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| NO PLACE LIKE HOME |
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1949 |
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FIGURING PROMINENTLY AMONG THE RUBBLE is the
rubble of homes. After World War II, devastated Europe was overrun
with refugees. Many of these passed through Displaced Persons camps, though
a few had to stay sometimes for years. The refugees included Holocaust
survivors, soldiers, partisans and their widows, collaborators, children born
on the run, all those people who, when the fighting arrived, piled their
belongings on carts or in packs and headed out, and kept going, trying to
somehow make it through the war — and in many cases, through the
aftermath. We're all-to-familiar with images of homelessness: refugees in
camps, running from wars, famines, hurricanes. Thanks to global news global
tragedy is ever before us, we become numb to the conditions of their lives,
the tangled politics of their situation, the logistics of relocation.
Now picture a movie crew appearing into the midst of a refugee camp to make a
film, using the refugees as extras, playing behind Hollywood's most glamorous
star. My mind is full of questions I've assimilated from Walker Percy's
ruminations on such topics in his Lost in the Cosmos as I watch the
wan, blank-eyed refugee women stumble through their lines in the opening
scenes of Stromboli. Who are they? How did they end up here? How
did they survive? And what did they think about bringing a screen goddess
into the midst of their suffering? Were they glad for the diversion, seduced
by the glamour, resentful of her good fortune? How did they feel about an
actress who'd spent the war on studio backlots portraying their experience?
Roberto Rossellini's first film with Ingrid Bergman puts his trademark
juxtaposition of reality and fiction into sharpest relief. You might even
say that Hollywood meets Reality through a barbed-wire fence in
Stromboli, when Karin, played by a Tinseltown actress, meets Antonio,
a real Italian fisherman.
Yet — are not celebrities celebrated (regardless of talent or
accomplishment!) because somehow their fame makes them seem more "real" than
us ordinary people, who may think our own lives seem ghosly and plain in
comparison.? Isn't that why most people, even perhaps war refugees, are so
willing to allow a film company to disrupt their lives, in hopes of a
celebrity encounter? Yet Ingrid Bergman fled Hollywood because of its
unreality, the manufactured sentiment, easy answers and neat,
contrived endings, the falseness of role-playing onscreen and for the public.
She's come to the refugee camp looking for reality, delighted to
finally be in a "real" place. For all their refugees suffering and want, the
refugees have something the actress doesn't (she thinks): they're so real, so
situated in the world. And for all the falseness of Hollywood, the actress
has something that snaps the refugees out of the collossal despair that is
their lives (they think): she's so real, so transcendent of this ugly, nasty
world. Reality seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
And now the internees are twice-displaced: homeless already, their "home" in
the camp has been turned into a stage set. Maybe that's okay. Maybe they've
had enough reality after all. And here's Ingrid Bergman, doubly-acting:
she's run from playing phony saints and her false image as one — she's
also left her husband and child! But here they're treating her like a saint
("She's so down to earth!" And she was, really. But still…), for deigning
to share with them their misery.
In any case, a Displaced Persons camp seems the exact right setting — it
would make a great movie itself. But could anyone really find "reality"
here? Would they know it if they saw it?
Thus far we've kept biography to a minimum to allow the films to speak for
themsevles. But we do need to get some biography out of the way and —
at the risk of further blurring those lines between fact and fiction —
we'll weave some into discussion here. Fact and fiction interweave and
illuminate one another when it comes to Stromboli. In the fiction, Karin's
interest in her fisherman is practical: marrying him is a way to get out of
the camp. In fact, Ingrid Bergman looked to Rossellini as a way to get her
out of Hollywood, where she'd come to feel trapped by a particular studio and
media made image, and an artificial film style. Rossellini's "neorealism"
was a revelation for Bergman of a radically new kind of film. She wrote and
told the director she wanted to work with him. Having the reigning queen of
Hollywood ask for a job was something Rossellini couldn't refuse, even if he
was the father of neorealsm. His willingness to make a film with a Hollywood
star confused and irritated his fans — but not nearly as much as it did
hers. At first, Rossellini actually tried to make a film in Hollywood, but
soon left shaking his head — and leaving the studio directors shaking
theirs. But he took with him their biggest female star, to make a film in
the Mediterranean with funding from Howard Hughes — who had his own
designs on Bergman. So did Rossellini, and he had something the millionaire
couldn't compete with: the magic of Italy. Even the tough and canny survivor
Karin doesn't seem immune to that beguiling Southern spirit. As Antonio
serenades her through the fence his dark eyes blaze with that warm
Mediterranean spirit that is wont to melt the frozen hearts of Northern
Europeans.
