672-675 3 Films by Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman

Discuss releases by Criterion and the films on them. Threads may contain spoilers!
Message
Author
User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#76 Post by knives » Fri Nov 08, 2013 4:18 pm

Or request a copy with your local library. Lots of fun possibilities.

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#77 Post by movielocke » Sat Dec 07, 2013 5:13 am

Stromboli, for me, was a film that was constantly interesting, but rarely cohesive. It was fascinating for the contrast it presents of the realism of island life and the expressionism of Bergman's perceptions of her experience. The wild oscillations between the bleak stares of island life and Bergman's 'these go to eleven' use of emotions is jarring, to say the least. But at the same time it sort of feels fitting? Is Bergman's loud and angry and constantly yelling character all that different from the stereotype of the old italian mother loud and yelling at her recalcitrant grown children (or husband) whilst whacking them with a wooden spoon? And while Bergman freaks out over what's taken from her the people freak out over what's given to them. The constant inversions quickly become symbolic, perhaps a little too much so. The film often felt like Godzilla King of Monsters, an Italian film cut together with hollywood shot footage.

I think the film is playing with the tropes of a hollywood woman's picture, and there certainly seem to be echoes of the genre, be it Gone with the Wind or Jezebel or Mr. Skeffington (first examples that come to mind), throughout the film, with the quotation of Gone with the Wind in the ending especially interesting. Unfortunately, I don't particularly like many/any of that particular genre, and so when the film veered back towards this direction I was continually put off by the symbolism and messaging of the melodramatics of her breakdown. I must say, it was a relief that Rossellini refrained from any stupidly big scenes of confrontation with the disapproving women of the town, I was constantly dreading some sort of stupid scene that made all of that more out-loud--that was perfectly handled. The symbolism and messaging is of course part and parcel with my favorite bit, the Tuna catch, but that sequence was just so breathtaking that it was the only moment the film fully won me over and I wasn't bored.

Not my cup of tea, but a densely crafted piece of art none-the-less, full of interesting ideas and approaches to the material.

Giulio
Joined: Mon May 25, 2009 6:35 pm
Location: Italy

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#78 Post by Giulio » Sat Dec 07, 2013 7:29 am

The Bergman constantly yelling in Stromboli? What film are you talking about? Mistaking for an anna magnani movie.
It's so sad, italian stereotypes always win on american audiences.

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#79 Post by movielocke » Sun Dec 08, 2013 10:16 pm

Giulio wrote:The Bergman constantly yelling in Stromboli? What film are you talking about? Mistaking for an anna magnani movie.
Hah, point well taken. Consider it a tribute to the emotional intensity of Bergman's performance that I felt like I had been yelled at for two hours, or maybe I just sympathized a bit too much with the poor fellow she married.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#80 Post by domino harvey » Sun Dec 08, 2013 10:32 pm

You were against Bergman and for her husband?!

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#81 Post by knives » Sun Dec 08, 2013 11:14 pm

Yeah, that seems unusual. The film is very intense and is built in such a way I perfectly sympathize with those that don't like it, but if anything I would think it would be easier to accuse Rossellini of making things too easy to sympathize with Bergman.

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#82 Post by movielocke » Mon Dec 09, 2013 5:27 am

domino harvey wrote:You were against Bergman and for her husband?!
She was crazy and hated him for being poor. He just wanted to go home and make a living.

User avatar
ellipsis7
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 1:56 pm
Location: Dublin

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#83 Post by ellipsis7 » Mon Dec 09, 2013 5:36 am

It is worth picking up VULCANO the contemporaneous rival movie starring the spurned Anna Magnani (and directed by German born Hollywood veteran William Dieterle) set and filmed on the neighbouring island (in the same Aeolian archipelago) of Vulcano... It's in a decent edition (but unfortunately only with French subs) from Ripley's Home Video (RHV) Italy... Cinecitta Luce have also put out the docu THE WAR OF THE VOLCANOES (LA GUERRA DEI VULCANI) on a DVD which does include Eng subs...

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#84 Post by domino harvey » Mon Dec 09, 2013 8:32 am

movielocke wrote:
domino harvey wrote:You were against Bergman and for her husband?!
She was crazy and hated him for being poor. He just wanted to go home and make a living.
:shock: If this was a movie trailer, here's where the needle getting pulled off the record sound happens

cinemartin

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#85 Post by cinemartin » Mon Dec 09, 2013 11:33 am

Personally, I sympathize with both characters.

