JOURNEY TO ITALY (1954) B/W 88m (107m) dir: Roberto Rossellini
w/Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders, Maria Mauban, Anna Proclemer, Paul Muller, Leslie Daniels, Natalia Ray, Jackie Frost, Maria Martin
From the Turner Classic Movies website, www.tcm.com, this article about the film by Margarita Landazuri: "When movie star Ingrid Bergman left her husband, child, and Hollywood to work with (and eventually marry) Italian director Roberto Rossellini in 1949, she also left behind Hollywood-style movie production to adopt Rossellini's radically different approach to making films. He essentially worked without a script, counting on improvisation and inspiration to shape his films, and often cast non-actors in important roles. As Bergman later told biographer Charlotte Chandler, 'In Hollywood, I was accustomed to the scripts being prepared meticulously, well in advance. Every detail was set down, every shot, every angle, every camera movement was written down on paper....With Roberto it was more like a battlefield where only the general knows what the soldiers are supposed to do.' Rossellini defended his working methods, saying 'A writer puts down a sentence, a page, then crosses it out. A painter uses carmine, then makes a green brush stroke on top of it. Why can't I also cross out, redo, and change? This is why a script can't be ironclad for me.'
"Between 1950 and 1954, Bergman appeared in six films, all directed by Rossellini, none of them commercially successful. Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) examines the breakdown of the troubled marriage of an English couple as they travel in Italy. By the time they began filming in early 1953, the couple's personal and professional relationship was fraying under the stresses of their notoriety, the failure of their films together, and their financial problems. Finally, Rossellini secured financing for Journey to Italy from a Milanese industrialist who was a fan of his neorealist films. Hoping for an international success, Rossellini cast British actor George Sanders, who had recently won an Academy Award for his acid portrayal of Broadway columnist Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950). Like Bergman, Sanders was used to Hollywood production methods. Unlike her, he was neither willing nor able to adapt himself to Rossellini's chaotic working style.
"Rossellini's original plan for Journey to Italy was to adapt Colette's 1934 novel, Duo, about a deteriorating marriage. That was the film Sanders expected to do. But by the time filming began, the rights to the novel had been sold elsewhere. Rossellini had a loose script, but he didn't share it with the cast, instead using notes scribbled on his shirt cuffs or the back of an envelope, and waiting for inspiration to strike. If it didn't, the director would go skin diving off the island of Capri. According to Bergman, Sanders, who was having his own marital problems with Hungarian starlet Zsa Zsa Gabor, 'had a series of nervous breakdowns. He was on the phone every night talking to his psychiatrist back in Hollywood.' Sanders told Bergman, 'I just can't go on, I can't do this commedia dell'arte, and invent my lines at the last minute.' In his memoirs, Sanders was disdainful of Rossellini's methods. 'My interest was reduced to a state bordering on stupefaction,' he wrote.
"According to Rossellini biographer Tag Gallagher, however, 'It was all a plot....He gave Sanders no direction, no hint about his role, ever. To the contrary, he did everything he could to intensify the actor's sense of lonely isolation.' Sanders stayed at a different hotel from the other actors, and the director gave the others instructions to avoid him. '"'It's his role, he's supposed to be like that, tense and anguished," Roberto explained..."It was his bad moods rather than his own personality that suited the character of the film.'''
"Once production on Journey to Italy was finished, it took a year and a half to find a distributor. When it was finally released in July of 1954, it was little-seen and poorly received. In the influential Italian film journal Cinema, G.C. Castello wrote, 'By this time, we've given up on Rossellini. But what is beginning to get annoying is that he has managed not only to ruin himself but he's also ruining the woman who would, not unworthily, have succeeded Greta Garbo one day.' But the group of French critics and filmmakers writing in Cahiers du Cinema embraced the film. Jacques Rivette wrote, 'If there is a modern cinema, this is it....It seems impossible to me to see Viaggio in Italia without receiving direct evidence of the fact that the film opens a breach, and that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through it.' In 1958, the magazine ranked the film third in a list of ten best films of all time after Sunrise (1927) and Rules of the Game (1939). Jean-Luc Godard wrote that Journey to Italy was one of 'five or six films that one wants to write about by simply saying, "It's the most beautiful film ever made"....Like a starfish that opens and closes, these films can offer and hide the secret of a world of which they are at the same time the sole repository and the fascinating reflection.'
