Published in 1987, ten years after his death at age seventy-one, “Fragments d’une Autobiographie” is Roberto Rossellini’s fascinating self-portrait and literary testament. A slim volume written in French, (“the first language I learned growing up before being taught Italian, or rather the Roman dialect.”) in which the iconic neorealist director evokes not only his personal and professional credo but his longtime quest to remain “an independent free spirit and a free man.”

In this breviary never translated in English, he eloquently distills some of the themes that matter to him. Italy, families, France, Hollywood … Rossellini lays himself bare, keen to set the record straight, notably about some of the misconceptions he believes to have been unjustifiably labeled with over the years. His intellectual brilliance in full display, reveals how he sees himself through selective memories and intimate confessions, but also as he wants to be perceived and remembered. At one point, he quite provocatively states that “It is about time I destroy the fundamental error made about me: I am not a filmmaker. Even if I possess a sort of expertise in that domain, movie making is not my profession. My job is to perpetually learn how to be a man.”

In the twenties, his wealthy father, head of an important construction company, he had built in Rome The Corso extolled as the most modern and beautiful movie theater in the country. “This is where I started to nourish myself with cinema.” Growing up, he was encouraged to develop “independence and an inquiring mind”. Life at home, via Ludovisi, just opposite the Hotel Savoia, was a mix of “intoxicating headiness and political awakening, where no subjects were taboo,” as a mix of eminent luminaries, musicians, painters, and novelists populated the dinner table weekly. There were periods of rebellion, of course, in his late teens and early twenties. “I started to skip classes at the university, I was chasing girls. I was constantly in love. I was racing motorbikes and cars, Fiat, Salmson, Amilcar, taking insane risks, fueled nonstop day and night by a rage for living.”

Instead of furthering his studies, feeling he was learning nothing, he started to dabble in screenwriting, dubbing, and sound effects. It led him, quite naturally, to directing, “trying to film the truth.” In 1940, Fantasia Sottomarina, (Undersea Fantasy), a ten-minute documentary helped seal his burgeoning reputation. “It was for me an indecisive and teeming period … during which my instinct commanded me to favor the observation of reality rather than to obey the conventions in effect then,” he recalls. “Italian cinema at the time was fascist from head to toe. I used all my ability to direct films without being trapped in that system. Sure, I had to wriggle out quite a lot to succeed, but in the end, I managed to be as strong, slippery, and elusive as an eel.” It worked. He was in demand for a while before being blacklisted by Italian producers.

Then came the harsh and dark years during the war. He managed to survive under the radar of the Fascists after joining the Resistance in July 1943 when parts of the country, including his hometown, were occupied by the Germans, which lead to the inspiration for Rome, Open City. “It was an obscure and complicated existence, where the sublime mixed with the grotesque as often in life but characteristically enlarged because of the troubled times.”

Referring to the groundbreaking opus that put him on the world map in 1945, he writes that the film “held an analysis of society but left a feeling of a great ambiguity from an esthetic point of view. It was unconscious cinema. The day I realized what I did and what I wanted to do, I left the system and quit this world of appearances …” Rossellini did not expect the film to resonate so much all over the world. “Success is like the flu,” he notes, “there is a map of the contagion crossed by inexplicable currents.” Thanks to the film, his lover Anna Magnani became a star. “I loved her”, he confesses. “Her passion, her potent vitality, her biting wit. Our affair was violent like everything she did.”

His next opus, Paisà, followed in a similar vein, and with Germany Year Zero, released in 1948, he completed his unofficial war film trilogy. His stature as one of the most original voices in European cinema was undeniable. “The transitory ephemeral success of those films was based on a misconception. One has endlessly speculated on neorealism and the fact I was considered its putative father, trying to see in it a school, a system, and in the end a new aesthetic. … In fact, I simply took advantage of the fact that all the usual structures of filmmaking were down to start inventing a technique allowing me to make movies outside a studio.”