In Stromboli, the calculating Karin has made a miscalculation, and
ends marooned on a forbidding, virtually desert isle. In life, Bergman's
romance with her Italian director left her exiled from Hollywood glory and
thrown upon an unexpected and unexpectedly austere neorealist career. The
scandal provoked by the worldly Karin among the plain women of Stromboli is
an eerie dress-rehearsal for the scandal provoked worldwide, but especially
in America, by the romance. Given neorealism's documentary style, one
particularly attuned to giving voice to the actual context, it's hard to
resist the temptation to look for such autobiographical glimmerings in these
films — or others by Bergman and Rossellini. The couple's marriage was
in trouble already when they filmed the marital breakdown in Voyage to
Italy. In their last film together, Fear, Bergman played a woman
who like herself had left husband and child behind. Her eventual return to
Hollywood in films like Anastasia drafted on her reputation as a woman
with a past. And years later, countryman Ingmar Bergman cast her as a driven
career-woman artist long estranged from a grown daughter in Autumn
Sonata. But it is the pre-scandal Joan of Arc that seems the most
eerily resonant of Ingrid Bergman's career: it's impossible to watch the film
withhout thinking of the virtual martyrdom of a courageous woman who dared to
be true to her inner voices.
But we shouldn't let the "real" story make for an ex post facto
symbol-system antithetical to neorealism's insistence on the concrete reality
of the things in themselves, not least the films themselves. And this film,
aside from the backstory and gossip, is a terrific one with which to reflect
on the modern condition of homelessness, especially from an existential
perspective.
TO ANTONIO, STROMBOLI IS HOME. His family, their
customs, La terra — the earth itself. To Karin, the island is
jagged black rocks on a desolate sea. The inhabitants are cold, their
tradition oppressive and ingrown. The village, though isolated from war
along with everything else, seems just as bombed-out as the ruined cities of
the continent. A more pertinent comparison would be Pompeii, since the
rubble-like dwellings and abandoned streets lay beneath a smoking volcano.
Thus, what seemed an escape for Karin turns out to be one more prison; what
she'd hoped to make "home" she quickly decides is just one more stop on the
road. And even if we, the viewers, are also marooned on Stromboli, it's
important we keep in mind Karin's context, a whole story we are given in
fragments. She was raised in a middle-class setting and married to an
architect, we learn. Upon the outbreak of war, she found herself living in
Czechoslovakia. So far, the story could have been that of Ilsa Lund (a
character made much more famous by Ingrid Bergman), and her husband might
have been Victor Lazlo, famed Czech freedom fighter. We can well imagine
Karin's life subject to the same separations and turbulence as Ilsa's —
except she never reunited with her husband, never caught that plane for
Lisbon out of Casablanca. Karin had a much harder war, ending up in Italy,
where she "managed to remain unmolested during the German occupation."
Later, we gather she was the mistress of a Nazi officer. In France, women
like that ended up after the war with their heads shaved, paraded through the
streets. Karen went to jail, then a refugee camp, and now after what must be
nearly a decade on the run is still living by her wits, ready and able to do
whatever is necessary — lie, cheat, steal, seduce another man; we get
the idea that her survival tricks have become second nature to her — if
not first nature by now. Indeed, Karin's obviously protean quality,
her easy flair for mendacity and the cold use of her body suggest she doesn't
herself know which of her faces is the real one anymore - and that she's
afraid to look beneath her masks to confirm her hunch that there's no one
left there at all.
We get the idea that it will be the conditions of peace that will finally
challenge Karin's ability to adapt. Marrying Antonio was "Plan B": but even
if Karin had succeed in her original plan to go to Argentina, it's clear
she'd have taken her prison with her, and so it may not have mattered where
or how she landed. Even if she were to escape now from Stromboli, one
suspects she'll never be able to stop running, conniving, dissimulating, and
so never regain her so tragically lost soul.