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#86 Post by movielocke » Mon Dec 09, 2013 4:32 pm

I didn't find her character any more sympathetic than the typical Hollywood female villain lead, but Rossellini did seem to be making an interesting commentary on those types. Bergman's character was like a less extreme Scarlett O'Hare, a character I'd describe as an unsympathetic mostly evil reprobate oozing bile and leaving wide ranging destruction and human tragedy in her wake.

User avatar
Gregory
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 4:07 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#87 Post by Gregory » Mon Dec 09, 2013 8:21 pm


User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#88 Post by movielocke » Fri Dec 13, 2013 10:02 pm

Europe '51 was a stunning improvement, in my opinion. Or perhaps I just prefer Hollywood's social consciousness genre to Hollywood's female melodrama genre. In both cases, Rossellini seems to be critiquing (and making better versions of) those hollywood approaches you would typically find a Bergman in, like The Snake Pit.

What makes this film work so much better than the typical Gentleman's agreement or The Snake Pit is that it's not just an 'oh my god, the humanity' approach to some an advocacy issue. Rather than manipulating the audience, instead the film is about Bergman's social consciousness transformation. She's internalizing the conflict that these sorts of film usually externalize.

By the end, the approach becomes saint like in its reverence for Bergman, and it's uncompromising and rather realistic portrayal of just how much society would dislike something as inconvenient as that. ;) so I was unsurprised, after reading the back cover, to see that it was related to the Flowers of St. Francis. I was a bit surprised, that Bergman doesn't become a nun, as you might expect in a happier ending film, and that she rather explicitly refuses joining a religious order, it seemed like the natural progression, but perhaps that would give the catholicness of it too much dominance over the story and ruin the balance between church and society she's navigating. The communism elements of the film seemed muted by comparison to the church, but perhaps that is just because I'm watching it in another era and the contexts don't all carry over. Speaking of cultural contexts, throughout the film my thoughts were constantly drifting towards Pope Francis, and I think my brain was twigging me to the Flowers of St. Francis, subconsciously, I need to pull that one out again, sometime soon.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#89 Post by knives » Sat Dec 14, 2013 1:15 am

Couldn't have said it better. Surely what makes, for me, Rossellini's films so great despite their overwhelming catholic-ness is that he approaches these issues more from the point of morality than religion. The supposed madness of Bergman is just a case of trying to relieve herself of the contradictions the state (and other apparatuses) make as necessity to survive within. There's a strange sort amorality like a wall which is decayed yet grows to these institutions which render a sort of hopelessness for the modern age at least as Rossellini envisions it (though as you point out Rosselini has the leper show in the earlier ages a similar perverse unwillingness to be healed). At the same time I can't call these films absolutely pessimistic since such as with Bergman here Rossellini has a great deal of admiration for his fighters.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#90 Post by knives » Sat Dec 14, 2013 2:09 am

You're right that perverse is the wrong word. I was getting too wrapped in the metaphor at that point I like Tourneur, but I'm curious which films you're specifically referring to. I can see it for I Walked With a Zombie, but outside of that I'm not sure unless you mean the elder.

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#91 Post by movielocke » Sun Dec 15, 2013 3:41 am

david hare wrote:In any case to me this all wildly surpasses simplistic Relgio-social readings.
Hah. I've spent the last year or so trying to correct my often overblown tendencies to skew mystical in my responses to films. So I deleted two or three paragraphs of babble about Grace, Selflessness, All-Encompassing Love, Sanity (I had a line about how she seems to get more sane the more she submits to Grace, that the moral, ethical and only sane, correct thing to do when you encounter someone dying is to give them all the aid and comfort you are able), and some screeds about society. And then I deleted it all because I thought I was being too inarticulate and vague, talking less and less about the film's contents as I went on. I brought up religion and communism so explicitly because Rossellini did, in his introduction, it's a shame he took such a simplistic religio-social reading.

User avatar
Matt
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#92 Post by Matt » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:03 pm

Am I perverse or would Europe '51 be a great double-feature with Viridiana? Both films about the impossibility of trying to be a "good" person without completely being taken advantage of or being thought insane. I thought Buñuel could have worked particular wonders with the sequence where Bergman goes to work at the factory so that Masina could make it with her new beau without losing her job.

I knew nothing about Europe '51 before seeing it and so was very impressed when what I thought was starting out to be something of a Communist utopian propaganda film took a left turn into being something very different. Whatever happened to films like this (and Bergman's and Bresson's films about faith)? I am a non-believer, but I can't get enough of films like this that are portraits of a struggle toward grace or a wrestle with faith. I suppose the history of the last several decades has made cynics of us all.

