A Film Canon

The most comprehensive statement of Rossellini's idiosyncratic Christian Humanism takes Franciscanism as its closest analogy, albeit by deflecting any biographical, or even particularly doctrinal, exposition of the saint into a series of vignettes delineating the practical concerns facing his community of monks, into which he is fully absorbed. In this way, Rossellini retains the anarrative structure of the florilegium from which the vignettes are taken, as well as providing a stylistic corollary in the pervasive, medieval one- dimensionality that identifies the monks with their abstracted, rural surroundings, transforming topography into topology in a manner that recalls his neorealist trilogy, but in mystic, rather than traumatic terms, with the exception of a single vignette that takes place outside the community ("How Brother Ginepro was judged on the gallows..."), and whose intense, chaotic violence could be taken as a synecdoche for that trauma. It makes sense, then, that Francis is presented both as the original peacemaker, and as a naive, innocence, exuberant child, transforming poverty from an abject to a beautiful, or even sublime phenomenon, such that the visceral, confronting act of cutting off a live pig's foot can become a source of mystical contemplation, and physical pain a mere manifestation of grace. Similarly, Francis' sceptical attitude to language ("You must begin each sermon with these words..."I talk and talk, yet accomplish little"...it is better to preach by example than by words") provides a welcome counterpoint to Rossellini's speechy, melodramatic inclinations, particularly prevalent in the two remaining installments of the purgation trilogy.