"Rossellini and Bergman ended their marriage in 1957, but they always maintained a respect and affection for each other. Rossellini was philosophical about their work together, telling Charlotte Chandler, 'A star cannot help being a star, and I confess that when we began making films for her, it turned out not as we had hoped, as we had expected it would. I did not make films that were right for her. I wanted her to be right for my films, but she could not reshape herself so much. Also, they were not what her audience expected from her, and they were not what my public expected from me.' Their films together may not have been entirely successful, financially or artistically, but they are fascinating documents of an exciting era in international filmmaking by two of cinema's greatest talents."
Warning! The following article contains information you may not want to know before viewing the film:
From the British Film Institute's international film magazine, Sight & Sound (July 2013, volume 23, issue 7, page 112), this article about the ending of JOURNEY TO ITALY by Brad Stevens: "An apparently random shot at the end of Rossellini's 1953 film encapsulates the director's egalitarian vision:
"Although Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1953) is now established as one of world cinema's supreme achievements, it still has a surprising number of detractors. I usually advise cinephiles who have trouble 'getting' the films Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman to list all the things they perceive as flaws, then try to see them as misunderstood virtues. Take Bergman's performances, which seem so much clumsier than her Hollywood roles. By stripping away the actress's standard repertoire of gestures and line readings, Rossellini revealed the genuine person usually concealed beneath the mask of technique. It says a great deal about our relationship to cinematic codes that many viewers consider Bergman's acting in these masterpieces to be 'unrealistic.' Even the crude dubbing has a positive function, preventing us from experiencing the films as professionally packaged entertainments whose rough edges have been smoothed away. Like the characters who are drifting aimlessly, the actors who were not given screenplays and the director who allowed the film's structure to be determined by chance, we are obliged to enter into an improvisational relationship with the work, becoming active participants in the construction of meaning rather than passive consumers.
"Journey to Italy focuses on a British couple, Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alex Joyce (George Sanders), visiting Italy to see some property they have inherited. Their marriage is on the verge of collapse and they have just agreed to divorce when, in the film's sublime final sequence, they find themselves in a town (Maiori) where a religious procession (an actual event into which Rossellini inserted his cast and crew) is taking place. Unable to drive through the crowded streets, the Joyces are obliged to leave their car, that shell which has protected them from too intimate an involvement with the people of Italy, and begin walking. Suddenly, cries of 'miracolo' are heard and we see a man walking away from a wheelchair: a cripple appears to have found the ability to walk (though the way he keeps touching his eyes suggests he may have been blind and recovered his sight) --- a genuine 'miracle' that Rossellini was lucky enough to catch on camera. As various individuals struggle forward to get a better view, Katherine is pulled away from Alex, who runs after her. The couple embrace and the camera pans away but just as we think the film is going to end with this conventional closing shot, Rossellini abruptly cuts to a seemingly insignificant 'documentary' detail: several members of a band standing near a wall while participants in the procession walk past. This shot lasts 18 seconds and concludes with a fade to black as the camera, for no apparent reason, starts panning to the right. Tag Gallagher, in his 1998 book The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, claims that the bandleader 'smiles knowingly at Alex and Katherine' but it seems to me that this 'character' remains oblivious of the couple. The suggestion is not that star performers are more important than 'extras,' but rather that these anonymous musicians have as much right to our attention as Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders. And Journey to Italy's mixture of documentary and fiction functions in much the same way. Where Haskell Wexler showed the stars of Medium Cool (1969) interacting with actual rioters in order to make a point about the real-life events, Rossellini does the opposite, allowing real-life events to make a point about the relative importance of his stars.
"So what seems to be a clumsy flaw, a poorly thought out decision to end the film with a randomly selected image, proves on closer inspection to lie at the heart of Rossellini's vision, in which the rough is always preferred to the smooth, incompleteness to resolution, involvement to contemplation. If Alex and Katherine are guilty of using their car's windscreen as a protective barrier, we are just as guilty of using the cinema screen in the same way. Like the Joyces, like the actors who play them --- like Rossellini --- we must overcome the barrier of 'fiction' and experience the external world, flaws and all, without mediation."