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Sragow: I think Hands Over the City is important and exciting for Americans to see today, because it touches on the dangers of treating bipartisan decision-making as an end in itself. In your movie, responsibility for the profit-taking and negligence in city planning falls as much on the politicians in the center, who drift between the left and the right according to public opinion, as it does on Steiger. Aren't you calling for honesty even more than for a reform ideology?
Rosi: The doctor who belongs to the center group dissociates himself from it when it supports the right-wing builder -- Steiger's character, Nottola. The doctor does this for moral reasons and in the interest of all the citizens. He wants it to be possible to reconcile the dictates of ethics with those of politics. That was the spirit of the movie, born in a moment when, at a national level, the left was inserting itself into the government, accompanied by many hopes.
Sragow: At the end of Hands Over the City, Nottola is still pulling the strings. And the last line of Lucky Luciano is, "Everyone will find themselves back at the same goddamn place where we started." Isn't one of your points that things don't change?
Rosi: Despite doubts as to how and when things will change, one needs to continue to be vigilant and act to have them change, and in the best way for the lives of the country and its citizens. That should be the purpose of politics, justice, and science.
Sragow: There's also a positive sense in which things don't change in your movies -- when they link up with the eternal. That happens most strongly in Christ Stopped at Eboli and Three Brothers, but also in Salvatore Giuliano, when the splendor of the timeless landscape mocks the ugliness of the political squabbles. Was this combination of classical and modern ambience -- of Euripides and Brecht -- part of what drew you to make Salvatore Giuliano?
Rosi: In Salvatore Giuliano, I testified to the dirty agreements between corrupt powers (the Mafia, the bandits, the police) and tied them to the first political mass assassination in Italy -- the massacre of the Communists at Portella delle Ginestre -- which is still one of Italy's unsolved mysteries. But great natural landscapes and certain immobile environments carry with them centuries of history; they often manage to offer a breath of "greatness" to events that, because of human violence, would otherwise only provoke horror.
Sragow: Anglo-Saxon critics often treated Salvatore Giuliano as a "puzzle" film. That's partly because they were unfamiliar with what you were dramatizing, like the way the code of silence (omerta) extends even to the bandits in the prisoners' dock. Didn't Italian audiences respond more directly? Is it true that the release of the film instigated an inquiry into the Mafia by Palermo's Regional Government?
Rosi: I was convinced that the only way in which I could have put together cause and effects was to structure Salvatore Giuliano as an investigation. For European audiences, the tiny percentage of obscurity deriving from this decision increased their fascination for the story. When it came out in Italy, the film was a great success, as it was immediately in France. The film did provoke the decision to constitute a parliamentary commission of investigation into the phenomenon of the Mafia in Sicily with the law dated Dec. 20, 1962, one that had been delayed many times.
Sragow: In Italy and France in the '60s, there was a movement among you and Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras and others to bring a "you are there" feeling to movies, combining documentary and feature-film techniques. You once told me that in Salvatore Giuliano, you wanted to provoke "psychodrama" by staging the actions in actual locations, with many of the real inhabitants. When the wives and mothers of arrested men scream "Assassins!" at the militia, or Giuliano's mother cries over his corpse, the scenes have a newsreel's rawness, but also an emotionalism that newsreels don't have. How did you achieve this new style?
Rosi: You must remember that Salvatore Giuliano was the first of these movies, in 1962; Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers was 1966, and Costa-Gavras' Z, 1969. In Salvatore Giuliano I combined the style of a document to that of interpretation and the construction of fiction without ever losing the sense of truth which that film needed. That is why I decided to shoot in the real places where those events took place little more than 10 years before. That is why I put together very few professional actors with many improvised actors chosen in the streets and houses of those places. That is why I spoke of a kind of "psychodrama." The women screaming "Assassins!" were the same who had screamed that in the same streets of Montelepre a decade before. And so, to interpret the role of the mother of Giuliano, I chose a farmer, mother of 10 sons, one of whom had been killed under similar circumstances to those in which Giuliano was killed.
