Voyage to Italy

Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1953), while not the last film Rossellini and Bergman made together (Joan of Arc at the Stake [1954] and Fear [1954–1955] were still to follow) is a culmination of the couple’s collaboration, and is arguably the Rossellini/Bergman film most widely viewed and discussed outside of Italy. The film’s fame can be attributed in large part to the immense enthusiasm it garnered from the Cahiers du cinéma critics, most notably André Bazin, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Fereydoun Hoveyda, and Jean-Luc Godard (who not only wrote about his admiration for the film, but in fact refers directly to it in his 1963 Contempt). ¹ For the Cahiers critics, the latter three of whom were to become core members of the French New Wave, Voyage to Italy signaled the birth of a new, modern cinema. Jacques Rivette stated it most famously, when he proclaimed that it seemed to him “impossible to see Viaggio in Italia without receiving direct evidence of the fact that the film opens a breach, and that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through it.” ² For these core members of the French New Wave, the film became an important point of reference and of transition, a connecting link between them (and the directions their own work as filmmakers would take) and the Italian neorealists, whose works had been so central in their formative years as critics for Cahiers. ³ As I discussed in Chapter 4, it was the almost complete neglect of the film in Italy that prompted Bazin to write his famous “Defense of Rossellini.” Yet, what distinguishes Bazin’s piece on Voyage to Italy from those of his contemporaries at Cahiers is the extent to which he links his interpretation of the film with a reconsideration of previous Rossellini works, Europa ‘51 in particular. Bazin’s reading of Voyage to Italy becomes a means of revising and nuancing, on the one hand, his understanding of the importance of Rossellini’s previous entire oeuvre and, on the other, the ever elusive definition of the concept of neorealism. What becomes apparent, in fact, is how “modernist” is his definition here of the aesthetic of neorealism, and the extent to which it diverges from dominant perceptions of the movement. For Bazin, unlike the other French critics who lauded the film, a consideration of Voyage to Italy’s revolutionary techniques prompts less a look forward to the future of the cinematic art, than a look back in order to re-discover and re-define its past. It is no coincidence, of course, that the film that initiates this revision on the part of Bazin of “neorealist history” itself depicts a journey of discovery into a forgotten or lost past.