Ingrid Bergman, whose centenary is being celebrated in two retrospectives—one at MOMA beginning this weekend, another at BAM Cinématek in mid-September—is one of the most distinctive actors ever to grace the screen. But her place at the forefront of the history of cinema derives from a handful of movies, made in Europe between 1949 and 1954, in which she acted under remarkable, and often difficult, circumstances.
Great performers are almost always fascinating to watch (even when they walk from their car to the door of their house) but most great performances result from an actor’s collaboration with great directors, and Bergman went further—and sacrificed more—than did any other actor, before or since, in order to work with a true cinematic artist, Roberto Rossellini.
In 1948, Bergman had already worked with Alfred Hitchcock on two films and would soon join him on a third project, “Under Capricorn” (the most original and most daring of the three), when, after seeing Rossellini’s new film “Paisan,” as well as his 1945 film “Open City,” she wrote to him and offered to work with him. These films are two of the seminal works of Italian neorealism, in which dramas were fused with documentary elements—basing the stories on true events from contemporary life, shooting as much as possible on location with minimal crew and equipment, and blending nonprofessional actors into the cast.
Bergman went to Italy to work with Rossellini, and they quickly fell in love with each other. Bergman left her husband, Petter Lindström, and their young daughter, Pia Lindström, to live with Rossellini. When she and Rossellini made “Stromboli,” their first film together, she was pregnant. She divorced Lindström, but the divorce hadn’t yet come through when her first child with Rossellini, Robertino, was born; a trumped-up scandal resulted, a sort of moralistic counterpart to McCarthyism.
Bergman was denounced in the press, in pulpits, and even in the Senate; local officials called for boycotts on all of her films, and it was beside the point whether she was persona non grata in Hollywood, because she had no intention, at the time, of working in Hollywood—in part, because Rossellini didn’t want her working with any director other than himself. (This insistence on exclusivity eventually caused trouble in their work together as well as in their marriage.)
“Stromboli” screens at MOMA Sunday (introduced by Isabella Rossellini, one of the couple’s two daughters), along with Rossellini’s whimsical yet audacious short film from the 1953 compilation “We, the Women.” The short was filmed at their house, and features Bergman telling a story to the camera, and then enacting it in flashback, about her trouble with a neighbor’s chicken. In “Stromboli,” Bergman plays a displaced person who, while in a refugee camp, marries an Italian man who brings her back home with him to the wild volcanic island of Stromboli, where her educated northern-European sophistication is sorely tested by the rugged landscape and the rustic way. It was followed by “Europa 51,” in which she plays a prosperous woman who, after the death of her child, scandalizes her husband and her social set by devoting herself to the poor; “Voyage to Italy,” in which she and George Sanders portray an English couple travelling to deal with an inheritance, and confronting their stifled marital conflicts; and “Fear,” in which she plays a married businesswoman whose adulterous affair leads to her being blackmailed.
The films were cast largely with nonprofessional actors, and Rossellini worked with her the same way that he worked with them. Bergman told her biographer Charlotte Chandler:
Bergman added that the nonprofessional actors in the cast had no trouble with Rossellini’s methods. “But for a professional actress like myself, it was very, very difficult.” Yet these films offer far more than the methodical contrast of seeing Bergman on location, among fishermen and their squirming piles of freshly caught fish in “Stromboli,” in a squalid riverfront shack in “Europa 51,” or at Pompeii in “Voyage to Italy.” (These three films are available from Criterion.) Were these movies merely the deglamorization of a star, they’d be mere footnotes to history.
Rather, they’re as emotionally overwhelming and intellectually complex as they are audaciously produced. Rossellini films a postwar world of increasing material comforts, industrial advances, and cultural sophistication, and strips away their surfaces in quest of a primal philosophical sense of virtue, one of fundamental humanistic morality. Bergman’s status as a star, as well as her star-like lustre and bearing, are essential to her place in Rossellini’s movies. Her performances in these movies—for all their dramatic intensity—enact the drama of her life at the time of the filming. Bergman’s own rude contact with raw places and events in these films is a central part of the films’ fundamental drama, the breach in middle-class sophistication resulting from contact with the raw side of life, with the elemental threats of physical destruction and mental breakdown.
