Stromboli

30/04/2023

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     Realism can be troublesome, especially when in searching for the realistic it arrives at the sadistic. There will no doubt and quite understandably be those watching Stromboli horrified by the animal violence it contains. In Roberto Rossellini’s film, a ferret mauls a rabbit, and later, in a set-piece sequence, giant tuna fish are pierced and punctured as fishermen capture a shoal off the coast of the Volcanic island of the title. The viewer is in little doubt the creatures are being killed and should our urban, western sensibility, if that is what we possess, be offended by such verisimilitude, and is it a price worth paying to access the real? 

   Rossellini wishes to show as accurately as he can a small island that makes its living chiefly from fishing, people who possess an earthy, pragmatic relationship with other living creatures. Rossellini was along with Vittorio De Sica the main exponent of neo-realism, a chiefly post-war Italian movement that wished to capture life as much as drama, to film Rome, Milan, Sicily, Stromboli, Napoli and elsewhere with a fidelity hitherto ignored in fictional film. It became not only a movement but a theory, with Andre Bazin insisting that neo-realism shouldn’t be seen as a series of films fitting into cinema history and reflecting Italy after the war, but as the very essence of cinema that film had before this too easily ignored.

  There were reasons for this eschewal and they would rest on film so naturally being a realistic medium, since all someone had to do was turn the camera on and reality would be recorded. It was the escape from the real that would turn it into an art, or at least an artifice, and who was going to disagree when most viewers were unlikely to turn up to the cinema to see people like themselves up there on the screen? If theorists and filmmakers like Rudolph Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Hugo Munsterberg reckoned for different reasons that film ought not to be a realistic medium, many a movie fan would for a set of different reasons, agree with them. People wanted to see Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, and preferably in fancy settings like Manhattan apartments and country estates. The dream factory was there to manufacture fantasy; it wasn’t there to reproduce reality. Bazin theoretically and Rossellini filmically wished to disagree. Bazin believed: that the problem with the Soviet school and other earlier film schools reliant on editing was that the montage “…used by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, or Gance did not show the event; it alluded to it. Undoubtedly they derived at least the greater part of the constituent elements from the reality they were describing but the final significance of the film was found to reside in the ordering of these elements much more than in their objective content.” (What is Cinema? Vol 1). Rossellini insisted that “montage is no longer necessary. Things are there…why manipulate them?” (Cahiers du Cinema) What mattered was often respecting the locale. Speaking of why it took so long to shoot Stromboli, Rossellini said: “…we were confined to the island, handicapped by the unpredictability of the weather and variations in the wind and sea that were too great.” (Cahiers du Cinema) But would Stromboli have been of much value if it had been shot in a studio, relying on wind machines and back-projected footage of the sea?

     If we think not, can we extend this to Rossellini’s filming of animal cruelty? Some will say it is all very well showing us the island, the villagers, the houses they live in. Nobody would have been harmed in the filming of such scenes, but the rabbit has been, and also the tuna fish. However, if Rossellini’s purpose is to capture reality rather than to dramatise it, we can have less of an issue aesthetically and ethically with the tuna fish sequence than the brief scene with the ferret and the rabbit. In the latter, Rossellini isn’t capturing a scene of animal cruelty, he is dramatically creating it as the rough husband Antonioni (Mario Vitale) shows the more sophisticated Lithuanian Karin (Ingrid Bergman), who has married him to escape an internment camp after the war, an act he finds amusing and which horrifies her. In the former, Rossellini shows the local fishermen at work, paying much attention to the detail of the catch and the difficulties involved. In the scene with the ferret and the rabbit, Rossellini could have excised it without much difficulty, found another way to illustrate the husband’s casual brutality, or allowed Karin to describe it to the film’s priest, for example. It would be much more difficult to excise the tuna sequence even if again Karin reacts strongly to the harshness of the people and the environment. What the fishing sequence shows vividly is the reality of living on a small island and people reliant on such a catch to feed the population. What the rabbit/ferret scene illustrates is no more than the coarse sensibility of one man that suggests in its showing potentially the coarseness of Rossellini himself. 

