Inside the Court of Louis XIV

This week marks the long-anticipated release of Roberto Rossellini’s beloved The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, the crowning achievement of the filmmaker’s remarkable end-of-career endeavor to capture the history of human knowledge in a series of provocatively minimalist television films (also including Blaise Pascal, Cartesius, and The Age of the Medici, released in conjunction as Eclipse Series 14). For Louis XIV, Rossellini scholar Tag Gallagher created a multimedia essay in which he elucidates the meanings behind the style of this modernist-humanist “horror film,” and Rossellini’s other history works. Watch a clip from that new video here.