“Voyage to Italy” (which I discuss in this clip) is the third of the five feature films in which Roberto Rossellini directed Ingrid Bergman, who was his wife at the time. The actress had sought out the director in 1948 after seeing his films “Open City” and “Paisan.” During the shoot of their first film together, “Stromboli,” they fell in love; Bergman left her husband for Rossellini, and the resulting scandal left her a Hollywood untouchable for a few years. Meanwhile, the films they made together cost Rossellini a large measure of his critical reputation: he was famed for films that were called “neo-realist,” which, beside being filmed on location, dealt expressly with political and social matters. Of course, his interests weren’t limited to current events, as seen in his 1948 adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play “The Human Voice”—and the films he made with Bergman represented an extraordinary new artistic turn in his career. He made the very fact of Bergman’s style, her natural grace and her unimpeachable glamour, a part of his films, which looked to the bourgeoisie as the new center of energy in a society tending toward increased industrial and informational abstraction. He borrowed her aptitude for melodrama in order to splice Hollywood-style dramatic compression to a documentary-based realism in the interest of a personal and philosophical cinema.
The critics who were most enthusiastic about what he was doing were the young ones at Cahiers du Cinéma, the future French New Wave; Jean-Luc Godard said that “Voyage to Italy” taught him that he could make a classic-style film on a low budget with just “a man, a woman, and a car”; and Rossellini quickly returned the favor: in the mid-fifties, he sought to organize a series of low-budget productions that these critics would themselves write and direct. The project came to nought. Bergman and Rossellini divorced, and she returned to the Hollywood fold; but the connection between them and the New Wave—and the modern cinema as such—remains unbroken.