazing speed. He discussed about them with specialists as well as ordinary people. Upon the return of each of my travel to the Middle or the Middle East, we spoke of the Moslem world and its problems such as Arab-Israeli conflict, the classic age of the Moslem civilization, of the gradual interruption of intellectual progres of Moslem world since of middle ages.

What fascinated Rossellini, was before all the role played by the Islamic civilization in the rise of the scientific and technical civilization of the West. Indeed, by the end of the Second World War, oriental studies witnessed a vast development in Europe. Researchers discovered more and more the influence of thinkers and Moslem scientists on the philosophy and the science of the Renaissance and the XVII th. century. One day I told Roberto the of the monk Vital Orderic whom Rodinson Maxim had reported to me. When the in the twelve century the future Louis VI was poisoned by his mistress, confronted with the impotence of occidental doctors, an appeal was made to a "long-haired and bearded" doctor of "Barbaria" (that is to say Andalousia) who re-established the health of prince! Roberto exlaimed: "What beautiful movie one could make around this incident!" The case of Frederic II of Hohenstaufen interested him too: the monarch discussed in arabic of philosophy and mathematics and had implanted in Lucera a Sarrasin colony together with a mosque and all the trappings of oriental life in order to attract Moslem intellectuals.

For a lot of Moslem scientists the ontology went together with scientific mind. Rossellini had been struck by the attempts of al Haytham] (the Alazen of the Latinists) to check the rise of Nile by applying to nature mathematical conceptions; by the discoveries of Biruni according to whom the desert of Saudi Arabia was in a remote time a sea. Rossellini had also read, I don't know where, this sentence of Bacon: "Philosophy was renewed principally by Aristotle in Greek language, then by Avicenna in arabe language." And he knew the affirmation of the historian Italian Geoffredo Quadri: Evidently, without Averroes the Renaissance would have been impossible!

Little by little, his initial project of making known "men to men" whom he had spoken to us upon his return from India, was transformed into something much vaster. For him it was to explore a different country and to transmit its human details - more so and especially, to revive the most important moments of the past and evoke the ideas which had contributed to the advance of humanity. He wanted to make men learn who were those who had originated the progress of the civilizations; he wanted to describe civilizations which had followed one another during the course of the history. In sum, he wanted to transmit ideas through men who had been the promoters, like for example Louis XIV and his notion of absolute power. Thus Islam, its scientists, philosophers and poets were forced at one point to enter in his undertaking just as Christianty or the Renaissance did. At every stage of its realization, his undertaking resembled looked more and more as a vast cinema encyclopedia!

In his researches and our conversations, Rossellini fished as much for ideas as for images. Some movies were fabricated in his head while he spoke or listened. At times, he took some notes on the margin of a newspaper page or on the back of a restaurant bill. Needless to say that more than often he lost these bits of flying papers. But the most important ideas stayed in the folds of his memory. One day, upon my return from a visit to Henry Corbin, I told him about the tale by Ibn Arabi, the great Andalousian mystic, and the funeral of Averroes in Cordoba. "When the coffin which contained his ashes had been loaded the flank of a carrying animal, they also placed his works on the other side in order to create a counter-weight the [maitre], on one side the Master, on the other his work." -- "Sublime" shouted Rossellini," an incomparable picture!" The following day he ordered the book of Corbin on the Sufism of Ibn Arabi!

Thus Rossellini was to say, in a permanent state of instruction. No only he learned, but he communicated also. He was not only a proponent of permanent education, he exercised it too and constantly. Self-educated and transmitter of knowledge, all in one at the same time! If the self-taught individual of the "La Nausée" would have been an artist, Anthony Roquentin would have suffered less and Sartre would have probably made movies rather than write pieces for thesis and treaties of philosophy never fully achieved. Nonetheless, the project of the history of humanity of Rossellini constituted a gigantic undertaking and I wonder why no movie director ever endavored to continue it after his death.

