Francesco Rosi Was a Master of Left-Wing Political Cinema
Italy’s Francesco Rosi produced an unforgettable series of political movies. They feature mob bosses and oil tycoons, corrupt politicians and conspiring spooks, showing how Italian elites used every dirty trick available to exclude the Left from power.
The Italian director Francesco Rosi shot some of the most important political movies ever made. Rosi was interested in a social structure that produces crime because it is itself criminal — and in exposing the legal injustices of the capitalist system. (Charles-André Habib / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
The Italian director Francesco Rosi shot some of the most important political movies of the 1960s and ’70s. Reinterpreting the darkest moments of recent history, he refuted the liberal narratives according to which Italy suffered from the opacity of its economic and political system, compared to the transparency and efficiency of international capitalism.
As a young intellectual, Rosi was interested in a social structure that produces crime because it is itself criminal, not in desperate people who break the rules and thrive, thanks to the fragility of an Italian state that has always struggled to assert itself against the interference of the Catholic Church and the survival of ancient semifeudal powers.
In other words, Rosi sought to draw attention to the legal injustices of the system, in line with the traditional analyses of the Marxist left, mainly represented by the Socialist and Communist Parties. As a (communist) character in one of Rosi’s films puts it: “They always follow the rules. But it’s the rules that don’t work.”
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