The Hazards of History

Uomini contro (Just Another War, 1970), one of Rosi’s most undervalued films, exposes the barbarity of war and the absurdity of military dogma by focusing on the plight of the common soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Great War, many of whom resorted to mutiny, desertion, and self-mutilation to resist being sent on suicide missions. Rosi’s obsession with the moral as well as the physical hazards of war finds new expression in La tregua (The Truce, 1997), adapted from Primo Levi’s memoir of his return home after Auschwitz. The film is stylistically notable for the eschewing of visual and theatrical effects and the concentration on the ordinary experience of a heterogeneous group of people, Jews and non-Jews alike, confronting the uncertainty of what awaited them as free beings. Claiming that he wanted “to turn Levi into an eye,” Rosi also aspires to the role of a timely witness.