    That would take care of the aesthetics, but what about the ethics? Interestingly, and perhaps importantly, the British Board of Film censors draw a distinction between violence to animals that has been created by the film and animal violence that has been captured by the film. “It is illegal to show any scene 'organised or directed” for the purposes of the film that involves actual cruelty to animals.” (BBFC) From a Bazinian perspective, the realism needn’t demand that the filmmaker enact scenes of animal cruelty because they reject montage or more recently CGI, they would just need to find another way of relaying the information that indicates this savagery. After all, Bazin’s notion of realism was closely affiliated with an ethical imperative. “…Cinema can say everything, but not show everything.” (What is Cinema? Volume II) There is an ethical importance involved in the aesthetic choices. Viewers may have a problem with the tuna fish sequence but it is integrated into the film. While it too could have been offered indirectly, by Karin expressing her dismay retrospectively, it would have lost much of its power. There is no such power in the rabbit/ferret scene.  

    Viewers may feel that Stromboli for all its locational realism is contrary to a realist aesthetic in casting Bergman in the leading role. As we have noted, viewers usually go to the cinema to see stars, and apart from the islanders themselves, just about every other person who would have gone to the cinema to see Stromboli went to see Ingrid Bergman. There is a convoluted and very famous story behind the production which can be summarised thus: Bergman wrote to Rossellini saying how she loved his work, they worked on Stromboli together and Rossellini told the married Bergman how much he loved her. A Hollywood scandal ensued with Bergman settling in Europe and becoming for a number of years the director’s focus: in Stromboli, Europa 51, Voyage to Italy and a couple of other films too. 

   If realism was predicated on putting everyday life on the screen, Bergman was very far from a quotidian figure. By 1950 she was one of the biggest film stars in the world: Casablanca, Gaslight, Suspicion and Notorious, but Rossellini wondered how such stardom would work in a neo-realist context. The film has two main points of interest; the island and Bergman, and while we can see that the interactions between the islanders and Karin are clumsy beyond the difficulties of social interaction, suggesting the failure of conjoining the professional and the amateur, it is as though the film’s purpose was to show Karin entrapped on the island and Bergman caught in a very different aesthetic universe than she was used to existing within. Rossellini reckoned, “her geographical situation is a trap. She finds herself in a maze, not because she chose to enter it but because there comes a moment when the very structure of the world she lives in turns into a maze. I think this is the point which most closely ties in with the needs of the story.” (Film Critica)

    Before Bergman, Rossellini was with Anna Magnani, which is gossip, but useful. She appeared in Rome, Open City and hoped too to get the role in Stromboli. But whatever the personal ethics involved in foregoing casting your lover and instead going ahead and casting someone who was to be your next, aesthetically the choice of Bergman makes sense. Magnani was earthy and Italian, someone who wouldn’t have looked out of place in this barren, brutal environment. The delicate Swede, pampered and praised in Hollywood, seems so consistently uncomfortable in the milieu Rossellini has thrown her in that the film’s resonances hover between the diegetic story and the non-diegetic experiment: seeing if Hollywood could be married to neo-realism; could a star be born anew in a different filmic universe? Bergman, always a wonderful actress of the close-up, is here often a thespian of the medium and long shot, someone whose voice is important but offered less inflective range than usual as she is often whiney and disconsolate. Yet it works, and Rossellini would produce in Europa 51 and Voyage to Italy two further films with Bergman that are regarded as masterpieces. 

    Yet none of them risked to the degree Stromboli does this combination of amateurs and professionals. Bazin had a term for it: amalgamation, or “the law of amalgam.” Bazin says “it is not the absence of professional actors that is, historically, the hallmark of social realism not of the Italian film. Rather, it is specifically the rejection of the star concept and the casual mixing of professionals and of those who just act occasionally.” (What is Cinema? Vol II) Bazin even gives Magnani as an example in Rome, Open City of someone who came to cinema from singing popular songs and fitted in easily into a mixed acting environment. This is not so of Bergman in Stromboli, but the mismatch works well if we accept the film is a hyperbolic account of contrasting environs, of Karin as a woman of the world and the islanders as people who seek an insular community.

    However, the film contains a couple of ironies, one beyond and the other within the diegesis: if Karin comes to the island out of duress as she marries a man she doesn’t love, Bergman comes to the same island from luxury because she fell for Rossellini. If viewers find it inexplicable how Karin became pregnant when she hardly touches her husband and when they sleep in separate beds, this is an immaculate conception containing a factual reality. Bergman became pregnant during the production. The other irony is within the story: many of the islanders know America but have chosen to return, believing that the States is all very well for the young but a tough country to live in when you are older. Here are these peasants Karin deems well below her social class, who nevertheless have been to America and Karin sees a chance for herself when the priest proposes it might just be possible to find a way of getting her either to Australia or the US. There she is determined not to “waste my youth here”, and some of these contemptible locals have been and returned. 

