Stromboli

When Ingrid Bergman left Hollywood to make Stromboli in 1949, the experience was a traumatic one in all senses. For Bergman, it meant being taken out of the comfort of the studio and shooting on location, using completely different methods. There was also her developing relationship with the director Roberto Rossellini and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage. RKO by all accounts were unhappy with the finished film, so different from their usual productions. Then there was the storyline of the film itself; a Czech woman who marries to escape the confines of an internment camp and finds herself in a new trap – a marriage to a man who doesn’t understand her and living on an island with a way of life that she hates. Like other neo-realist directors, Rossellini didn’t seek to praise or condemn the age old traditions of Italy, just to show them as they were. He could explore the contradictions of the community, how living by values so attached to the past could be reassuring and invigorating as well as suffocating. Stromboli is about old white stone houses, hidden coves where the water laps over rocks and watching the sun set over the sea, but it is also about the desolation of paths and fields left to grow wild and the constant tension created by a mountain which could explode at any moment (the volcano providing the film’s central metaphor, of course). Bergman as Karin Bjorsen is not easy to love; she complains all the time, flirts and manipulates and looks her nose down at those she perceives as less sophisticated. But it’s hard not to sympathise with her situation. Her husband Antonio (Mario Vitale) can be brutish and he is stubbornly resistant to change. But he also loves and he works harder than the other fisherman to give his wife a lifestyle he thinks she wants.

Outsiders have hardly been able to film Italy without turning it into a paradise: Roman Holiday(1953), Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), Summer Madness(1955), even another film about old traditions clashing with the new world, A Bell for Adano(1945), about an American major trying to run an Italian town during the war turns the villagers into affectionate, wily, characters. But the neo-realist directors could show the beauty and the cruelty, never better exemplified than by the sequence showing the actual Stromboli fishermen out at sea capturing huge tunny fish with the waves crashing around them. Visually compelling, we see these huge majestic creatures speared in a ritual that has gone on for hundreds of years. Rossellini believed in truth as far as it was possible; but I also love neo-realism for the social document elements of it, capturing a way of life which may well have vanished forever.