ABSTRACT
It has been said that 1939, the year of Ingrid Bergman’s “discovery” by Hollywood, signaled the low point of the careers of her two major predecessors—as European imports—Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, both of whom had by this time been deemed “box office poison” by the industry. Bergman was introduced, Robin Wood argues, “as a replacement: at once the ‘new Garbo’ and the anti-Garbo.” 1 Yet, despite her enormous success in Hollywood throughout the 1940s, Bergman has in subsequent decades not prompted the kind of detailed, theoretically influenced readings afforded to figures like Dietrich, Garbo, and another of Bergman’s contemporaries, Rita Hayworth. Furthermore, in the discourse on the representation of women in the cinema Bergman is seldom held up—in the way that these other figures consistently are—as paradigmatic of the phenomenon of Hollywood stardom in the classical era. Critical writings on the actress can be roughly divided into three major areas of interest. Anglo-American critics have focused on making sense of the causes of the Bergman/Rossellini scandal that erupted in the United States in 1949–1950, and its effects on Bergman’s career. 2 These analyses have widened our understanding of the publicity discourse surrounding Bergman’s flight from Hollywood and the release in the U.S. of her first film with Rossellini; however, they tend to disengage the American public discourse from other kinds of material—an approach that, in effect, blocks a critical reading of the films in which Bergman stars. Moreover, by limiting their analyses to the period before and immediately following the actress’s move to Italy, such approaches also implicitly accept Hollywood’s own assessment at the time that Bergman’s film career effectually ended when she made the decision to join Rossellini on the island of Stromboli for their first collaboration. In Italy, by contrast, the criticism on Bergman has only in a limited or indirect way shown an interest in the public discourse surrounding the Hollywood actress. There, the focus has been on understanding the ways in which Bergman’s presence influenced the director Rossellini’s style, particularly in the context of his links to the neorealist movement. The Italian critical reception of Bergman, while taking a stronger interest than the Americans in close readings of the film texts themselves, particularly those the Hollywood actress made with Rossellini, is less interested (or, only negatively) in the unique status of the star (and the extra-filmic discourse which has such a big role in constituting it) than in an investigation of the relationship the films construct between Bergman’s figure as subject and the Italian characters and setting. In many respects the most interesting writings on Bergman, finally—those which bring together a consideration of the films and the publicity discourse—are by the Cahiers du cinéma critics, most notably Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and André Bazin. These writings, like many by the Cahiers critics of the fifties and sixties, are brief, elliptical, not fully elaborated, and yet, perhaps precisely for these reasons get at something in the reception of and fascination with Bergman not captured by readings which focus too narrowly on one or the other discourse—that is, either the textual configurations of the films or the public discourse surrounding the Hollywood star. 3
