In his best films, the director Francesco Rosi, who has died aged 92, was essentially a crusading, investigative journalist concerned with the corruption and inequalities of the economically depressed Italian south. He believed that “the audience should not be just passive spectators”: he wanted to make people think and question.
He established his international reputation with Salvatore Giuliano (1962), winning the Silver Bear award at the Berlin film festival. The film employed a documentary style to investigate the story of a notorious Sicilian bandit and folk hero, assembling a seemingly random series of flashbacks from the discovery of Giuliano’s bullet-ridden body in 1950, and exploring through the bandit’s life and death the socio-political complexities of postwar Sicily. With this labyrinthine structure, Rosi explained, he intended to convey “the impossibility of resolving the truth”. Gianni Di Venanzo’s black-and-white photography contributed hugely to the effect. “Black and white,” said Rosi, “is the only way to make good cinema … Black and white is imaginative, it’s a suggestion, not a limitation.”
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