The Flowers of St. Francis

Roberto Rossellini – 1950 – Italy

Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis is a powerful reminder that art should always transcend rather than cater to politics.  A prime mover of the neo-realist school of post-war Italian cinema, Rossellini was probably as vocal a socialist as any of them – De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, etc. – but he didn’t seem to feel it his duty to turn his own films into agitprop.  The neo-realists’ politics, for a short time anyway, felt more anti-fascist and anti-clerical than technically communist, and it was heavily oriented towards the labor class and prone to humor over diatribes.  Since the 60s, though, cinematic Leftism has steadily deteriorated into a kind of smarmy and elitist self-righteousness, the chief symptom of which is knee-jerk sneering at religious faith.  The tone of too many presumably “socially conscious” films conjures the image of the collective smirk of the moderately educated while telling the slightly less educated how to behave.  Co-written by Federico Fellini, The Flowers of St. Francis focuses on a man entirely self-removed from the political turmoil of his day and yet appears to be forever influencing and influenced by the world around him.  Boldly plotless, it is not a sentimental bio-pic as has been frequently made; instead it tells a handful of anecdotes about St. Francis and relays them like parables in a poetic film language that strives for transcendence.  In his only film appearance, a real monk named Nazario Gerardi was persuaded by Rossellini to star as Francis/Francesco and his performance attains the glowing spirituality of Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) or even John Carradine in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).  Unlike today’s trendy transgressive filmmakers, Rossellini paid a price for making what seemed to be such an uncritical portrayal of religion; the film was jeered by politically-focused Leftist critics but resonated with popular audiences, a clear indication of the huge gulf between the real world and the theorists who intend to shape it.  And of course, for what it’s worth, François Truffaut famously called The Flowers of St. Francis “the most beautiful film in the world.”