Stromboli, tierra de Dios

I enjoyed reading "erupting beauty" (The Big Combo, 2 February 2004) for a good summary of Stromboli. Zetes ("A vastly underrated masterpiece", zetes from Saint Paul, MN, 15 June 2002) and bkoganbing ("Ingrid and the volcano", bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York, 29 August 2012) both include good background about the controversies surrounding it. Cogs ("Poor old Ingrid!!", cogs from London, England, 2 February 2005) sees similarities between Rossellini and Bresson that I share. I agree with Cogs that Bresson is more interesting.

Stromboli is a showcase for Ingrid Bergman, who to my mind is easily the greatest actress in cinema. Karen's situation is Hellish. She marries to escape an Italian interment camp. She subsequently finds only misery with the desolate volcano-island that her fisherman-husband takes her to. The terrain is harsh and the locals are even worse. She discovers him to be overly simple and occasionally too beastly to bear. The finale reflects her desire for just a meager amount of happiness in such a world as this.

Visually Roberto Rossellini is superb. His visual aesthetics are unsentimental but never boring. His camera work is unobtrusive.

Two of the most memorable scenes feature a disturbing quotient of animal cruelty. In the first scene, a live rabbit is needlessly sacrificed by being placed near a ferret. Rossellini couldn't use stuffed animals. He has the audience, some of whom are animal lovers, suffer by showing the kill in detail. Of course, Rossellini is strengthening the distance between Ingrid and her fisherman husband, and identifying her with the suffering rabbit. However, I won't give Rossellini any credit for moving the story along with this thoughtless tactic.

The second scene is the justifiably famous tuna slaughter with real fisherman, nets and spears. I have eaten tuna all my life and haven't thought much where it comes from. Also, I have no doubt that all of the tuna that we see being harvested was ultimately eaten. To give Rossellini credit, he filmed it well--with Ingrid nearby witnessing it as if she was one of the unfortunate fish. I just don't think that it takes great storytelling skill to rely on animal slaughter to move an audience.

Two other scenes that are noteworthy is when Karen attempts to seduce a priest, and when she (apparently) seduces a lighthouse keeper. The character that Rosselini and Bergman are portraying is flawed, and very human. She's no saint, she's a woman with unfulfilled needs.

Overall, Stromboli is a must-see member of the Italian neo-realism canon. Very few films venture to depict life without false pretenses. Ingrid's Karen really suffers; and her actions make her a polarizing figure to viewers, isolating her further. Rossellini and Bergman are showing what life is really like as every member of the audience understands it.

Stromboli is a film with the look of Flaherty's `Man of Aran' and the dramatics of von Trier's `Breaking the Waves'. The story is the tragedy of a woman named Karin, a Lithuanian refugee after WWII and her pursuit of a better life marrying an Italian peasant and moving down with him to his birthplace, a volcanic island off the coast of southern Italy.

Rossellini portraits her heroin without sentimentalism or affection of any kind. He seems to be more interested in revealing her dark sides and miseries, but as Bergman's performance is so emotionally raw, we cannot but stick with her to the end of her journey. We do not pity her, but take pity with her. Rossellini's strong Catholicism usually forces us to live through his films as Catholics, regardless of which belief one may have.

If war was hell then the post war can be redemption time. Karin has nostalgia of her past, a lost-paradise, and all her efforts are put to restore that primal state. She's an Eva cast away from Eden, with somehow Bovarian ambitions, trying to reach prosperity at any cost. Her chances are scarce, so she takes the only opportunity she gets to leave the camp, marrying Antonio, a peasant whom she first kisses through barbed wire. She will soon realize that Antonio's island is miles away of the paradise of her dreams. The place is barren and the locals are hostile. She's trapped in a labyrinth surrounded by sea and menaced by an active volcano. Any form of relationship, even with her husband, is impeded because of a communication problem. Technically she cannot speak the language. But she cannot either penetrate a hermetic, oppressive world ruled by rites and tradition. If paradise was a state where men could speak the language of the gods in harmony with nature, Karin's pilgrimage will ultimately have to restore that dialogue, rebuild that bridge with origin.

In her symbolic descent to primitivism she learns the meaning of life in the hard way, and at the same time she follows all the phases of mankind from the first cry of the new born, to subsequent life in a cavern, cave-painting, elemental worshipping, fishing for subsistence and conversion. Karin's fault is her self-sufficiency, denying the existence of a superior order and her mundane ambition of a destiny ruled by luxury and comfort. She thinks the place is filthy and defines her belonging to `a different class'. When she realizes that there's no place for glamour in Stromboli she turns into an Eve and tempts the local priest. This behaving sooner or later will provoke the wrath of the gods, portrayed in the everlasting volcano to which the fate of the islanders is attached from immemorial days. To outcome her tragic fall, Karin should ascend the top of the mountain while getting rid of her material belongings (the money, the suitcase), rise up her head to the sky and address God. Rossellini doesn't show us if she saves her life or not because the thing is that she assumed her role of creature and thus her subordination to a supreme kind. Same as the villagers, who stoically accept the infuriated eruptions, or the fishermen that depend on the fruitful sea.

