Disc Reviews

The Roberto Rossellini Ingrid Bergman Collection

• 4th Aug 2015

The affair that only lasted for a few years between Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini and Swedish Hollywood mega-star Ingrid Bergman had a huge effect on cinema and significantly was the first post-war meeting between Hollywood and so-called European arthouse cinema, the first meeting since the European émigrés fled Nazism in in the 1930s and early 40s (ironically Rossellini’s early work was directing propaganda films for Mussolini). On one of the extras on the three discs released by BFI there is an Italian documentary film, ‘Bergman & Magnani: The War of the Volcanoes’ that charts the dissolution of the director’s relationship with the uber-strong Italian actress Anna Magnani (who had made a major appearance in his ground breaking film, Rome: Open City in 1945). He literally left her and travelled over to Hollywood promising to bring Bergman back with him which he promptly did, with her leaving her Swedish husband behind in Hollywood. After a whirlwind romance and her subsequently falling pregnant out of wedlock the US government prompted to label Rossellini as evil. A short while later Rossellini began filming Stromboli (1950) on the title island off Sicily, while his ex-lover made a very similar film called Volcano made the same year near Vesuvius.

Stromboli has been beautifully cleaned up, as all the films in this collection have been in 2012. The story follows a Lithuanian refugee who, like many after the war has lost all her money and property and is kept in an internment camp in Italy. She befriends a much younger Italian soldier there who marries her and takes her back to his island which he has romanticised to her. On arriving she befriends the local priest and soon begins to feel trapped on this lump of volcanic rock. Regretting her decision to marry him she tries and struggles to both be accepted by the locals and find an escape. Stromboli marked the turning point for the director moving away from neo-realism towards a more psychological form of cinema. While the director shows life in the village including the almost ritualistic tuna fishing expedition he focuses on the dark psychological trauma that the émigré is going through. Once again the Swedish actress shows with the simplest of expressions the trouble she is going through without any unnecessary over acting – this was a mark of many of Bergman’s performances.

Chronologically the next film in the collection is Journey to Italy (1953) also known as Viaggio in Italia charting the decline in the pairs relationship as it portrays a middle-aged English couple in Naples who are passively aggressively indifferent to each other as we witness the disintegration of their marriage. They have arrived at a villa nestled between Naples and Mount Vesuvius which they hope to sell off following the death of a relation. He (George Sanders) is a boorish stuffed shirt not interested in culture but instead looking forward to freedom, while she (Bergman) is romantic, cultured and feels supressed. While she goes looking at museums, visits Pompeii and the hot springs he would rather go drinking in Capri. There is something of a travelogue about this film but it works very well and is still enjoyable after many viewings but there is little if any sense of neo-realism. We seem them reconcile during a religious festival but we know that this will only be short lived.

The final main film in the collection on the disc is the rarely seen German-Italian co-production, Fear (1954). Filmed in the noirish streets of Munich, the director has once again returned to Germany (after his neo-realist classic, Germany – Year Zero (1948), available on the other BFI box set collection, ‘The War Trilogy’). This is a distinctly psychological thriller about the wife of an eminent scientist who is being blackmailed by a woman of ill repute with the filming following her nervous downfall. Although I had previously seen it a number of times in Germany, this is the first time this film has been available on DVD or video in the UK and is rarely even seen. While it would have benefitted from its German or Italian language versions (shown as Angst in Germany and some other countries) it was good to see, even if some of the acting isn’t that great.

Otherwise the extras on the discs are plentiful – apart from the aforementioned documentary there is also a late 1981 NFT interview with Bergman, a video essay by Tag Gallagher, an amusing and artistic tribute to her father by former model and actress Isabella Rossellini and perhaps most significantly of all the rare showing of a 1952 film by the director (not with Bergman), The Machine That Kills Bad People (1952). This fantasy or wish-fulfilment film is about a camera that is able to freeze and kill people who are bad in a small Amalfi village. While the inclusion of this film may seem incongruous,  this film rarely seen anywhere goes against neo-realism which, contrary to previous held beliefs that Bergman had influenced Rossellini to move away from neo-realism as he was working on this project before he started making Stromboli.

The box set is not a complete collection of the collaboration between Rossellini and Bergman for it omits Europa ’52 (1951) (included on the US Criterion release of the restored films that omitted Fear), as well as a segment for the portmanteau film, We the Women and the dull theatrical adaptation of the story of Joan of Arc, Giovanna d’Arco al rogo (both 1954), the second time the actress had played the saintly female warrior. By then their relationship was over but marked a turning point in both their careers as Bergman headed for more mature roles while Rossellini eventually moved to directing French and Italian TV movies. Never the less this is an interesting body of films and great that BFI have been able to release them.

Chris Hick