ABSTRACT
Rossellini’s Europa’51 (1952), which was shot approximately three years after the director’s first collaboration with Bergman, Stromboli, Land of God, and immediately following Francis, God’s Jester (1950), transplants the foreign woman from the harsh but beautiful southern landscape of the volcanic island to the postwar urban environment of Rome. The city depicted in this film, however, bears no resemblance to its portrayal in the director’s most famous postwar works, Rome Open City and Paisà. It is, as others have pointed out, austere to the point of abstraction, barely “concretely denoted,” reduced to a few features. 2 This, I will show, is a consequence, on the one hand, of the way in which certain framing and editing patterns deployed in relation to the figure of the star—such as, frequent close-ups of her face, and extended periods of immobility as the camera rests on her image—serve to block movement and break down the connecting links between people and locations within the urban geography. My reading of Europa’51 will thus provide a framework for addressing the problem of theorizing the relationship between the cinematic image of the woman—as spectacle or fetish—and a set of spatial and temporal relationships extending beyond her that a film establishes between characters and objects, what we might call the story-world or realistic setting of the film.