The most unforgettable sequence of the film is the one of the tuna fishing. Rossellini is so precise in the choosing of the images and the rhythm of the editing that the one feels that is seated in one of the boats bringing the prays. But the scene has much more than an aesthetic value. It works not only because it's beautiful; it is also informative for the story, dramatic in itself and in the events of the film, and symbolic both for the story and for Bergman's character, who watches the action from a neighboring boat. Such an adjustment distinguishes art from a good movie.

Other recent commentaries on this film call it a "masterpiece". I strongly disagree. When it opened the reviews were as bleak and indifferent to it as Karen (Ingrid Bergman) is to the island of Stromboli. No one considered it up to Rossellini's "Open City" or "Paisan" in terms of genuine artifice. It was termed bleak and undistinguished with a plodding script that could only be called simplistic in terms of dialogue.

Fine B&W cinematography of a desolate island and scenes of an actual volcano eruption are not enough to make a 107-minute movie tailored to demonstrate the neo-realism of Ingrid Bergman's acting now that she had shed her Hollywood glamour. Bergman is ill served by a poorly developed character and embarrassingly inept scenes between her and her Italian fisherman husband (Mario Vitale).

There is startling realism in the tuna fishing sequence and harsh realism in the desolate landscape and close-ups of island people, but Rossellini did not seem to have a well developed or finished script in mind when he began shooting what others have called a "masterpiece". There is no doubt that had he the advantage of a well structured and conceived screenplay he might have been effective in telling this kind of story. But with the camera lingering on an anguished Ingrid Bergman sobbing in scene after scene of emotional isolation, the viewer is left with the feeling that this is little more than a post-war documentary in search of a coherent plot.

The unresolved ending used in the U.S. print is not the original ending, by the way, and leaves the viewer with the feeling he has witnessed an unfinished screenplay. It is said that Rossellini began shooting without a complete script on a day to day basis that must have been a strain on Bergman. It shows when he spends an inordinate amount of time on a fishing sequence that has little to do with furthering the slight plot. Too bad he didn't start the project with a finished script and a firm focus for his content.

The background music is oddly silent during some of the most emotional moments and despite Italian chants of fishermen the soundtrack remains mostly barren of any interesting content.

I wanted to take the time to write of this work by my grandparents Rossellini and Bergman, as it has always been a film of both great emotion and confusion for me personally. If anything, there is much to be said for my grandmother moving from Hollywood to a deserted volcanic island with meager means and low production capacity. This speaks to her love not only of my grandfather's work, but also to her sense of adventure and courage, looking for new ways to express herself as an actress. When it comes to my grandfather, this is his most impulsive directorial work. He was in a both stressful and joyous time in his life and i can only imagine the feelings of both anguish and happiness that he felt. All of these swirls and jests of emotion are apparent, they are as evident as the very powerful setting itself. Though the film is certainly not perfect, and at times even slow and overtly dramatic, it is nonetheless sincere and beautiful. It is a work of love made by two people in love.

I must confess that I don't belong to those who consider this movie a big masterpiece. The main problem is Ingrid Bergman and her role. Somehow I found it hard to believe that a woman who seems to be reasonably urbane and worldly-wise, or at least streetwise, and who seems to have weathered difficult situations during a World War in comparative comfort would follow an illiterate peasant to a dead end island. She has many scenes on her own in which she – I can't describe it differently – throws tantrums and feels sorry for herself. It just becomes a boring routine after a while and a little ridiculous as well. There is no character development whatsoever. I liked Bergman much more in movies like Notorious or Gaslight were she probably received better direction.

However, the fantastic locations more than compensate for those flaws. The island of Stromboli is nothing more than an active volcano. The main characters live on the edge between the sea and the towering crater. All important movements in this movie are vertical. The messages from hell fall out of the sky in the form of burning rocks or lower themselves over the heads of people as poisonous gases. A contrary movement – up from the bottom - is the awesome fishing expedition – for me the most unforgettable event of the movie. Large teams of fishermen haul in a huge net, singing. Gradually the surface of the water over the net starts getting agitated until at last huge fish (tuna, I guess) start emerging in a wild frenzy and are hauled aboard. This is perfectly filmed an edited – and simply horrific.

All the elements come together and leave little action space for the cornered humans. The movie proposes two solutions: emigration or religion. The priest of the island plays a pivotal role in the story as he represents the link between the two options. However his actions seemed to me pretty inconclusive, at first he expresses himself overly optimistic, in an almost derisory way, as to the functionality of the ill fitted marriage of the heroine, then he declares himself incapable of helping the heroine, throwing her back onto herself in matters of religious belief. Eventually he comes through as the chief guardian of the dead buried on the island that is a kind of gateway to the world beyond. This is all interesting stuff, but it is not handled with particular care or discipline, which is a pity.