Going back to Islam and as I tried to show it, the project brewed in his mind by the mid-1950's, that is to say before India, his divorce from Ingrid Bergman and his final abandonment of fiction cinema. But it took final shape only after the oil crisis of 1973-74. In a letter he sent me in 1977, Rossellini wrote of a "Moslem world finally awake, that has the courage to take vengeance." He also wrote: " Now that the world is again bitterly torn by new lack of understanding and fresh rancor, it is urgent to do something useful." In addition, the embargo instituted by the OPEC countries and the sudden tripling of petroleum price catapulted the Moslem world to the frontline and into the first pages of the international media. The moment was thus ripe to captivate television with a series of movies on the present situation of Moslem world and on its contribution to worldwide civilization. Roberto wrote me: " I know the topic well enough"! This letter on the project regarding Islam has also another story that I am going to try to sum up before analyzing the content.

In 1974 and 1975, Rossellini visited me on several occasions in New York and I saw him again two or three times in Paris and Rome. In addition he spoke to me at length over the telephone. I was wondering who paid his expenses. I open here a parenthesis that reveals the insouciance of the prestigious movie-maker in regard to money. At the time of his divorce with Ingrid Bergman he spent at times the night in my apartment; he left me with some astronomical telephone bills! I will underline another incident again. When we presented at the UNESCO "Les Évadés de la Nuit," he came to inspect the theater room and stayed there for lunch. I later suggested to drive him to hishotel. "I have my taxicab" he said innocently "I kept it." Astonished, I remarked that it would cost him quite dearly. He raised the shoulders and replied: "The production will pay!"

The project on the Islam was beginning to take shape, but Rossellini had a heavy program before him and didn't think that he could start before 1977. He wanted me to take an extended long holiday in order to collaborate with him and eventually realize some movies that he considered. He had in mind a series of movies like: Socrate, The Age of Iron, The Age of the Medicis, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, Descartes, etc. In our discussions, I suggested scenarios on Haroun-al-Rashid who had exchanged embassies with Charlemagne; on Avicenna who had to flee the court of a prince in order to find protection with another; on Averroes who had invoked "rationality" as well as some other important figures.

On a day of spring of 1976, I was in a passenger plane together with an Iranian big shot who had to meet with I don't recall which Italian minister. I had to change aircraft in Rome for another one to Paris. The officials who at come to greet the Iranian dignitary insisted that I should accompany them to the official lounge. As we walked towards the entrance of lounge, I heard my name called. I turned around, a bus carrying passengers to the many flights for Paris stopped and Rossellini stepping out rushed towards me and grabbed me in his arms: " That's it", he shouted triumphantly. "We will soon begin the project on Islam, I was going to call you in New York - we must see each other"  The group of officials was losing patience as well as the travelers in the bus; the driver honked his horn repeatedly. But Rossellini did not care. "I will be in Paris in a few hours" I told him. We made appointment for the same evening at the Hotel Raphaël .

Our common friend Fulchignoni joined us for dinner at an Italian restaurant that curiously enough was named… New York ( or maybe another American name). Not an extraordinary coincidence since "Little Italy" lies in a section of New York! The enthusiasm of Rossellini had no bounds. He contrasted the capacity to meditate and philosophize of the Orient to what he termed "pragmatism" (take here "materialism") of the West and faded in, (evidently without "fade out!") about the dire situation of our planet with the population explosion, ecological devastation, nuclear danger, economic crisis, moral devaluation and all the ills of the years 1960-1970. And now to top it all, the vengeful awakening of the Moslem world...

Fulchignoni winked at me - It was high time to press on the alarm button and stop the eulogistic ardor of our friend. I disputed his notion of the "awakening" of the Islamic world. Alas Rossellini is no longer among us in order to experience how the "so-called awakening" of the Islamic world translated into a jump in the past, even more profound in countries like Iran, the Sudan, Afghanistan … and a stagnation as astounding as it is incomprehensible with other Islamic countries.