One of the most devastating images we get in the film is the shot of Karin,
who already feels trapped in Stromboli, racing to nowhere among the mazelike
passageways of the village. Obviously, her case is an extreme one, but I
think most of us can identify with the feeling of being trapped, the sense of
horror that we dare not look back lest we see something is gaining on us.
If she only had a cellphone, I've thought, watching her scramble
frantically through that maze — just as I sometimes wonder, observing
people compulsively talking on phones everywhere, what it is they're so
afraid of discovering if they should ever find themselves in a moment of
silence. "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a
room alone," says Pascal.
Since Pascal wrote at the dawn of Modernity, this restlessness is obviously
not just a postwar phenomenon. Some speak of the "homelessness" of the
Modern Mind — a permanent state of ruin, refugees and restless motion.
This brand of homelessness actually predated the war: for before Rossellini
recommended St. Francis as a new unity and foundation, someone else had
offered National Socialism for the same reason. The only real solution to
the homelessness of the Modern mind, says Albert Camus, is to give up looking
for home. The reason we fill our lives with activity and noise is because
we're afraid to face our true condition: that reality is irremediably broken,
that wholeness is gone forever, that there is literally no place like home:
So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its
hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of nostalgia. But
with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of
shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must despair of
ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of
heart. And yet some prefer to keep their hope in motion. That
seems to be how Karin has survived not just her terrible circumstances during
the war, but also the degrading choices she had to make in order to survive.
Edmund in Germany: Year Zero was a displaced person, too,
shell-shocked and homeless despite the fact that he retained family and
domicile. He'd experienced his own loss of innocence, yet he obviously
couldn't master the tricks of survival fast enough, and paid with his life.
Indeed, suicide, or its temptation, recurs in Rossellini's series with a
regularity worth remarking upon. Like Edmund, the boy Michele jumps from a
great height in Europa '51 . Nanni is tempted by the devil to throw
herself off the rocks in The Miracle, but clings steadfastly to her
faith. A prostitute in Viaggio would have thrown herself into the bay
she says, if someone hadn't chanced just then to pick her up. And the entire
action of Stromboli leads to the mouth of the volcano, where Karin is
tempted to fling herself in. She steps back, blaming a lack of courage.
We stand ourselves now on the brink of great depths of philosophical
questions and also aesthetic ones that catch and reflect them. I hesitate to
dive in, not just from cowardice I like to think, and so perhaps will give
Karin more credit than she gives herself. Nevertheless, we can hardly avoid
the vortex around which Rossellini's entire postwar journey spins. It is the
fundamental question of philosophy, says Camus, this issue of "To be or not
to be". For Camus, in the face of the Abyss — death, the absurd, and we
can add Auschwitz — human beings tend to physical or philosophical
suicide. Nanni's religious faith he would class as the philosophical sort
— "bad faith," to use Sartre's term, as opposed to facing unflinching
the meaninglessness of it all.
Despite the overtly theistic form of Stromboli's denouement, the
action — finally shouting back to the universe, standing transparent
before some ultimate brute reality — makes for an existential showdown
that viewers of various philosophical inclinations may find compelling and
true. It all depends, of course, on what the viewer decides that brute
reality stands for: God, death, the absurd. In any case, for Karin, this is
clearly the moment of disclosure, the surrender of her own self-concealments
and evasions and shedding of her false identities to face reality — and
in this, for the first time, we see that this selfish yet identity-less
individual may receive back a real self. For the Christian, it is the
paradox of dying to get life, of losing one's life in order to save it.
There is a distinctive existential stream in the history of film criticism,
headed by André Bazin, which has not only championed Rossellini, but featured
prominently Christian existentialists. Bazin followed the
proto-existentialist "Personalism" of Catholic thinker Emmanuel Mounier,
whose Esprit magazine Bazin gave him his start writing film reviews.
Bazin's approach has of late been eclipsed by the materialistic semiological
perspective currently in ascendance, which would deny that neorealism gives
any special access to reality, since "reality" has never been anything but
culturally-created codes that are imposed on the raw data of experience.
Going beyond the limits of the reality of materialism was something director
Eric Rohmer felt Stromboli was urging him to do — and he says he
at first resisted, even hated, the film for this. But halfway through the
screening this Catholic filmmaker had what he called a "road to Damascus"
experience, a conversion, from materialistic existentialism — to belief
in something beyond.
