The Brooklyn Rail

“A sleep-wandering dreamer,” this time in the form of Ingrid Bergman, “staggered here and there among the blooming ruins,” a description that crashes life (“blooming”) and death (“ruins”) together. Bergman’s “pale, elegiac face” reflects the eerily aesthetic beauty of her existential fears and relationship anxieties as she confronts the invigorating art, ancient remains, and fertile yet deadly fields of lava that compose the southern Italian landscape.

These poetic lines did not come from Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 neorealist film Journey to Italy; rather they originated in the previous century, in a travel narrative by German Romantic poet and satirist Heinrich Heine, called not “Journey to Italy” but translated to English as The Journey to Italy (1826–1831).

At one point, Bergman’s character remembers an old friend, a poet, who passed away, one whose sensibilities were so much more romantic than those of her pragmatic husband. She describes him, not as having a “pale elegiac face,” as Heine wrote, but as “so pale and spiritual.” He wrote poems about the Neapolitan museums and ancient ruins: “Temple of the spirit / No longer bodies / but pure ascetic images.” It’s as if she speaks of Heine himself.

As far as I can tell, the two Journeys to Italy have no relation to each other, so I’d like to introduce them. Books and movies have had a special relationship since the early days of film history, but we rarely focus on that bond beyond the straightforward practice of adaptation; what about the other relationships between the literary and cinematic arts? Seeing as these two texts have so much in common—especially in how they use Italian landscapes and nationhood as a symbolic forum for explorations of sex and death—I suspect they’ll really hit it off.

Any example of a genre is usually strongest when it breaks its own rules, when it transcends categorization. In his Journey, Heine wrote, “There is nothing so stupid on the face of the earth as to read a book of travels in Italy—unless it be to write one—and the only way in which its author can make it in any degree tolerable is to say as little in it as possible of Italy.” Meanwhile, Rossellini’s oeuvre—and his Journey is no exception—plumbs psychological depths to the boiling points of confronting mortality and existential loneliness in order for his characters to find connection or inner truth. Thus, the director’s usual offering climaxes in “oof!”-y but sublime and spiritual (two rather Romantic concepts!) moments. Hence his reputation as a storyteller who can take a plot in which nothing happens and culminate it in a moment that means everything. Both artists set out to create very specific types of texts, and both seem to resist the tasks they gave themselves throughout the whole process.

The two Journeys have experienced scant accessibility and availability in the US since their respective releases. English versions of Heine’s travelogue only exist as used copies of a 1999 reprint of an 1855 translation by Charles Leland. And based on complaints of a passionate 1974 Film Comment article by Robin Wood (who honorably attempted to rectify the initial harsh critical reception of the film and highlight its significance to film history), it would seem the version of the Rossellini film made available today by the Criterion Collection might mark the first time Americans have access to a full-length English edition. Heine’s fame as a Romantic poet and a satirist and Rossellini’s as a founder of Italian neorealism make for a weird juxtaposition when placed side by side, but, to me, both genres share a key characteristic when they function at peak potential: whimsy.

Each text reaches whimsical peaks in museums—though I’m apparently alone in this opinion, or at least I would have been at the time of the film’s United States release. Donald Spoto writes in his Bergman biography Notorious (1997), “Critics excoriated the film as pointless and dull, poorly written, incompetently directed and atrociously edited. Ingrid looked nervous and statuesque, which was appropriate enough for a character shown, for the most part, wandering through museum halls and empty villas. Voyage in Italy [aka Journey to Italy], later inextricably canonized by the French New Wave, is a triumph of mind-numbing, elegant emptiness.” Spoto’s critiques would have been at home with the reception of Journey to Italy after its American release in 1955, which was colder than the marriage portrayed on screen.

In September of 1955, Variety published an article that read, “Spectator must wait for the femme star, for no apparent reason, to wander through four museums and ruins, which tends to slow even the meandering pace previously established.” One particularly snarky review by David Ketchum reads: “I was sitting there stupified [sic] watching BERGMAN and SANDERS travel around the Italian countryside visiting morbid places like the Catacombs and crumbly temples and old graveyards in Pompey [sic]. And that’s all very fine if you like travelogues, but I like movies to have some sort of plot or story—you know, some kind of point, not just rambling on and on with nothing really happening.”