What Rossellini got from working with Bergman was something more than merely her status as a star and the impact of her displacement on location. Her extraordinary cinematic craft enabled her to get quickly to the heart of a moment, to express a wide range of emotions and inner conflicts both quickly and clearly. That sense of condensation and abstraction, joined to the majesty of her mere presence, pushed his films in the direction of melodrama. In effect, the movies that Rossellini and Bergman made together are a fusion of dark-toned Hollywood romances and documentary-toned naturalism. The philosophical clarity and briskness of these films are a matter both of cultural politics and of aesthetic principle; Rossellini literally puts the cinema and its luminaries in their place—as agents of self-recognition and critical judgment in the physical place and the historical moment in which they’re living and working.
But instead of bringing Bergman’s fan base to an appreciation of Rossellinian realism and Rossellini’s art-house admirers to a recognition of Bergman’s grandeur, these films displeased both sets of viewers, and failed both among critics and at the box office. The reception of “Stromboli” in the United States was tainted by the scandal; its reception elsewhere, as in Europe, where Rossellini was an artistic hero of the first rank, was tainted by Bergman. The predominantly intellectual fans of Rossellini’s films thought that he had sold out to Hollywood. Meanwhile, Bergman’s loyal enthusiasts had trouble recognizing the glamorous actress in Rossellini’s films.
The only people who took up the cause of these films with uninhibited enthusiasm were a band of young French critics who recognized them to be both an extension of Rossellini’s earlier films and an entirely new and fruitful approach to filmmaking over-all. These critics—including Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol—intended to make movies. They loved movies of all sorts, including Hollywood masterworks, and from Rossellini they got the idea of making a Hollywood-like film cheaply and on location. Godard said that, after seeing “Voyage to Italy,” he realized that he’d only need two actors and a car to make a movie.
Rossellini reciprocated their passion and attempted to jump-start their directorial careers with a series of features to be shot on 16-mm. film (at the time, an amateur format). That series didn’t pan out—the financing didn’t come through—but the ambition proved enduring. When Godard made “Breathless,” filming the international star Jean Seberg and little-known Jean-Paul Belmondo on the Champs-Élysées with a cameraman hidden in a pushcart, it was a Rossellinian gesture; and the enduring influence of the New Wave, with its blend of Hollywood and documentary, movie myth and material reality, can be seen as well in a movie like “Under the Skin,” in which Jonathan Glazer films Scarlett Johansson in unscripted scenes with amateur actors, on the streets of Glasgow.
Rossellini’s own career proved paradoxical. Not only did he not like actors; he didn’t exactly like movies, either. Though he was friendly with the New Wave directors, he derided their cinephilic passion; he thought that movies themselves didn’t deserve these filmmakers’ intellectual attention and aesthetic devotion, which would better have been devoted to the actual ideas and concerns that formed the subject of their own movies. (In 1962, he even made the wondrously sardonic featurette “L’Illibatezza,” or “Purity,” in which he satirized cinephilic habits.) The aesthetic that Rossellini developed was practical; in the nineteen-sixties, as the world of filmmaking burst out with freewheeling invention, Rossellini’s own methods grew simpler, and his artistic concerns converged around costume dramas that provided ingeniously analytical realizations of key philosophical moments in history (such as “The Taking of Power by Louis XIV,” from 1966). The very movement that carried his own work forward into history and bore him on its shoulders as a hero, and that his most controversial work decisively inspired, was alien to his sensibility.
In retrospect, the brazen originality of “Stromboli” and Rossellini’s other three dramatic features with Bergman is hard to detect, because the tone that they strike is one that has become a dominant mode of modern filmmaking. Rossellini turned the dramas of Bergman’s life into her art, and, in the process, presented her on-screen not as a character or even as an actor but as herself. It was her greatest role.