Rossellini's own views are typically difficult to pin down. Raised a
Catholic, he was notoriously irregular in his lifestyle and cagey in his
direct commentary about his religious commitments — even as he
stubbornly insisted Christianity was the only real foundation for Western
Civilization. It is in the form of his art, his neorealism, in which
Rossellini seems the most solidly Christian: his commitment to the
particular, to concrete matter, his belief reality had its own message, one
that transcended human manipulation, and must be approached with humility and
transparency.
WHETHER ONE SEES IN STROMBOLI an escape
from, or one more example of, bad faith, a certain ambiguity is actually one
of the primary virtues for both makers and appreciators of neorealism. From
their perspective, ambiguity opens things up to allow something to seep
through which is blocked by over-determining the meaning. The climax and
ending of Stromboli, as other films in this cycle, may or may not
seem ambiguous for most viewers, but it will certainly seem abrupt. Among
his violations of film form orthodoxy, the director ignores the structural
rule of 1) Tell 'em what yer gonna tell em; 2) Tell 'em; and 3) Tell 'em what
you told him. Things just happen.
Rossellini also missed the
screenwriting memo that insists that the action must tend to raise a dramatic
question in the viewer's mind ("Will Karin go back to her husband? Will she
reconcile herself to staying on Stromboli? Stay tuned!). Rosellini rejects
the strategy of impaling his character on the horns of dilemma, and even more
the Hollywood solution of somehow contriving to let them have it both ways.
Yet neither does he compel them to a tragic choice. Instead, like Christ
with the Pharisees, he rises so completely above any implicit dramatic
questions as to leave the viewer utterly mystified, if not perturbed. "What
happens next?" takes one inevitably back into the domain of plot, thereby
short-circuiting any meaning he wishes to coax out between the lines of
cause-and-effect. Rossellini knows that imposing a neat resolution would
falsify any deeper questions the material has raised. The proper cast of
mind, as always, is openness and humility, and a surrender of the need to
dominate — to seek knowledge in the Biblical sense.
I do wonder, looking at their weary faces onscreen, what happened next to the
women in the refugee camp at which Stromboli was filmed — whether
any of them ever found peace, stability, and home ever again. And I can't
help but wonder whether Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rosselli ever learned the
lessons of neorealism — these two whose lives were always filled with
frantic activity and motion, did they ever suspend their restless wandering
and doing and just "be"? But while the extracurricular background is
pertinent and facinating, it quickly blocks our engagement with the films.
The best way to keep that connection firm may be to keep in mind the
biography that should matter to us the most: our own. Will I learn the
lessons of neorealism? Even if I'm not like the tourists who never take
anything from an experience but what they bring, even if my encounter with
these films has been genuinely transcendent, what difference does it make?
How different is a taste for "transcendence" than whatever it is that drives
weary souls like Karin?
Whatever may have driven Rossellini, his work gives solid evidence of someone
who wanted to make a difference, to make an art that was connected concretely
to the world. He may have been a talker (even a fast-talker), but the
director understood the difference between ideas and action, words and flesh,
abstraction and reality, dead letter and bodiless spirit. These postwar
films show him casting about vigorously for some lesson to be learned, path
to take, ground and direction for a civilization in ruins and tempted by
equally flawed alternatives. His later period as filmmaker was devoted to
trying to communicate to the next generation the moral and intellectual
foundations of European culture, building upon his postwar emphasis in
changing one's vision.
Dudley Andrew in a book on major film theories, concludes his chapter on the
Christian disciples of Bazin, Amédée Ayfre and Henri Agel, summarizes the
spiral of neorealist engagement:
"The artist provides an image or series of images, beautiful in themselves,
yet capable as well of consolidating and initiating new ideas. The critic
(and every spectator is in part a critic) elaborates the ideas latent in the
work and connects them to the great network of ideas we call knowledge. The
image comes out of pre-logical experience and rises toward idea. The critic
grabs the image in its ascent and draws out its rational truths. But Ayfre
says the process here is not yet complete, for the critic, enriched with his
ideas, must then resubmit himself to the image and descend to the level of
experience, letting the image sink back with the flux of inner life. The
critic must follow the image by responding anew to reality."
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