     As Karin in this scene tries to seduce the priest, hoping to get $3,000 he holds to take care of the cemetery, one may see in Karin an abominable figure, just as we will see in Antonio’s animal cruelty a terrible man, and potentially in the islanders’ fishing of tuna a barbaric people. But that wouldn’t be quite how Rossellini views it. People are just trying to live and survive as best they can. “It is precisely that great actions and great deeds come about in the same way, with the same resonance as normal everyday occurrences.” (Cahiers du Cinema) If this is so whether working with a famous actress like Bergman, or locals who have never acted at all, the purpose is to be open to what contingent reality offers. Some might have issues with the tuna fishing sequence, though Rossellini waited eight days before he could film it as nature wouldn’t meet the demands of film production. For Bergman she was waiting longer to work with Rossellini, saying “I think that deep down I was in love with Roberto from the moment I saw Open City, for I could never get over the fact that he was always there in my thoughts.” (My Story) 

   Perhaps neo-realism died the moment Bergman and Rossellini met but another way of looking at it is that it renewed cinema in interesting ways as realism tried to incorporate stardom. It was a lesson we can even see in New Hollywood, in American films of the seventies where a more realistic style didn’t counter the presence of film stars. It had become very common to put well-known actors in difficult situations — Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, Roy Scheider in Sorcerer, Jon Voigt and Burt Reynolds in Deliverance. “Burt Reynolds once said [director John] Boorman was adamant about filming the movie in chronological order in case an actor died. In one scene, Reynolds was in a canoe when it went barreling over a waterfall and he cracked his tailbone. Jon Voight, meanwhile, put his life on the line to film a rock climbing sequence without a harness or any wires.” (Indiewire) Sheen ended up with a heart attack. The amalgamation Bazin discusses, thus became also between environment and actor, with stars risking their lives for the roles they would play in environments that could kill them. Rossellini was clearly at the forefront of developments in realism but how we feel about the ethics behind such progress may reflect on which we find the more important, ethics or an aesthetic that insistently incorporates reality. Rossellini was vital to bringing them together, even if his attitude to animals who had no say in the ethical choices he was making, might still cause us a few problems. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Stromboli

     Realism can be troublesome, especially when in searching for the realistic it arrives at the sadistic. There will no doubt and quite understandably be those watching Stromboli horrified by the animal violence it contains. In Roberto Rossellini’s film, a ferret mauls a rabbit, and later, in a set-piece sequence, giant tuna fish are pierced and punctured as fishermen capture a shoal off the coast of the Volcanic island of the title. The viewer is in little doubt the creatures are being killed and should our urban, western sensibility, if that is what we possess, be offended by such verisimilitude, and is it a price worth paying to access the real? 

   Rossellini wishes to show as accurately as he can a small island that makes its living chiefly from fishing, people who possess an earthy, pragmatic relationship with other living creatures. Rossellini was along with Vittorio De Sica the main exponent of neo-realism, a chiefly post-war Italian movement that wished to capture life as much as drama, to film Rome, Milan, Sicily, Stromboli, Napoli and elsewhere with a fidelity hitherto ignored in fictional film. It became not only a movement but a theory, with Andre Bazin insisting that neo-realism shouldn’t be seen as a series of films fitting into cinema history and reflecting Italy after the war, but as the very essence of cinema that film had before this too easily ignored.

  There were reasons for this eschewal and they would rest on film so naturally being a realistic medium, since all someone had to do was turn the camera on and reality would be recorded. It was the escape from the real that would turn it into an art, or at least an artifice, and who was going to disagree when most viewers were unlikely to turn up to the cinema to see people like themselves up there on the screen? If theorists and filmmakers like Rudolph Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Hugo Munsterberg reckoned for different reasons that film ought not to be a realistic medium, many a movie fan would for a set of different reasons, agree with them. People wanted to see Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, and preferably in fancy settings like Manhattan apartments and country estates. The dream factory was there to manufacture fantasy; it wasn’t there to reproduce reality. Bazin theoretically and Rossellini filmically wished to disagree. Bazin believed: that the problem with the Soviet school and other earlier film schools reliant on editing was that the montage “…used by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, or Gance did not show the event; it alluded to it. Undoubtedly they derived at least the greater part of the constituent elements from the reality they were describing but the final significance of the film was found to reside in the ordering of these elements much more than in their objective content.” (What is Cinema? Vol 1). Rossellini insisted that “montage is no longer necessary. Things are there…why manipulate them?” (Cahiers du Cinema) What mattered was often respecting the locale. Speaking of why it took so long to shoot Stromboli, Rossellini said: “…we were confined to the island, handicapped by the unpredictability of the weather and variations in the wind and sea that were too great.” (Cahiers du Cinema) But would Stromboli have been of much value if it had been shot in a studio, relying on wind machines and back-projected footage of the sea?

