8 - La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV: Toward a Didactic Cinema for Television

Summary

Between the time Rossellini achieved commercial success with Il generale Delia Rovere, which he had not enjoyed since the release of his early neorealist classics, and the making of La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV for French television, he underwent a major shift in his thinking about the cinema. As early as 1961 in an essay entitled “Audiovisual Means of Communication and Man in a Scientific and Industrial Society,” Rossellini argued, displaying his habitual naiveté, that traditional cinema, following the economic model encouraged by Hollywood, fostered a homogenized mass culture that hindered independent, rational thought, whereas television could provide a democratic diffusion of culture to large, commercial audiences. In an often-cited interview with Cahiers du Cinéma in the following year, Rossellini made an important distinction to which he referred constantly when discussing the didactic potential of television. He rejected the concept of “education” (since even the word's etymology implied conditioning, guiding, directing, and ultimately coercing the person involved in the “lesson”) in favor of what he preferred to call “information” or “instruction” that would allow the “student” to make his or her own choices. In a subsequent Cahiers du Cinéma interview in 1963, Rossellini explained his rejection of commercial cinema but also attacked proponents of cinema verité, who proposed rejecting artistic interpretation in noncommercial film-making. For Rossellini, moral choices and artistic interpretation were not antithetical to the goal of uncovering truth or reality that his rejection of commercial fictional cinema implied.