This introduction to what I consider the most interesting and significant films by Roberto Rossellini, a small percentage of his total artistic production, aims at analyzing the truly original elements of Rossellini's style and defining the many ways in which he helped to shape the history of postwar Italian cinema. Until only a few years ago, critical discussions of Rossellini virtually ignored his work during the fascist period, but I trust my overview of Rossellini's career and the chapter devoted to a film from this period will demonstrate how mistaken such a perspective was. Although Rossellini himself constantly refers to a search for truth and realism in his cinema (and is universally acknowledged as the father of Italian neorealism), his notion of exactly what kind of “truth” could be conveyed by the art of the cinema evolved drastically until the latter part of his career when he abandoned the commercial cinema completely for work in the upstart medium of television.

This book considers only seven films, but I believe they are the films that will continue to define Rossellini's genius in the future or will be deemed crucial in explaining the evolution of his cinematic style regardless of the ideological foundation of the critic examining Rossellini's works. Although this new series on great directors is not the proper place for academic polemics, I have also tried to suggest in the notes how a number of critics, particularly those associated first with Cahiers du Cinéma and more recently with Screen and their Marxist followers in the United States, have used their interpretations of Rossellini's works in their polemical arguments with their intellectual or academic opponents.