     If we think not, can we extend this to Rossellini’s filming of animal cruelty? Some will say it is all very well showing us the island, the villagers, the houses they live in. Nobody would have been harmed in the filming of such scenes, but the rabbit has been, and also the tuna fish. However, if Rossellini’s purpose is to capture reality rather than to dramatise it, we can have less of an issue aesthetically and ethically with the tuna fish sequence than the brief scene with the ferret and the rabbit. In the latter, Rossellini isn’t capturing a scene of animal cruelty, he is dramatically creating it as the rough husband Antonioni (Mario Vitale) shows the more sophisticated Lithuanian Karin (Ingrid Bergman), who has married him to escape an internment camp after the war, an act he finds amusing and which horrifies her. In the former, Rossellini shows the local fishermen at work, paying much attention to the detail of the catch and the difficulties involved. In the scene with the ferret and the rabbit, Rossellini could have excised it without much difficulty, found another way to illustrate the husband’s casual brutality, or allowed Karin to describe it to the film’s priest, for example. It would be much more difficult to excise the tuna sequence even if again Karin reacts strongly to the harshness of the people and the environment. What the fishing sequence shows vividly is the reality of living on a small island and people reliant on such a catch to feed the population. What the rabbit/ferret scene illustrates is no more than the coarse sensibility of one man that suggests in its showing potentially the coarseness of Rossellini himself. 

    That would take care of the aesthetics, but what about the ethics? Interestingly, and perhaps importantly, the British Board of Film censors draw a distinction between violence to animals that has been created by the film and animal violence that has been captured by the film. “It is illegal to show any scene 'organised or directed” for the purposes of the film that involves actual cruelty to animals.” (BBFC) From a Bazinian perspective, the realism needn’t demand that the filmmaker enact scenes of animal cruelty because they reject montage or more recently CGI, they would just need to find another way of relaying the information that indicates this savagery. After all, Bazin’s notion of realism was closely affiliated with an ethical imperative. “…Cinema can say everything, but not show everything.” (What is Cinema? Volume II) There is an ethical importance involved in the aesthetic choices. Viewers may have a problem with the tuna fish sequence but it is integrated into the film. While it too could have been offered indirectly, by Karin expressing her dismay retrospectively, it would have lost much of its power. There is no such power in the rabbit/ferret scene.  

    Viewers may feel that Stromboli for all its locational realism is contrary to a realist aesthetic in casting Bergman in the leading role. As we have noted, viewers usually go to the cinema to see stars, and apart from the islanders themselves, just about every other person who would have gone to the cinema to see Stromboli went to see Ingrid Bergman. There is a convoluted and very famous story behind the production which can be summarised thus: Bergman wrote to Rossellini saying how she loved his work, they worked on Stromboli together and Rossellini told the married Bergman how much he loved her. A Hollywood scandal ensued with Bergman settling in Europe and becoming for a number of years the director’s focus: in Stromboli, Europa 51, Voyage to Italy and a couple of other films too. 

   If realism was predicated on putting everyday life on the screen, Bergman was very far from a quotidian figure. By 1950 she was one of the biggest film stars in the world: Casablanca, Gaslight, Suspicion and Notorious, but Rossellini wondered how such stardom would work in a neo-realist context. The film has two main points of interest; the island and Bergman, and while we can see that the interactions between the islanders and Karin are clumsy beyond the difficulties of social interaction, suggesting the failure of conjoining the professional and the amateur, it is as though the film’s purpose was to show Karin entrapped on the island and Bergman caught in a very different aesthetic universe than she was used to existing within. Rossellini reckoned, “her geographical situation is a trap. She finds herself in a maze, not because she chose to enter it but because there comes a moment when the very structure of the world she lives in turns into a maze. I think this is the point which most closely ties in with the needs of the story.” (Film Critica)