Heine’s actual nonfiction Italian travelogue naturally spends the first fifty or so pages in Germany. Even when we get to Italy, we’re still kind of waiting to get to Italy. Which begs the question: What exactly does getting to Italy even mean when you’re flipping pages, not flying planes? His idea of telling us about the country revolves around descriptions of attractive women or women who strike him as capital-R Romantic in some fashion. We get some flowery language about sunshine in almost every chapter and something along the lines of mountains embracing villages—typical Romantic poetry stuff (I mock, but I love it). The culmination of the book seems to be establishing a platform for ridiculing Heine’s rival German poet, while all the satirical descriptions of people (of multiple nationalities) leading up to his big literary “oh, burn!” becomes practice for his true nemesis. He focuses on satirical and critical hot takes on political and religious issues of the day tied up in nascent ideas of nationalism and freedom, topics that largely would require a strong understanding of nineteenth-century Western European history to fully appreciate.

But then there’s moments like this, anxious yet whimsical moments: “The town [Lucca] seemed but the ghost of a town, a specter of stone in broad daylight … It held me, perhaps, even more powerfully bound since the sun lit up so warmly and brightly the uncanny buildings; and I marked well that ghosts are far more terrible when they cast aside the black mantle of night to show themselves in the clear light of noon.” And taking about fifty pages to even get to Italy, another eighty pages or so to get to the core of the text, “The Baths of Lucca,” can be forgiven.

All aboard the hot tub of Lucca time machine; let’s travel a hundred years to face the ghosts of protagonists haunting the Neapolitan landscape in Rosellini’s 1954 film, which has been written about as an adaptation of James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914). Bergman stars as Katherine Joyce, an English woman struggling to bridge the emotional and physical distance blooming between her and her husband, Alex (George Sanders), while they try to settle the estate of a deceased uncle who left them his villa. The couple decides to part ways for the duration of their vacation, the husband attempting to pursue other women on Capri and in Naples while Katherine sightsees.

 

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I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only “ti amo,” [“I love you”] I am ready to come and make a film with you.

—Ingrid Bergman.

So read the iconic letter that led to Bergman starring in a trifecta of films—including Journey to Italy along with Stromboli (1950) and Europa ’51 (1952)—and, at the time considered scandalous, to the relationship with Rossellini himself (that would give us Isabella Rossellini). With Rossellini, Bergman had a chance to play a different kind of character, to dig psychologically deeper and pair the intense, dramatic acting of earlier movies like Gaslight (1944) with the cinema vérité of neorealism. Sadly, Bergman, struggling with the domineering Rossellini and his unconventional approach to filmmaking, did not see this period as the success she had hoped for. Of course, that information comes from a biographer who clearly did not see her collaborations with Rossellini as productive.

According to beloved TCM host Alicia Malone, Bergman, around the time of her own journey to Italy, “was exiled from Hollywood, lost custody of her daughter, and suffered the scorn of thousands. The press documented her every move, and her actions were even denounced on the Senate floor.” Because of her affair with Rossellini which resulted in a pregnancy, one senator accused her of being “a powerful influence for evil.”

1955 newspapers advertised movies like Saratoga Trunk, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Notorious, all films released around ten, twenty, or more years previously with no mention of Bergman’s latest work. Other gossipy columns tittered about the Bergman-Rossellini relationship, spreading rumors about how Audrey Hepburn and her then husband Mel Ferrer’s relationship “has Bergman-Rossellini overtones,” which suggests the ubiquity of the so-called scandal. Another column refers to “Ingrid Bergman and her Italian husband,” as if Rossellini is not even worth naming—who would know that guy? A real burn must have been the profile of actor Anna Magnani, Rossellini’s ex-wife, run the same month of Journey to Italy’s release in the United States. It reads: “Questions about Roberto Rossellini, who threw her over to marry Ingrid Bergman in one of Rome’s juiciest scandals, she dismissed with a tired shrug.”

Malone presents a much more favorable look on Bergman’s career overall in her previously cited book, Girls on Film. Malone’s regard of Bergman reminds me of my own earliest encounters with the actress and with Journey to Italy specifically. I had long been a fan of Casablanca, and the lead actress had struck me as particularly magnetic, though the more times I watched the film, the more frustrated I felt at how Ilsa (and Bergman as an actor) seemed pushed around by the men who controlled her life, leaving no room for this charismatic star to exercise the full breadth of her talents.

