The Age of the Medici, originally released in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 as L'età di Cosimo de Medici (The Age of Cosimo de Medici), is a 1973 3-part TV series about the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, directed by Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...

. The series was shot in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 in the hope of securing a North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

n release, which it failed to achieve, and was later dubbed into Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 and shown on state television. The films are: Cosimo de Medici, The Power of Cosimo and Leon Battista Alberti: Humanism.

Like several other TV series directed by Rossellini during the 1970s

1970s

File:1970s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: US President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office after the Watergate scandal in 1974; Refugees aboard a US naval boat after the Fall of Saigon, leading to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; The 1973 oil...

, The Age of the Medici is a form of docudrama

Docudrama

In film, television programming and staged theatre, docudrama is a documentary-style genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events. As a neologism, the term is often confused with docufiction....

, in which historical information is communicated via dramatized conversations between figures from history, and between ordinary people. They are unabashedly "teaching films." As Dave Kehr explains, "The dialogue is bluntly didactic, with characters telling one another things they would already know entirely for the benefit of the audience.... Rossellini isn’t asking his viewers to identify with his characters or become caught up in their personal dramas ... Instead he creates a detached perspective." Each scene plays out in a single long take

Long take

A long take is an uninterrupted shot in a film which lasts much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general, usually lasting several minutes. It can be used for dramatic and narrative effect if done properly, and in moving shots is often accomplished...

, with the camera slowly moving and zooming to create different framings of the action, or, as Kehr puts it, "to close in on details or investigate relationships".

When the films debuted in New York's Public Theater in 1973, New York Times movie critic Vincent Canby noted that while not difficult, the austere style of the films, "as well as Rossellini's total lack of concern for what might be called performance, take some getting used to. Yet once you've grasped the method and the rhythm of the films, they are a ravishingly beautiful experience":

The actors make few attempts to act. They recite as they walk about magnificent locations, sounding and looking like ferociously gifted dress-extras. The talk has been rather flatly dubbed into English so that it's not always possible to tell who is speaking.

Forget these problems, though. The film is about what is being said and what you can see around and behind these figures. When you connect with The Age of the Medici, it has the effect of reducing every other film you've seen recently to the status of an ornament.

Rationale for the films

In his book, Un Esprit Libre (A Free Spirit), published in France in 1977, the year he died, Rossellini wrote of his belief that the cinema had reached a dead end. Instead he felt there was a pressing societal need for an education for the whole person in order to free people from the terrible dangers of specialization, which he saw as as another form of ignorance. "We are neither ants, nor bees, nor spiders," he wrote, "and yet we have become regimented, stereotyped. . . ." He believed that education today has an effect of "fixing and maintaining" what is already established in a society. He also found ridiculous educational methods that fill brains with facts while suffocating all interest into the why's of life and the world."