    Before Bergman, Rossellini was with Anna Magnani, which is gossip, but useful. She appeared in Rome, Open City and hoped too to get the role in Stromboli. But whatever the personal ethics involved in foregoing casting your lover and instead going ahead and casting someone who was to be your next, aesthetically the choice of Bergman makes sense. Magnani was earthy and Italian, someone who wouldn’t have looked out of place in this barren, brutal environment. The delicate Swede, pampered and praised in Hollywood, seems so consistently uncomfortable in the milieu Rossellini has thrown her in that the film’s resonances hover between the diegetic story and the non-diegetic experiment: seeing if Hollywood could be married to neo-realism; could a star be born anew in a different filmic universe? Bergman, always a wonderful actress of the close-up, is here often a thespian of the medium and long shot, someone whose voice is important but offered less inflective range than usual as she is often whiney and disconsolate. Yet it works, and Rossellini would produce in Europa 51 and Voyage to Italy two further films with Bergman that are regarded as masterpieces. 

    Yet none of them risked to the degree Stromboli does this combination of amateurs and professionals. Bazin had a term for it: amalgamation, or “the law of amalgam.” Bazin says “it is not the absence of professional actors that is, historically, the hallmark of social realism not of the Italian film. Rather, it is specifically the rejection of the star concept and the casual mixing of professionals and of those who just act occasionally.” (What is Cinema? Vol II) Bazin even gives Magnani as an example in Rome, Open City of someone who came to cinema from singing popular songs and fitted in easily into a mixed acting environment. This is not so of Bergman in Stromboli, but the mismatch works well if we accept the film is a hyperbolic account of contrasting environs, of Karin as a woman of the world and the islanders as people who seek an insular community.

    However, the film contains a couple of ironies, one beyond and the other within the diegesis: if Karin comes to the island out of duress as she marries a man she doesn’t love, Bergman comes to the same island from luxury because she fell for Rossellini. If viewers find it inexplicable how Karin became pregnant when she hardly touches her husband and when they sleep in separate beds, this is an immaculate conception containing a factual reality. Bergman became pregnant during the production. The other irony is within the story: many of the islanders know America but have chosen to return, believing that the States is all very well for the young but a tough country to live in when you are older. Here are these peasants Karin deems well below her social class, who nevertheless have been to America and Karin sees a chance for herself when the priest proposes it might just be possible to find a way of getting her either to Australia or the US. There she is determined not to “waste my youth here”, and some of these contemptible locals have been and returned. 

     As Karin in this scene tries to seduce the priest, hoping to get $3,000 he holds to take care of the cemetery, one may see in Karin an abominable figure, just as we will see in Antonio’s animal cruelty a terrible man, and potentially in the islanders’ fishing of tuna a barbaric people. But that wouldn’t be quite how Rossellini views it. People are just trying to live and survive as best they can. “It is precisely that great actions and great deeds come about in the same way, with the same resonance as normal everyday occurrences.” (Cahiers du Cinema) If this is so whether working with a famous actress like Bergman, or locals who have never acted at all, the purpose is to be open to what contingent reality offers. Some might have issues with the tuna fishing sequence, though Rossellini waited eight days before he could film it as nature wouldn’t meet the demands of film production. For Bergman she was waiting longer to work with Rossellini, saying “I think that deep down I was in love with Roberto from the moment I saw Open City, for I could never get over the fact that he was always there in my thoughts.” (My Story) 

   Perhaps neo-realism died the moment Bergman and Rossellini met but another way of looking at it is that it renewed cinema in interesting ways as realism tried to incorporate stardom. It was a lesson we can even see in New Hollywood, in American films of the seventies where a more realistic style didn’t counter the presence of film stars. It had become very common to put well-known actors in difficult situations — Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, Roy Scheider in Sorcerer, Jon Voigt and Burt Reynolds in Deliverance. “Burt Reynolds once said [director John] Boorman was adamant about filming the movie in chronological order in case an actor died. In one scene, Reynolds was in a canoe when it went barreling over a waterfall and he cracked his tailbone. Jon Voight, meanwhile, put his life on the line to film a rock climbing sequence without a harness or any wires.” (Indiewire) Sheen ended up with a heart attack. The amalgamation Bazin discusses, thus became also between environment and actor, with stars risking their lives for the roles they would play in environments that could kill them. Rossellini was clearly at the forefront of developments in realism but how we feel about the ethics behind such progress may reflect on which we find the more important, ethics or an aesthetic that insistently incorporates reality. Rossellini was vital to bringing them together, even if his attitude to animals who had no say in the ethical choices he was making, might still cause us a few problems. 


© Tony McKibbin