A Film Canon

The first - and strongest - installment in Rossellini's purgation trilogy, Stromboli also marks the first of several attempts to transform Ingrid Bergman into a personification of the miscommunication that, in the neorealist trilogy, was used as a synecdoche for the ravages of war, and so construe her gradual apprehension of, and reconciliation with, her surroundings - the trajectory of all three films - as a descent, purgation and salvation that leaves her pitied, despised and incapable of displaying any sign of grace, innocence, or naivety - the qualities that typified her American performances - without simultaneously confronting the post-war viewer with their fear, uncertainty and, above all, complicity, all of which are too pervasive and horrifying to be directly surmounted, and so need to be condensed to her body. To this end, her first incarnation takes the form of Karin, a Lithuanian refugee whose flight encompasses Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, an Italian displaced person's camp (where the film opens) and, finally, the tiny volcanic island of Stromboli, where her husband quickly sides with the locals against this palpable, unsettling holiness, subsuming himself into an alienating dialect whose most accessible mediator is the local priest ("May the Lord guide you. Compose yourself, meditate, think."), but which finds most striking expression in Karin's increasingly nauseous anticipation of death, or at least a potentially fatal birth pang. Unfortunately, this is offset by stagy delivery, resulting from a combination of non-professional, non-English actors with an excessively discursive English script - a problem that increases as the trilogy progresses. However, Rossellini compensates with an extraordinary deflection of his desecrated cityscapes into the purgatorial landscape of the island, which not only culminates the rural neorealist strain's fascination with liminal, lava-locked coastlines (as well as the spectacular water sequences that tend to accompany them, as evinced in the haunting sermon at sea and depictions of tuna fishing), but, in the final eruption, produces a warscape to rival anything in more realistic WWII drama, fusing Karin's spectacular ascent with the gravitas of Dante's Purgatory, upon which its topography is surely based, but whose comforting glimpse of the stars is replaced with her lunar, sulphurous vista, and the ambiguous, tortured epiphany that it produces: "God! My God! Give me the strength, the understanding and the courage!"