Years later, I had taken a second job at a small arthouse theatre, where I could read books in the old-fashioned box office while waiting to sell tickets and, for free, watch as many indie and foreign films as I could fit into my schedule. (My first job was in an art museum, which perhaps explains my bias in favor of the museum scenes of both Journeys.) One night, we had a special guest, director Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, Badlands). Most of our guests came to do Q&As paired with their own film’s screening, but Malick wanted to share one of his favorite movies with us instead. He picked Rossellini’s Journey to Italy.

Unlike Mr. Spoto, I was mesmerized. I thought the neorealist style both subdued Bergman’s more dramatic approach to acting while also allowing her to pop and rail against her backdrop—appropriate for the theme of a woman confronting the harsh realities of her failing marriage. Rossellini’s camera seemed fixated on picking up every twinge of psychological nuance that graced her face. This was the type of movie I’d been waiting to see Bergman in.

Heine “cannot leave unmentioned the collection of portraits of beautiful Genoese women, exhibited in the Palace Durazzo,” and I cannot leave unmentioned the reasons why, contrary to the critics, the scenes of Ingrid Bergman meandering through a museum, catacombs, lava fields, and the ruins of Pompeii, should be regarded as some of the most thrilling, fabulously whimsical, brooding scenes ever captured on film. Thank goodness for the French New Wave’s ability to appreciate this picture. For both Heine and Rossellini, these museums open up the most essential (and sometimes funny) feelings about art, sex, and death. Here’s a rather dramatic explanation from Heine of how those things are connected, as he gazes at the portraits of women long deceased, musing on how even their likeness will someday decay:

But sadder far than this idea of an endless dying, and of a desolate yawning annihilation, is the thought that we do not even perish as originals, but as copies of long-vanished mortals who were spiritually and bodily like us, and that, after us, men will again be born, who will in turn see, and feel, and think like us, and be again in turn annihilated by Death.

Heine offers words for Bergman, who, often mute, stumbles aimlessly, furiously, anxiously, determinedly through these spaces of Neapolitan pride. Eerie music trills as if it were an incantation to magically resurrect the dead for Katherine’s visits. Heine’s wit might help some of those critics, the ones who found Rossellini’s Journey humorless, laugh a little. An elderly man gives Katherine a tour of the museum and says of one sculpture: “This is the Venus I like most … She is more mature. Don’t you agree, lady?” Katherine’s response: “Perhaps, I wouldn’t know.” The sultry-yet-mature statue has no arms or head.

On another tour, a guide holds Katherine’s wrists in the holes in the rocks, spreading her arms like a crucifixion; the guide says this is how the ancients would have tied up “a beautiful woman like you.” Kinky stuff. Katherine’s conclusion after one of her tours is that “To think that those men lived thousands of years ago, and you feel that they are just like the men today.”

And to top it off with another weird coincidence, Heine’s museum visit haunts him because he thinks he recognizes himself and the dead Maria (an old lover) in the centuries-old portraits. During Katherine’s museum tour, a guide notes that one ancient statue “looks just like my daughter Marianna.” Both recognize loved ones in likenesses where they were impossible to exist. Perhaps what I’m interested in is not so much adaptation but likeness. A resemblance that at once fits into the cycle of Heine’s “endless dying” and by doing so defies time itself thus allowing us to find ourselves and converse with those asking similar questions across the centuries and through the veil.

As you may have noticed, Journey to Italy has a variety of names. Viaggio in Italia in Italian, it has been translated to Voyage in Italy, The Strangers, The Lonely Woman, and one contemporaneous advertisement seems to refer to it as The Greatest Love—gag! (I’m not sure what other movie the ad could be for.) Heine’s Journey is part of a collection that literally translates to “Pictures,” and “journey” could also be translated as “trip.” So really they are not two journeys to Italy at all. While scholarship on Joyce and Rossellini exists, another story is that Rossellini wanted to adapt the French novel Duo by Colette (1934) but could not get the rights. So he tweaked the tale. A couple’s trip to Southern France became a trek through southern Italy, the settings made interchangeable even though the iconic cinematography of Journey to Italy develops the setting as much as the characters.

Wherever we went, I hope you enjoyed the tours. Thank you for joining me on two journeys to Italy. Or was it three, four? Maybe we did not go anywhere at all.