Nevertheless, that very night I pointed out to him that scholars and philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes to cite only those, were pursued by the ire of official religious representatives. They were proclaimed "heretics" in the XIIth century and this condemnation continues still today… Imperturbable, Roberto replied "Still, without them, science and philosophy would not have developed in the West." That was true and we agreed that we should make films on influential figures in order to show their contribution to universal thoughts and sciences.

Today, the contribution of Islam to universal civilization is admitted more and more. One can even learn about it in many schools and universities of the West. But at the time Rossellini thought about it, that was less evident indeed. I would even add that the breathtaking increase of oil prices blinded even intelligent persons who fumed at the "savage" Arabs! Onde day in the elevator of the Waldorf Astoria I encountered by chance Kissinger who accused jointly the Shah and OPEC to have stabbed the United States in the back!

Rossellini's idea could calm down spirits and even help to the maintaining of peace and even reconciliation. "Let people know" was his slogan. But the further his "didactic" venture grew, he matched his initial slogan with a much stronger motto: " There can only be salvation with knowledge." Since his Indian adventure and the dozens of documents he created, the limitless possibilities of education through television fascinated him. The very darkness of a movie theater, he said, gives the spectator a sort of solemnity that squashes him. The onlooker listens passively -- but in front of the TV screen, on the contrary, he remains himself, he reacts, in short there is an invisible exchange, a mysterious feed-back which allows him to better absorb information. In fact, Roberto had a glimpsed the Internet combined with television before it happened.

Following dinner, Fulchignoni drove us in his car to the Raphael and bid us goodnight. I continued my conversation with Roberto at the bar first and then in his room. I stressed upon him that Moslem scholars had worked to speak individually, without being acknowledged, without contacts and discussions between themselves, without knowing what the others did. Newton said somewhere that he owed his discoveries because he climbed on the shoulders of his predecessors. He could see further… Nothing alike in the Islamic world. Western university teachers had snatched and continued the work of the Avicennas, Birunis, Kharazmis, Averroes… Exchanges between westerners existed but not between Moslem scholars.

A difference in point of view cut me apart from Rossellini. He saw mostly the contribution of the Moslem world to Western civilization. I rather looked in the opposite way: the rejection by the Moslem world of its intellectual and scientific treasures that a backward Western world collected in order to come out of its under-development. The triumph Islamic fundamentalist theologies from the 12^th century on, rang the toll bell of the decline of civilization in the Orient. I saw there a true cultural suicide when for Rossellini it was just a transmission of knowledge. In fact, it was a sort of brain-drain, a flight or rather an expulsion of brains. Today, they still talk of the flight of Third world brains towards the West. Already, at the UNESCO
I proclaimed my disagreement. I told then, and continue to say now, that if our countries adopted a democratic atmosphere of freedom of expression and discussion, the brain flight would stop. What sort of an intellectual or scientist would like to live in the Afghanistan of the Talibans, the Iran of the mollahs, the Iraq of Saddam… or even under the politico-religious authoritarianism of other Islamic countries? At the time, I was unable to convince Rossellini. He proceeded from a universal point of view and saw only the continuity of human thoughts and sciences.

Nevertheless we found grounds for a compromise. He he told for example that in the film concerning Averroes we would witness his hurdles with fundamentalist theologians, his trial, his exile and imprisonment in the palace of the Almohade sultan and his interdiction to read or write. As always, the film was constructed in his head with powerful images: The discussion of Averroes with an adolescent Ibn Arabi; the crowds agitated by the theologians; insulting the master and throwing stones at him, (already the Intifada!); the trial and the responses of the master to fallacious accusations of heresy, and many others scenes.

In fact, the brain of Rossellini was like a genuine film archive (cinémathèque) of movies yet to be turned. I must have in my files notes concerning some of them! I regret that my friends of the" Cahiers du Cinéma" and myself never asked him in the course of our conversations to parley about his work in gestation and open partly the doors of his "personal cinémathèque!"