It was not long after that he received a letter from Ingrid Bergman. She was ready to work with him. He tells in detail about their first meeting in London where the actress was shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn. Of their subsequent long conversations at the hotel George V in Paris and how he warned her about his special method of working, that he would not show her a script, to begin with. She agreed and he tailored Stromboli for her. “Then I did Journey to Italy for which I got colossal insults all over the world. And then I directed Europe 51. And the press started to write that I was ruining Ingrid’s career. In fact, we were battling the all-mighty organization that is Hollywood, where reputations were built and destroyed, regimented by laws of incommensurable frivolity.” Rossellini made it clear he would not participate in such a hypocritical game. “After courageously resisting for eight years, Ingrid was now reasoning on different terms. She had risked her career for me, putting at stake the most formidable asset she had for the man she loved.” Their marriage was over. Bergman went on to do Anastasia for 20^th Century Fox and Hollywood won its star back.

“Hollywood and I suffered from reciprocal allergy,” he asserts, claiming the same happened with Italian cinema. “With very few exceptions, I was never really admitted nor concerned by it”, nonetheless mentioning his friendships with Federico Fellini and Vittorio de Sica. “Solitude is my province”, he admits, “and it is not now that I will enter the system.”

In 1957, Rossellini went to India. It was a new chapter for him. Artistic and personal. There, he met Sonali Dasgupta who became his next wife and whom he credits with helping him “see and understand and get rid of all preconceived ideas about India.” During his sojourn, he purposely avoided the touristy approach, refusing to visit any famous monuments and landmarks. “When I had to pass in front of the Taj Mahal, I looked the other way.” He did not want to be part of what he calls “the India of illusions that western visitors brought back in their luggage.” For thirteen months, he traveled from north to south with a small crew, minimum equipment, and … a hundred kilos of spaghettis!” The result, India: Matri Bhumi was a docu-fiction that reflected, he hoped, “the country of realism by excellence.” He proudly mentions that in Les Cahiers du Cinéma Jean-Luc Godard deemed the film “beautiful like the creation of the world.”

On the subject of New Wave filmmakers, he acknowledges the influence he might have had. “They have said repeatedly that through my example they could free themselves from moviemaking exclusively based on money criteria and escape the star system in place … In a way, they are my children as they claim a Rossellinian filiation.” But, he wonders, “what have most of them accomplished with my legacy and in the realm of cinema d’auteur?” Without naming them, he asserts that in twenty years, Godard excepted, they have endlessly rehashed the same navel-gazing and puberty trouble shenanigans.”

In some of the fragments of this autobiography, Rossellini is prone to quote Engels, Plato, Balzac, Saint Paul, Comenius, and Karl Marx whose works inspired him. He vilipends the “media that continue to spread ignorance made of factual simplifications, the disease of wanting to intellectualize everything, an intellectual plague far from helping to develop knowledge, they denied their audiences any relation with reality.”  His equally virulent and pessimistic ire targets several other topics: social injustice, the decline of cultural standards, the corrupted world of show business, Western Civilization’s deep crisis, the lack of human conscience, the castration of the education system as he sees perpetuated today. No wonder he announces in the first sentence that the book is “a deliberate political act.”

He is more at peace writing about his friendship with Jean Renoir, whose Grand Illusion he admired greatly, he says that “astonishingly, we never talked about cinema and movies. We had so many more topics to discuss together.” Or when he pays homage to Marcel Pagnol. “I had seen Marius, Angèle and La femme du boulanger before the War.  His films were a fantastic breath of truth. Neorealism avant la lettre, it was him.”

With eerie prescience, he warns the French. “You are on the verge of losing your cultural identity. You are so Americanized even though (you are) not the only ones. Time will come if we don’t pay attention, when all over the world the same culture of consumeristic readymade entertainment based on show-business, western, silly eroticism, brutish violence, and televised game shows, will run rampant. In fact, those times are already here. The tide of mediocrity is rising, like a new deluge.”

One final piece of advice from Rossellini. “We have to hurry building the future. It is the only real-time we are living.” It is moving to note this was written in January 1977, six months before his sudden death of a heart attack in Rome, the city, his name is forever linked with.