User avatar
matrixschmatrix
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 11:26 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#93 Post by matrixschmatrix » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:08 pm

Well, Tree of Life is more abstract, but felt like what you're describing here, and moved me on a level comparable with the really great films of the genre (though I think The Passion of Joan of Arc will probably always be the capstone.)

Kauno
Joined: Sun Dec 18, 2011 4:01 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#94 Post by Kauno » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:12 pm

You are perverse alright, but there's thought in what you are saying.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#95 Post by knives » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:17 pm

Matt wrote:Am I perverse or would Europe '51 be a great double-feature with Viridiana? Both films about the impossibility of trying to be a "good" person without completely being taken advantage of or being thought insane. I thought Buñuel could have worked particular wonders with the sequence where Bergman goes to work at the factory so that Masina could make it with her new beau without losing her job.

I knew nothing about Europe '51 before seeing it and so was very impressed when what I thought was starting out to be something of a Communist utopian propaganda film took a left turn into being something very different. Whatever happened to films like this (and Bergman's and Bresson's films about faith)? I am a non-believer, but I can't get enough of films like this that are portraits of a struggle toward grace or a wrestle with faith. I suppose the history of the last several decades has made cynics of us all.
I always thought Boudu would make the best two for Viridiana. I suspect the failings of future Rossellini's etc is the movement society has gone away from any sort of academic popular approach which they seem to thrive on. Really only Reygadas and Malick seem to have any interest on that front and I feel often their approach dumbs down a lot of what they are aiming for.

User avatar
Matt
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#96 Post by Matt » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:22 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote:Well, Tree of Life is more abstract, but felt like what you're describing here, and moved me on a level comparable with the really great films of the genre (though I think The Passion of Joan of Arc will probably always be the capstone.)
Yes, I hadn't thought of Tree of Life, but it definitely does have that same searching quality as these films. It did lose me (and many others, I suspect) with its explicitly paradisiacal ending. I guess I prefer my religious films to remain earthbound and a little more ambiguous. Faith seems to be a more radical act without the explicit guarantee of a big family reunion in the sky when you die.

User avatar
Matt
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#97 Post by Matt » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:33 pm

knives wrote:
Matt wrote:Am I perverse or would Europe '51 be a great double-feature with Viridiana?
I always thought Boudu would make the best two for Viridiana.
I think they would make a good double-feature, but for reasons of class than religion. I've always avoided drawing parallels between Jesus and Boudu (though maybe that was just a reaction to having that particular interpretation imposed on the film by the prof when we were studying the film in college). Boudu, for me, is kind of the ultimate hippie. He absolutely rejects the values of bourgeois society and often favors their exact inverse. Coming back to the Rosellini, someone should make a sequel that follows Bergman's character and her inability to remain appropriately saintlike to her gaggle of followers. She becomes drudge, nanny, and nurse to all those ragamuffin kids and dies within 6 months of tuberculosis. Or she stays in the looney bin and becomes a kingpin.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#98 Post by knives » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:45 pm

Oh, I don't think Boudu is related to jesus or religion at all. I think at the core of both films is a suspicion of the benign appearing charity of bourgeoisie who expect to be met with gratitude in return making it not a real charity.

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#99 Post by movielocke » Wed Dec 18, 2013 4:07 pm

The interview with Ingrid and Isabella on Voyage to Italy starts with a fade up from black and soundless lip flap and then the sound cues up after about two seconds of lip flap to Ingrid mid-sentance. Unlike all the other extras on the disc, this one doesn't have any title right away, it just starts as I described. Is this just something weird going on with my player? or is this happening with everyone's and it's an error? if I reverse or chapter back it does the same thing, as it is, it's the beginning of the feature, as best I can see.

User avatar
movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Re: 672-675 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini...

#100 Post by movielocke » Thu Dec 19, 2013 2:18 pm

I'm still mulling over the magnificent Journey to Italy, but My Father is 100 Years Old was tremendous fun, witty, engaging, and managed to encompass so much of the content about Rossellini and his place in history and film-dom that the other extras also cover (though they take a much longer time to do it).

The booklet is also superb, probably their best compilation of material since the Trilogy of Life. In particular I loved the two interviews with Rossellini from the Cahiers Cohort and then from Apra, excellent insights into the man and his work, it's impressive what an excellent interviewer Truffaut was, and I was wanting to pull out my copy of Truffaut Hitchcock after reading that one.

Post Reply