Where Islam is concerned he explained clearly in his letter and (I cite): " I would like to realize a series of programs on the Islamic world according to the methods I have established for tens of years. The series of reports that I propose to create is destined like my other realizations for televisions but also for schools and universities. In order to describe the history of Islamic Thoughts I will follow the didactic-informative method I have used for Socrates, the Age of the Medicis, the Taking of Power by Louis XIV, Descartes, etc."

As far as I can remember the series was supposed to encompass " the Age of Haroun-al-Rashid," since the reign of this Calif who became famous through the Thousand and One Nights, represented in a way the apogee of Moslem civilization and the radiance of Bagdad. And maybe even as Cocteau noted in his September 1953 Journal ( Le Passé
Défini, tome II p.226,) the neo-realist film directors, like the Calif who wore a merchant's garb to visit the city, disguised themselves as a camera to wander in the diverse regions of the world.

Often I told Rossellini that he should contemplate to include in his project films on popular literature of the Orient that explain more appropriately many aspects of the Moslem world than treaties and studies of scholars. I thought about the Thousand and One Nights and also this incomparable personage named Mollah Nassredin in Iran and Goha the Simple in Arab countries. In parenthesis I would say that Mollah Nassredin and the Persian philosopher Molla Sadra are the two rare mollahs I do respect. To incite Rossellini not to lose sight historical fictions, I repeated one of his own phrases: " Art has an important role to play in instruction." I added that a personage as Mollah Nassredin incorporates in his adventures many traits of oriental civilization.

The last time I saw Roberto - it was at the beginning of 1977 - he asked me to write a synopsis of the famous fictitious mollah. Many years later in 1986, I transformed into a novel the few pages I had written on the plane bringing me back to New York. May as it be, Rossellini in 1977, already had in his head films on Avicenna, Averroes, the mathematician Omar Khayyam, Ibn Khaldun, Haroun-al-Rashid and a few others.

In his letter on Islam, Rossellini mentions several times over what he calls "his method." It certainly pertains to the didactic-historic conception of his films for television. When thinking deeper, this method did not depart too much from the one he used for movies. In Rome Open City and Paisa, critics talked about him as the father of neo-realism. He did not accept gracefully this categorization. To put himself apart from others, he insisted that for him, neo-realism was before anything else a moral position. At the beginning of our friendship I did not understand what he meant by these words. Certainly there was a unity of style in his work. But his discourse varied from one story to another. But the more I reflected on his films apparently quite deviant from one-another, I thought to have found a common denominator between them that consisted in "a will to demystify." Demystification of resistance and war in Rome Open City, Paisa, the Escapees of Night; demystification of defeat in Germany Year Zero; of sanctity in Fiorettis; of philanthropy in Europe 51, of marriage in Fear and Voyage in Italy; of heroism in General della Rovere; of philosophy in Socrates; of monarchy in the Taking of Power by Louis XIV…etc, etc. His cinematographic style. What they named neo-realism, reflected this "moral position." How come? I have abandoned criticism for more than 30 years and do not have any intention to return to it. But I would like to give one or two examples of this union between moral thought and artistic style in the films of Rossellini. He alternated in all the  pure documentary and dramatical scenes. Take for example Voyage in Italy or Stromboli: procession in the streets of Naples or fishing! Berlin in ruins, and a kid running to his suicide; the deprived of Europe 51 and the drama of a wealthy middle-class woman; prison life and the identification of the little crook to the hero in Rovere, etc.

In 1959, I told Rossellini that I finally understood his meaning. For a moment he remained perplexed then he nodded his head: It is exactly what I tried to transmit when I said that for me neo-realism was before anything else a moral position." All at once I understood why his films spawned so many controversies. He was terribly ambiguous. Even during Fascist time. Thus Il Navo Bianco or Un Pilota Retorna demystified Mussolinian patriotism! I remember the long discussions in the press and religious circles on the topic of fathoming if the Fiorettis or the Miracle were Christian films. Neither Christian, nor anti-Christian. This tendency to demystification made of Rossellini an individual apart, a man open to the world, totally incapable of fanaticism, but capable of love and friendship transcending his egotism. A man who radiated sympathy and invited dialogue.

