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L'amore (1948) Background

Released between his neo-realist classics Paisà (1946) and Germania anno zero (1948), Roberto Rossellini’s 1948 diptych film L’amore is considered by some to be a minor work, and received mixed reviews in Italy upon its release.   However, the film displays many of the techniques and themes that elevated Rossellini to near-legendary status both in his homeland and overseas.   Despite this, the film may have been largely forgotten today were it not for a US legal wrangle in the 1950s that attracted renewed attention to ‘Il Miracolo’ (The Miracle), the second segment of the film, and brought about a change in American law.

L’amore is comprised of two short films - Una voce umana (A Human Voice), and Il Miracolo (The Miracle) – both of which were developed to provide a stage for the acting prowess of mercurial Italian actress Anna Magnani, who was Rossellini’s lover at the time.   In fact, the idea for Una voce umana, which is an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue La voix humaine (The Human Voice), was Magnani’s.   She had already performed the role in Rome in 1942 at a gala to celebrate her most successful stage revue, and in early 1947, she joined Rossellini in Paris to receive an award for her performance in his Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City) where she suggested Una voce umana as a joint project.   Having recently met Cocteau, who had expressed his admiration for Paisà, Rossellini was enthusiastic.   He was filming Germania, anno zero at the time, but the production was bogged down with problems and Rossellini was more than willing to temporarily abandon the shoot in order to employ a French crew to help him film Una voce umana in Paris in just two weeks.

The completed film ran for a scant 35 minutes, making it too short to be released on its own.   While Rossellini resumed work on Germania, anno zero, he pressed his screenwriters for another short story, to be specifically written for Magnani, which should complement Una voce umana.   It was a young Federico Fellini, who had worked with Rossellini on both Roma, città aperta and Paisà, who came up with Il Miracolo, the story of a simple peasant girl who believes she is about to give birth to Jesus after she is impregnated by a passing tramp.

The two films, combined into a diptych called L’amore, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 1948.   The film was reviewed by Piero Regnoli for L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican journal, which commented that, ‘Opinions may vary and questions may arise – even serious ones – of a religious nature (not to be diminished by the fact that the woman portrayed is mad [because] the author who attributed madness to her is not mad)…’   Regnoli noted that there were ‘passages of undoubted cinematic distinction,’ but criticised the film for being, ‘on such a pretentiously cerebral plane that it reminds one of the early d’Annunzio,’ before concluding that ‘we continue to believe in Rossellini’s art and we look forward to his next achievement.’

However, following the film’s premiere in Rome in September 1948, the Vatican’s censorship agency, the Catholic Cinematographic Centre, was not so understanding, and denounced ‘Il Miracolo’ as ‘an abominable profanation from religious and moral viewpoints.’   The Italian government was obliged by law to ban anything that offended the Catholic Church, however for some reason the CCC failed to invoke any sanction, and the Government’s own censorship agency gave the film a standard ‘nulla osta’ clearance, allowing it to be freely shown throughout the country.

 In America, the film ‘Il Miracolo’ received a licence from the New York State on 2^nd March 1949 permitting exhibition without English subtitles.   However, it wasn’t screened until it received a second licence on 30^th November 1950 for its’ inclusion in a trilogy subtitled in English called Ways of Love, which also included two French films, Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne (1936) and Marcel Pagnol’s Jofroi (1933).

The trilogy opened on 12^th December 1950 at the Paris Theatre on 58^th Street in Manhattan, and although it was almost immediately condemned by the National Legion of Decency as ‘a sacrilegious and blasphemous mockery of Christian religious truth,’ the National Board of Review considered the film ‘especially worth seeing'.   On 27^th December the film was voted best foreign language film by the New York Film Critics’ Circle, despite the fact that four days earlier, Edward T. McCaffrey, the Commissioner of Licenses for New York City, had ordered that the film, which he declared to be ‘officially and personally blasphemous,’ be withdrawn.   Failure to do so, he warned, would result in the suspension of the license to operate the Paris Theatre.

Within a week of McCaffrey’s decree the film was on the cinema’s program once more, thanks to a ruling by the New York Supreme Court that McCaffrey had no powers relating to film censorship and had therefore exceeded his authority when he demanded the film be withdrawn.

Any hopes that exhibition problems had been overcome were dashed, however, on Sunday 7^th January 1951 when His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman issued a statement, which was read at all masses in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, condemning the film and urging ‘all right thinking citizens’ to campaign for a tightening of censorship laws.

Rossellini, who two years earlier had received Vatican approval for the making of a film about the life of St. Francis which would include members of the Franciscan Order, sent a telegram to Cardinal Spellmann protesting against the boycott of ‘Il Miracolo.’

Rossellini wrote: ‘In The Miracle men are still without pity because they still have not come back to God, but God is already present in the faith, however confused, of that poor, persecuted woman; and since God is wherever a human being suffers and is misunderstood, The Miracle occurs when at the birth of the child the poor, demented woman regains sanity in her maternal love.’

The Board of Regents was inundated with ‘hundreds of letters, telegrams, post cards, affidavits and other communications’ both condemning and defending ‘Il Miracolo’ and its Chairman appointed three Board members to review the decision of the Motion Picture Division to grant the two licenses.   These members viewed the film on 15^th January 1951 and subsequently declared the film to be sacrilegious.   Four days later an order was issued to the licensees to demonstrate at a hearing on 30^th January 1951 why the license should not be revoked because of that reason.

On 16^th February 1951, the Board of Regents revoked the license, declaring that the ‘mockery or profaning of those beliefs that are sacred to any portion of our citizenship is abhorrent to the laws of this great State.’   Their decision was subsequently upheld by the Appellate Division, who stated that the banning of any motion picture ‘that may fairly be deemed sacrilegious to the adherents of any religious group… is directly related to public peace and order.’

The film’s US distributor took the case as far as the Supreme Court, and on 26^th May 1952, the decision in the case of Burstyn v. Wilson overturned the Board of Regents’ decision by ruling that film was not merely a business but also a means of expression that came under the protection of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.   The court’s decision reversed a ruling made in the case of Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Comm'n in 1915, and also found that sacrilege could not be a reason for artistic censorship.

 Una voce umana, the accompanying piece to ‘Il Miracolo’ that made up the original film L’Amore was not without problems of its own.   For many years it was out of distribution due to legal difficulties over the rights to Cocteau’s play, until a restored print was screened at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco in 1978.

 [ADD]

The Films of Roberto Rossellini by Peter E. Bondanella, pp 15-16, Cambridge University Press; Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures, 1945-2000. Contributors: Carlo Testa - author. Publisher: Praeger. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: 14-15; The Films of Federico Fellini. Contributors: Peter Bondanella - author. Publisher: Cambridge University Press. Place of Publication: Cambridge, England. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number: 16.

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