DVD of the Week: The Taking of Power by Louis XIV

For some filmmakers, Italian Neo-Realism meant going into the street and filming stories of contemporary life; for Roberto Rossellini, whose 1966 film “The Taking of Power by Louis XIV” I discuss in this clip, it meant filming history on the wing. That’s why there’s no essential difference between his films of the nineteen-forties (such as “Germany Year Zero,” which I discussed here last year), his melodramas of the nineteen-fifties with his then-wife, Ingrid Bergman (such as “Voyage to Italy”), and his historical portraits of the ’sixties and seventies. In this film, Rossellini (with the screenwriter Jean Gruault), traces the rise of modern French culture—indeed, of modern France—to very specific moments in the young king’s struggle to preserve his fragile reign. In the process, he makes the places, artifacts, and practices of today’s France—those that are accessible to any traveller, reader, or, for that matter, recreational eater—vibrate with the dramatic tensions, passions, and ideas of the characters he films.