But I am departing from the subject of my conference which is : Rossellini and his project on Islam. At our last meeting that took place in the beginning of 1977, Rosselini as I said, was determined to begin the shooting, immediately after Karl Marx.

When he announced his decision I started to laugh.
"You don't believe me?" he said in an irate way.
"Yes I believe you but you will vex the Moslems."
"How come?" he asked.
"Look here, I answered, they will accuse you of anti-Islamism… Marx treated religion as the opium of the people!"

The extent of his project required important funds. Thus it was necessary to interest Moslem countries and more particularly those who had petro-dollars. Roberto wanted me to carry on with governments. It was not difficult at the United Nations where they were all represented. I asked him to send me a few pages describing his ideas so that I could show them to Moslem ambassadors. As I said in the introduction that I wrote to the distant heirs of our 1950-years team - that letter got lost in the last moments of Rossellini's life. Or rather I never received it. Nevertheless I knew of its substance, jointly settled during our last encounter.

The very object of the letter, - incite the richest government of Islamic countries to finance at least partly the project - explains the exaggerations. Of course and I already said it, the Islamic world contributed in all domains to the advancement of the entire world and more specially the western one. But one must not forget that the Islamic world itself, largely profited of the treasures accumulated by civilizations that preceded or coexisted with it. In fact, the idea of the universality of human civilization meant the whole of the Rossellini's effort.

I believe that many of his friends, of his colleagues, did not appreciate to its just value his idea. What! A film-maker who gets mixed up with philosophy and history! That is not serious! If at least he was a theater writer! The elitists of those years considered the cinema world with a sort of condescending manner. Show-business! Rossellini an encyclopedic, that rather incited them to chuckle. At the end of the eighties, Joseph Papp had organized in his theater of Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village, a projection of a few television films of Rossellini, notable the Age of the Medicis. The NewYorker intellectuals and critics yawned to death. Nevertheless they applauded because of the presence of Isabella Rossellini. They did not want to hurt her feelings.

However the incredible development of means of communications since the passing of Rossellini have definitely destroyed these attempts at partitions and amply confirmed his views. The spectators of channels like History, Discovery, Science, Biography, are increasing and multiplying. Universities and schools have their web pages on the Internet. One can follow their courses electronically. The demand for documentaries, the way Rossellini recommended does not cease to swell… Without knowing it the entire industry of spectacles is becoming Rossellinian!

It is too bad that Rossellini could not start his project on Islam. But to see things clearly, it is his fault. Indeed, he was an individualist and wanted to do everything himself, seconded by a few collaborators of his choice. He resembled those artisans who carry in the grave the secrets of their art. An encyclopedic enterprise of this kind needed an extremely well structured organization. Everything stopped when his heart ceased to beat.

Everything? No. Because he left a will. Certainly, it is not a notarized document but instead two printed texts. One of 963 titled, "Manifest didactic Cinema" in which he explained what he named the "New Pedagogy through Images." The other in 1977, the title of which is in itself a program: "A free spirit should not learn anything as a slave." He was obsessed with the mortality of civilizations, something after all quite normal for someone was born and grew in a town rich with ruins of the great epochs of the past. He was questioning himself on the means that could allow man to survive in a surrounding that scientific discoveries and technological realizations transformed continually and more and more rapidly. And, he had discovered an essential mean. Re-learn to learn. And, in the new education that he recommended cinema and mostly television would have had an all-important role to play. It was a must he said, for man to know man…

Think for a moment to films on the Islamic world in the midst of a Middle East in prey to a conflict that continues for fifty years already. If these films had been realized wouldn't they have shown to the Palestinians and Israelis that, over there, existed not only enemies, but also friends capable of understanding reciprocal grievances… I am certain that his project could have contributed to facilitate a solution to the problems afflicting the Middle East.

Fereydoun Hoveyda, May 2001

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