A Film Canon

Europa '51 departs from the other two installments in Rossellini's second trilogy by emphasising the holy, rather than the abject, dimension of Ingrid Bergman's purgation. As a result, the purgatorial landscapes that occupy those films - Stromboli in Stromboli, Vesuvius in Voyage To Italy - are replaced by a divine brilliance that is not merely the result of overlighting, and predominates at those moments at which Irene Girard (Bergman) apprehends genuine human 'communication' as the Christian humanist equivalent of communism, extrapolating a generalised, maternal beneficence from her insatiable, but belated, love for her son. Unfortunately, this scenario encourages all Rossellini's discursive tendencies, producing a series of tortured discussions, whose self- defeating circularities nicely corroborate Irene's insistence that revelatory communion is more productive than rational conversation, but make for a fairly bland cinematic experience. In fact, the strongest moments are still those in which Rossellini's topological tendencies rupture this discursive surface - or, alternatively, in which this divine light is raised to a sufficient pitch for Irene to cower, terrified, before it, her features brought into grotesque, angular relief. As with the neorealist trilogy, this topological dimension may occur at the level of individual bodies - most spectacularly in the prolonged death of a prostitute, culminating with her shedding tears of blood - or in terms of the cityscape itself, which, despite such visceral asides as a visit to a children's factory, and the recovery of a child's body from a polluted river, finds expression more as a series of surreal, sanitised, bureaucratic emptinesses, whose disorienting potential is poetically embodied in Rossellini's queasy, hallucinatory camera movement, as well as the vertiginous leap down a spiral staircase that opens the narrative, recalling the sudden conclusion of Germany, Year Zero.