In 1966, Roberto Rossellini directed La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV for French television. With this film, he inaugurated a radical turn in his career – a move away from the neorealism that made him famous, toward a form of cinema-saggio, or film-essay, adopting a didactic type of filmmaking and moving away from conventional storytelling. Rosselini turned to the lives of pivotal historical figures, each emblematic of a significant transformation in human thought and consciousness. His subjects ranged from Socrates and Blaise Pascal to Louis XIV and Jesus Christ. At the time of his death, Rossellini was preparing similarly ambitious projects focused on figures like Karl Marx and key moments such as the American Revolution.
La prise de pouvoir stages the quiet consolidation of absolute power following Cardinal Mazarin’s death, portraying Louis XIV’s transformation into the Sun King. The film eschews psychologisation for tableau-like compositions and long takes, focusing instead on the slow crystallisation of power through its gestures, rituals and spatial arrangements. It’s a cinema of patience and distance, exemplifying the clarity and formal austerity of Rossellini’s late style. Rossellini even developed a remote-controlled zoom to “lead the gaze” without cutting. French critic Serge Daney – whom we dedicated an issue to before the summer – wrote that La prise de pouvoir avoids the pitfall of trying to revive the past. Rossellini films these historical events like events, as if they are happening for the first time. “Cinema is an art that always fails in reconstructing the past,” Daney writes. “But what it can do is seize the moment when something is passing.”
For Rossellini, television offered a unique opportunity. “Modern society and modern art have been destructive of man,” he told André Bazin. “But television is an aid to his rediscovery.” Slavoj Žižek has gone so far as to call Rossellini’s historical TV films “the Rossellini to be rehabilitated,” preferring their rigorous minimalism to the celebrated neorealist works. No longer confined to the “warm” cocoon of cinema, Rossellini saw television as a medium “without traditions” he believed could reconnect audiences with history, humanity, and truth. Jean Renoir, Rossellini’s contemporary and co-interviewee with Bazin, added: “And if you and I, Roberto, are turning towards television, it is because television is in a technically primitive state that may restore to artists that fighting spirit of early cinema, when everything that was made was good.”
On the occasion of this screening, Sabzian will also publish a new issue dedicated to the writings of André Bazin on television. Alongside Rossellini, Bazin recognised television’s potential to redefine the relationship between the image and reality. His reflections on the medium, often overshadowed by his more widely known writings on cinema, resonate deeply with Rossellini’s televisual turn.
