Post Description

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI'S 
WAR TRILOGY
complete 3-disc boxset

criterion.com/boxsets/689



Studio: Criterion

DVD RELEASE DATE: JANUARY 26, 2010


ABOUT THE BOXSET:
Roberto Rossellini is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. And it was with his trilogy of films made during and after World War II -- Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero -- that he left his first transformative mark on cinema. With their stripped-down aesthetic, largely nonprofessional casts, and unorthodox approaches to storytelling, these intensely emotional works were international sensations and came to define the neorealist movement. Shot in battle-ravaged Italy and Germany, these three films are some of our most lasting, humane documents of devastated postwar Europe, containing universal images of both tragedy and hope.

If "Rome, Open City" wasn't actually the beginning of modern cinema, it was a beginning, one of the films that, along with "Paisan" and "Germany Year Zero" and other neo-realist films, transformed the ways in which future generations of filmmakers would think about the relationship between cinema and the real world. The last sixty plus years of world cinema would not have looked the same without Rossellini's pioneering work.



Rome Open City
Roberto Rossellini, 1945

This was Roberto Rossellini�s revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Rome Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II.


Paisan
Roberto Rossellini, 1946

Roberto Rossellini�s follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan, which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley

Germany Year Zero
Roberto Rossellini, 1948

The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini�s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin shown through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy.