Ingrid Bergman's Star Persona and the Alien Space of Stromboli

Abstract

This essay looks at the trajectory of Ingrid Bergman's star persona, from 1930s Sweden to 1940s Hollywood to Rossellini's Italy, with particular focus on the later part of the 1940s in Hollywood and on the transformation of her star persona in the first film she made with Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli, land of God, released in 1949. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

Abstract:

This essay looks at the trajectory of Ingrid Bergman's star persona, from 1930s Sweden to 1940s Hollywood to Rossellini's Italy, with particular focus on the later part of the 1940s in Hollywood and on the transformation of her star persona in the first film she made with Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli, land of God, released in 1949.

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 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 tremendous success in Hollywood throughout the 1940s, Bergman has in subsequent decades not inspired the kind of detailed, theoretically nuanced 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 Bergman can be roughly divided into three major areas of interest. Anglo-American critics have focused on trying to understand the Bergman/Rossellini scandal and its consequences for Bergman's career. These studies have concentrated on American promotion and publicity texts and on reviews and commentaries in the popular press, and have for the most part limited the time frame of their analysis to the years 1949-50, which mark the height of the scandal in the United States.2 While these analyses have provided valuable insights into the publicity discourse surrounding Bergman s flight from Hollywood and the release in the United States of her first collaboration with Roberto Rossellini, they tend to take the public discourse at face value-an approach that, in effect, blocks a critical reading of the films in which Bergman stars. Moreover, by limiting the time frame of their analyses, such readings 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 critical writing 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 in the unique status of the star (and the extrafilmic discourse that 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 that 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 1950s and 1960s, 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 that 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

As Miriam Hansen, in her study of Rudolph Valentino and female spectatorship, has argued, reconstructing a possible horizon of reception for a star "involves juggling different levels of material and bringing them to bear on each other in a kind of methodological both/and of textual analysis and historiographie speculation."4 The image of the star that is publicly disseminated outside the cinema feeds into the star's film performances (influencing, for instance, the roles created for her or those for which she is chosen, and her presentation in the films), just as each individual performance contributes to a lesser or greater degree to the transformation of the publicity discourse. This is not to ignore that other "events," such as revelations involving the private life of the star, can also affect the public discourse. To get at the complexity of the Bergman star persona, in its temporal dimension (that is, its transformation over time), we must trace its configurations both inside and outside the films, and in the points of confluence and of tension between different kinds of media texts. An understanding of a star's image, Richard Dyer claims in his landmark study Stars, will not be arrived at by combining a series of texts from various media cumulatively into a sum total. Rather, one must investigate the range of meanings associated with a particular star and the way in which these various meanings interact dynamically and are in tension with one another. One must consider the star image as a "structured polysemy." The meanings linked to a star, Dyer says, may often "be to some degree in opposition or contradiction, in which case the star's image is characterized by attempts to negotiate, reconcile or mask the difference between the elements, or else simply hold them in tension."5

A Woman's Face (1938). Ingrid Bergman, already in her earliest days as a film star in her native Sweden, embodied the contradictory qualities of, on the one hand, voluptuousness, assertiveness, and sexuality, and on the other, spirituality, passivity (sometimes to the point of masochism), and "niceness." Among her early Swedish films, this can be seen most strikingly in the 1938 Gustaf Molander film, A Woman's Face (En Kvinnas ansikte, a big commercial hit), which Bergman made at the age of twenty-three, and right before her departure for Hollywood. By the time Bergman began work on A Woman's Face, in 1937, she had already made eight films in her native country (having begun her film career four years before, at the age of nineteen), and had been voted that same year by a poll of thirty thousand Swedish filmgoers as the most admired movie star of the year (she received 5,000 more votes than Greta Garbo, whose popularity had declined steadily since her departure for Hollywood).6 In this Molander film (from a screenplay by Gosta Stevens), the young Bergman plays Anna Paulsson, a woman whose face is badly disfigured in childhood by a fire in which her alcoholic parents were killed. In the unscarred left side of her face, as the doctor says while examining her, we see the "beautiful child she must once have been." Yet the gross disfigurement of the right side of her face, the film shows us, has made her into a criminal and a hard-hearted, embittered woman. The restoration of Anna's beauty through reconstructive surgery, the result of a chance encounter with a doctor who learned his craft on the scarred faces of wounded World War I veterans, transforms not only her face, but her soul as well. She becomes a gentle, lovable woman.

In this film, as in the Douglas Sirk 1941 American remake (starring Joan Crawford) discussed by Mary Ann Doane, the woman's "cure" consists in a "beautification of body/face. The doctor's work is the transformation of the woman into a specular object ... the woman's status as [object to be looked at] is synonymous with her 'health'-her [pathology] is characterized as the very lack of that status."7 Yet the film's conventional narrative-in which femininity is equated with physical beauty and domesticity-partly serves as a means of containing conflicting elements in the Bergman persona. Her performance in the first third of the film-as a disfigured, angry woman, the leader of a group of con artists and petty thieves-cannot be fully erased by her rebirth after surgery as the new Anna Paulsson, the loving nanny who wants nothing more than to be integrated-through marriage-into the male-dominated clan that employs her. The character played by Bergman up until the doctors "cure" is a masterful amalgam of vulnerability, aggression, and a kind of carnal sensuality that comes to the surface again in full force in Hollywood films like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Notorious (1946), and Under Capricorn (1949). As hard as the last half of A Woman's Face works to recuperate Anna for us-to establish her "true" identity as essentially feminine and good-we can never quite forget the compelling force of the actress's performance in the film's opening scenes. The character of Anna in A Woman's Face can be seen in some ways as a peculiarly literal representation of conflicting aspects of the Bergman star persona: at once palpably sexual, active, aggressive, vulnerable, healthy, natural, and nice. A Woman's Face is unusual in that it represents these conflicting components in successive representations within one film.

A Woman's Face, in some ways like The Blue Angel for Marlene Dietrich, marks a turning point in a number of respects for the career of its leading actress. By 1938, first of all, the professional choices made by European film actresses were seldom politically neutral. Bergman's own journey to Hollywood was delayed by almost a year because of her participation, immediately after completing work on A Woman's Face, in Nazi director Carl Froelich's Die vier Gesellen (The Four Companions, 1938), which was filmed at the Ufa Studios in Berlin and was apparently intended to launch Bergman as an Ufa star. It is, perhaps, not surprising that The Four Companions, in contrast to A Woman's Face, avoids even any indirect reference to the violence and political turmoil erupting at that time in Central Europe. The film, which follows the failed attempt of four young women to set up an advertising agency, was a dismal failure at the box office, a fact that did not stop those at Ufa from nurturing hopes for a number of years that Bergman might return to Berlin. A Woman's Face, by contrast, does betray signs-at the edges of its melodramatic storyline-of the dark powers gathering force in Europe. The climactic center of that film, culminating in Anna's transformation through surgery, is the consequence of her coming across a book in a physician s office containing a series of gruesome images of disfigured World War I soldiers' faces before and after reconstructive surgery.

The persona that was created for her soon after her arrival in Hollywood in 1939-of nature and health, of niceness, of the devoted wife and mother, the hard working actress-is a kind of counterimage to all that Bergman left behind, i.e., the reign of death and destruction that had descended upon Europe. The ending of A Woman's Face in a way rehearses that departure. The final shots of the film show Bergman's character leaving Sweden, on a boat headed for China, to work for the doctor who performed plastic surgery on her, the doctor who had learned his craft on the deformed faces of World War I veterans. It is only years later that Bergman would betray any sign of regret over her decision to leave Sweden for Germany and then Hollywood at the height of the war. Evidence of her feelings of guilt might be read in her decision to contact Rossellini, asking if he might make use of her acting skills and her celebrity, right after having seen his two films about Italy's experience of the war, Rome Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), in a small New York theater. This justly famous story (with slightly different versions given by Bergman and Rossellini in their autobiographical writings) is often referred to in accounts of Bergman's break with Hollywood and the scandal over her relationship with Rossellini. For Hollywood, Bergman's departure for Europe at the height of her American success was an unforgivable betrayal. But from the point of view of her beginnings in Sweden, the betrayal might have been seen to have occurred in reverse order, in the actress's embrace of a Hollywood that thrived (in the years 1940-45) precisely in its disavowal of the destruction being wrought on the world that she had left behind.8

Bergman in Hollywood: The Birth of a Star. The discourse surrounding Bergman's entrance into Hollywood, precisely at the time when both Dietrichs and Garbo's popularity in the American film market had hit a low point, frequently appropriates the language that had been used with Dietrich, as Hollywood's latest European star, the new/young Garbo. The term "new Garbo" seems to have simply been transposed, around 1939, from Dietrich to Bergman. Through the mid- to late 1940s-in fact, up until her departure for Italy-publicity and promotion materials frequently talk about Bergman in terms that position her in relation to Garbo and, to a much lesser extent, Dietrich. These comparisons are in themselves not very revealing. They tend to rather schematically contrast Bergman's "less exotic," "freer," "more natural" qualities with, for example, Garbo's glamour, aloofness, and sphinx-like beauty.9 Until the public response of outrage and betrayal over her affair with Rossellini, the promotional discourse surrounding Bergman's figure exhibits a uniformity, a tediousness even, that we do not find with the other major female stars to whom she was most frequently compared (not only Dietrich and Garbo, but also Rita Hayworth}, and that certainly conflicts markedly with the range of personas Bergman took on in her film roles. According to David Smit, the uniformity of the actress's public persona was a direct consequence of David O. Selznick's intense personal involvement in and control over the development of Bergman's Hollywood public image-which emphasized her natural, wholesome, and spiritual qualities. The public's perception of Bergman as the embodiment of Sister Benedict or Joan of Arc, in spite of the many roles she played that strongly undermined this characterization, suggests the success of Selznick's public relations campaign on her behalf.10

As is well known (and, in fact, is very much part of the myth of Bergman's rise to success in Hollywood), Bergman was explicidy marketed by Selznick as a healthy and uncomplicated "Nordic natural" after she had refused his first efforts to make her over in the usual Hollywood way-by having her eyebrows plucked, her teeth fixed, her hair dyed, etc.11 Yet the image of her so heavily promoted by Selznick is-for contemporary scholars and critics, at least-not easily reconciled with the many film roles from this period in which Bergman plays decidedly "unwholesome" characters: women engaged in extramarital affairs (as in both the Swedish and American versions of Intermezzo [Gustaf Molander, 1936, and Gregory Ratoff, 1939, respectively] as well as Casablanca [Michael Curtiz, 1942]), promiscuous women (Sam Wood's For Whom the Bell Tolls [1943] and Saratoga Trunk [1946]), and prostitutes (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [Victor Fleming, 1941] and Lewis Milestone's Arch of Triumph [1948]).12 Clearly, up until the scandal that erupted over her affair with Rossellini, audiences had no difficulty accepting what seems today to be an irreconcilable discrepancy between her on- and offscreen personas, something that might very well be explained by the fact that, despite their apparent diversity, all of Bergman s Hollywood roles ultimately fit within a very narrowly defined space of action for women. The only alternative to a character who is defined wholly by her romantic entanglements is the role of the devoted nun, or of a historical figure like Joan of Arc.

Bergman's reputed abilities as an actress gave her opportunities-like the Joan of Arc role-not afforded to other major stars of the 1940s, while at the same time the label of actress served as a justification by the studio for those roles they felt might undermine the image of Bergman they wanted to promote. Selznick, for instance, initially voiced strong opposition to Bergman's decision to audition for the role of the prostitute in Victor Fleming's production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a role that had been slated for Lana Turner, Metro's new young sex goddess. For Selznick, Bergman was more suited to play the sweetly innocent, love-struck fiancée to Spencer Tracy s Jekyll and Hyde. Fleming finally agreed to give Bergman a screen test for the role she coveted, and was greatly surprised at her ability to combine sexual sophistication and abject subjugation. Yet, Smit argues, Selznick voiced considerable concern about Bergman's appearance as Ivy, and made every effort to present her role not only in this film, but in films like Arch of Triumph as well, as "an indication of her acting ability and not true to her composite image as a simple, natural, wholesome, dignified woman who brings distinction to any role."13

Others have singled out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as the film that not only liberated Bergman from the role of the self-sacrificing governess or companion, to which Hollywood had up until that point confined her, by allowing her to play a character who "conveyed a frankly carnal nature," but also the first to cast her in the role of the victim.14 The role of Ivy, the cockney barmaid who seduces Dr. Jekyll, only to find herself tormented by his alter ego Mr. Hyde, is a striking portrait of feminine victimization and sexual servitude. On the basis of the films she had made in Hollywood up until then, Fleming could not have anticipated how important these two characteristics, eroticism and suffering (and their connection), would become for Bergman's cinematic persona. The openness and vulnerability in Bergman's face had been commented upon from her beginnings in Sweden. Yet never before, at least not in Hollywood, had these qualities been put to use for Bergman's portrayal of a character so strongly defined by victimization and sexual subjugation. Fleming's Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is notable, furthermore, for a number of features that were hallmarks of Hollywood films of the 1940s. Molly Haskell says that, even when movies such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (of which there is a 1931 version, directed by Rouben Mamoulian), are adaptations of plays or novels written earlier, "it is significant that, having been made in the forties, they take on its peculiar colorations. The trust that accompanied attraction is a thing of the past. Instead, relationships are rooted in fear and suspicion, impotence and inadequacy."15 In George Cukor's Gaslight-which was released a few years after Jekyll and Hyde, in 1944, and for which Bergman received an Academy Award-cruelty and coldness, as in the later Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), feature as crucial elements in the attraction that the male love interest holds for the female lead. As Haskell points out, Bergmans Paula remains under the spell of Charles Boyers Gregory-indeed, she most completely surrenders to its sexual implications after she has discovered his true nature.16 The sexual overtones in the sadomasochistic relationship between husband and wife were, moreover, a key feature of Gaslight's publicity campaign. This can be seen particularly in one of the most prominently featured publicity photos for the film, showing Boyer physically restraining Bergman as she leans back compliantly. But perhaps nothing so pointedly demonstrates the transformation this role effected on Bergman s American star persona than the kinds of roles she took on after Gaslight's release, in her historic collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, in particular.

Bergman made her first film with Hitchcock, Spellbound (1945), right on the heels of the box office and critical successes of not only Gaslight, but Saratoga Trunk and The Betts of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, which brought in more money than any other Hollywood film in 1945) as well. Thus, she came to her first collaboration with Hitchcock at a time when her popularity seemed invulnerable. Spellbound, which was made for only $1.7 million and had not been expected to turn a great profit, grossed $8 million in its first release, making it one of the two or three most lucrative films of the 1940s. It was, moreover, the first American film in which Bergman received first-star billing. When, well before work on Spellbound had been completed, Hitchcock spun for Bergman the idea for a film to be called Notorious, the actress committed to the project immediately. The completed film, which was released in September of 1946, had a very strong box office and critical reception (a number of popular magazines, such as Look and Cosmopolitan, promoted it as Bergmans greatest achievement), in a year that "stands out as the most profitable in Hollywood's history," although it did not have the kind of unprecedented commercial success of The Bells of St. Mary's, which had been released the previous year.17 In the long run, however, Notorious's enormous appeal-for critics, scholars, and the larger public-has endured in a way rivaled only by the very different Casablanca, and for this reason holds a key place in my reading of the changes Bergmans star image underwent in the three years (1946-48) leading up to her departure for Italy to work with Rossellini.18

The extent to which Hitchcock is responsible for what many have perceived to be a shift in Bergmans onscreen persona in the mid-1940s-towards an ever more understated, neutral acting mode, one in which framing and camera movement gain importance-is a matter of some debate.19 That Hitchcock sought to work with Bergman at the height of her fame, at a point when her status as Hollywood icon had already been well established, is significant. At the same time, his controlling nature on the set-particularly in his contact with actors-was by this time already well known. As with many of the actors with whom he worked, Hitchcock has said he sought to minimize and neutralize Bergmans facial expressions and her gestures. He complained that when she first came to work with him, Bergman had an overly grand, theatrical notion of acting for the cinema, and thus much of his work with her involved efforts to quell her expressiveness, to quiet her gestures and bodily movements. Hitchcock's love of the star system, John Fawell claims, is connected to this dominating attitude towards actors-hence his appreciation of actors who were already known for certain qualities, which he could then utilize to maximum effect, rather than asking actors to fit into a role not necessarily created specifically for them. When explaining why he took on a project like Under Capricorn, Hitchcock told Truffaut he did so "simply because Bergman was the biggest actress of the day. 'All I could think of was: here I am, Hitchcock, the one important English director, returning to London with the biggest star of the day. I was literally intoxicated at the thought of the cameras and flashbulbs that would be directed at Bergman and myself at the airport.'"20 The director's admission of the extent to which his desire to work with Bergman was motivated by a fascination with her status as celebrity is revealing. He clearly understood the power of her image as mythic sign; this power can be seen as an increasingly dominant structuring force in his work with her, and helps to explain what was perceived by Bergman and others as his excessive efforts to control and neutralize her acting style.

One of the aims of Hitchcock's method of directing Bergman, of which she may or may not have been aware, was clearly to increase the use of the close-up in relation to her figure, to concentrate expression in the micromovements of the face.21 Like her great Swedish predecessor Greta Garbo, Bergman was a star around whom the fetish of the face became a central aspect to her cult, particularly later in her Hollywood career. According to Joe McElhaney, the actress's career "represents a significant moment during the sound period when the mask-like grandeur of the silent star gives way to what Edgar Morin has called 'the quiet face,' which attempts to reconcile the permanent expression of the mask with the thousand tiny lifelike expressions that constitute 'naturalness.'" Yet unlike Garbo, who "regardless of the success of her sound films, remains the silent film star par excellence in terms of the connotations of her face," the close-ups (very often, extreme closeups) of Bergman in publicity shots and in many of her films from the late 1940s seem to emphasize her central place within a Hollywood discourse that promoted greater naturalism in acting. "By its very nature," McElhaney says, "Bergman's face is incapable of assuming the nature of a Garbo-like mask but must continually connote its naturalism and be in motion through this combination of radiance and eroticism."22 The attraction to Bergmans face, and its expressive qualities, is further emphasized by the fact that in many of her films from this period, her body is covered up in what are often elaborate costumes, from the high-neck Victorian dresses she wears in both Gaslight and Under Capricorn to the uniforms-the nun's habit, the soldier's armor, the doctors coat-she dons in films like Spellbound, Joan of Arc, and The Bells of St. Mary's. This is not the case, however, in Notorious, where Bergmans body is on display, highly sexualized, at least in the film's opening scenes. Yet, even in this film, the emphasis progressively shifts from the body to the "tiny local movements" of face as the site of seduction and eroticism.23 By the end of the film, the actress's body has been covered in multiple layers of clothing-a nightgown and robe tied at the neck, a heavy floor-length fur coat-as she descends the staircase with Devlin's arm wrapped around her. In the film's closing shots, Alicia, Tania Modleski says, is etherealized and spiritualized until she has become "practically bodiless."24

Hitchcock's Notorious: "The Story of a Face."25 The intersection of a strict control of and limitation on the actress's bodily movements and an intensive focus on the face in close-up is perhaps nowhere in Bergmans career as striking as in Notorious. "Almost no Hitchcock film," McElhaney claims, "uses the close-up as frequently and systematically as Notorious: 119 close-ups and 72 extreme closeups, a combined total of 191 shots in a 101-minute film." Bergmans face is the primary object of the increased frequency and self-consciousness with which Hitchcock uses the close-up in this film, writes McElhaney, countering the argument made by Jean-Luc Godard, Pascal Bonitzer, and Slajov Zizek, for whom Hitchcock's concentration on objects, such as the wine bottles, the key, or the coffee cup, overwhelm the representation of the human figure in this film.26 These readings, McElhaney says, ignore the context of Notorious's production and reception. They ignore the fact, for instance, that in 1946, film exhibitors had voted Bergman the most popular female star in Hollywood, or that the film's publicity campaign promoted the film as a gallery of ravishing close-ups of Bergman alone or locked in a tight embrace with her costar, Cary Grant. Many reviewers at the time of the film's release, furthermore, commented on the frequent use of the close-up in relation to Bergman. And certainly, we see a marked contrast between the role assumed by the face for Bergman-as a site of erotic attraction and an index of affect and thought-and the fetishization, through a focus on clothes, hair, and other body parts, which is manifested by Hitchcock with regard to actresses such as Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren.27

Like so many of Hitchcock's films, Notorious manifests a strong fascination and identification with its leading actress, while at the same time the film works hard to ultimately contain her character's strength-to neutralize or domesticate the potentially disturbing aspects of her personality.28 On the surface, the film's narrative is blatantly antifeminist. Alicia Huberman, played by Bergman, is positioned in the opening scenes as the object of male desire and curiosity. The film then proceeds, in Modleski s words, "to submit her to a process of purification whereby she is purged of her excess sexuality in order to be rendered fit for her place in the patriarchal order....Hitchcock accomplishes this purification largely through visual means."29 At the party after her father's sentencing trial, where she first meets Devlin (played by Cary Grant), Alicia is wearing a bold striped blouse with a bared midriff. She is at once highly sexualized and vulnerable, exuding what Molly Haskell calls, in reference to another Hitchcock favorite, Joan Fontaine, a "voluptuous masochism."30 This heroine, the "notorious" woman who is a disturbance to the order of things from the male perspective, is by the end of the film, however, rendered virginal, even if it nearly kills her. In the final scenes, Modleski argues, the film purifies and disembodies the sexual woman.31 Yet, at the level of identification, the film undeniably draws us into Alicia s position of suffering much more strongly than it does into Devlin's role as the sadist and punisher. The film, as Wood points out, fully belongs to Bergman. In the scenes Bergman and Grant share, he says, "it is always Bergman who is privileged, partly because we are aware, from sharing her viewpoint, of the monstrousness of Grant's treatment of her."32 Furthermore, Alicia's often contemptuous and hostile comments in the face of Devlin's cruel treatment of her suggest a degree of willingness on her part to inhabit the role of the victim. Admittedly, she does not take her punishment without protest. On the level of the plot, one could argue that Alicia's self-destructive behavior is an expression of her wish to atone for the sins of her father, the Nazi collaborator. Yet this explanation cannot account for the film's unrelenting, even obsessive return to Alicia's face as a site of pain and suffering. Devlin's strong attraction to Alicia is shown to be based not only in his desire to punish and to possess her, but concomitantly in his identification with her suffering. As he states in the film's final scene, it was precisely his inability to act, his confinement to the role of passive observer of her love affair with Sebastian, that tormented him. As he rescues her from Sebastian s murderous home, he admits as much, telling her he did not intervene sooner because "I couldn't see straight; I was a fat-headed guy filled with pain." Pascale Bonitzer rightly sees the plot as "the pretext for a perverse erotic situation in which Alicia, treated sadistically twice over, brushes against death, and in which she never stops, quite literally-agonizing."33

In Modleski's compelling reading of this film, Alicia's suffering is an expression of her anger. Her characters self-destructive behavior, Modleski asserts, "is from the beginning shown to be simultaneously aggressive and hostile: her excessive drinking and her promiscuous behavior are an angry response to her fathers criminality, and when she is driven by Devlin's sadistic treatment of her to renew her notorious ways (e.g., drink too much) contempt and defiance are strongly marked in her voice and manner."34 To say that Alicia's suffering conveys feelings of anger is not to disavow the narrowness of the space in which that anger is allowed expression. In Notorious, as in so many Hollywood films of this era, the woman's anger is muted and contained by its concentration within the confines of the love relationship with the male hero. This is especially clear in the film's closing scene, in which Alicia, on the brink of death, has been cleansed of her excess sexuality, rendered virginal and angelic so that Devlin may finally express his love for her.35

Endings: Hollywood and the Trajectory of Romantic Love. Bergman's character in Notorious, a compelling mixture of vulnerability and aggression, love/ devotion and promiscuity, dependence and self-sufficiency, can lead us-I have tried to show-to new insights into the larger arc of the actress's Hollywood career, a career in which the multiple dimensions of her star persona were often underplayed, if not in her films then certainly in much of the public discourse surrounding her. This discourse, which circulated through reviews, interviews, studio publicity, and articles in fan magazines and the popular press in the early to mid-1940s, presented an image of Bergman as a hard-working actress who rushed home from the set every evening to be with her doctor-husband and young daughter.36 While many of her film roles, as I have discussed, clearly contradicted this view, almost all of her Hollywood films-and certainly those that made her famous-cast her in the role either of the saint (Joan of Arc, The Bells of St. Mary's) or, more often, the woman who submits herself wholly to male desire. Fifty years after her rise to international stardom, New Yorker reviewer David Denby still describes Bergman as an actress one thinks of always "in relation to her male co-stars, nuzzling against Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Cooper, and Cary Grant; one remembers her shy ardor, the yielding and defiant moods, the desire to break through to men, and the anguish when she was thwarted or mocked."37 What her biographer Donald Spoto describes as her submissiveness and "ultrafeminine" traits, her "ecstatic weakness" and "clinging kisses," her susceptibility to love (too much) made her the perfect match for those male characters of the 1940s-played by actors such as Charles Boyer, Cary Grant, Claude Rains, and Spencer Tracy-for whom desire was by definition all-consuming and destructive.

The extent to which many of the Hollywood films in which Bergman appeared in the 1940s work to contain her energy-to confine the expression of her eroticism, her victimization, and defiance to what Bonitzer has called the "obsessional, fetishistic, and frozen" narrative of the Oedipal romance-is made all the more apparent when we contrast her work of this period and its reception in Hollywood with the way American audiences came to perceive the very different, less "controlled" expression of her sexuality, her suffering, and anger in her performances for Rossellini-something that became apparent very early on in the American response to her work with the Italian director.38 Those qualities in Bergman's work for Rossellini, which, indeed, were most compelling for the Italians and even more so for the French-her peculiar mix of sobriety and abandon, of openness and resistance, and her failure to find appropriate objects for her love and anger-could not be easily reconciled by American audiences with the image they had of her "nuzzling against her famous male co-stars," surrendering to her fate in the stories of "female sacrifice, martyrdom, and redemption" that had formed the core of her Hollywood repertoire.39

When the force of Bergman's personality ceased to be wholly devoted to romantic love, it was perceived by the American public in particular as excessive and disturbing. According to Jacques Rivette, it was the "excessiveness" of and lack of focus in Bergman's acting in Stromboli that more than anything else put audiences off. It went, he says, "to the limits of what is bearable, of what is decently admissible, to the very brink of indelicacy"; the notion of love Stromboli presented was without joy or extravagance, "a conception so serious and genuinely carnal... of a sentiment more usually disputed nowadays by either eroticism or angelism."40 The actress's to some extent self-imposed banishment from Hollywood must, thus, be considered not only in the context of the outcry over her relationship with Rossellini and the birth of their first, out-of-wedlock child; but also in relation to the radical transformation her film persona underwent when she moved to Italy. Her perceived "betrayal" of Hollywood was never simply about the revelations about her personal life-revelations that challenged the somewhat static public image of her as wholesome and spiritual, a devoted housewife and mother. Bergman's departure from Hollywood was certainly on some level perceived as a rejection of the rules guiding its mode of representation, and simultaneously as an embrace of a radically different conception of the cinema.41 In this other conception of the cinema, for one, the expression of the female heroine's emotions are not confined to the realm of the spiritual or of the family/home romance. Qualities that came to be associated with Bergman's Hollywood persona-her intense sexual energy, the combination of suffering and defiance-were opened up and, in a sense, "politicized" in the films she went on to make with Rossellini. We might even go so far as to say that these films used Bergman to explore precisely what was left out of, what was absent from or repressed in, the Hollywood films of the 1940s. While American films of this period explored women's subjectivity in ways that they had not before, this exploration had clear limits. If, as Dana Polan says of the Hollywood films of this era, "not all of a woman's force, will, energy need be devoted to a man, at least some of it must."42 Americans were not ready for this, a female heroine whose "force, will, energy" were not directed at a male love object-a heroine for whom, in fact, the promise of romantic love seemed to hold no interest. Having become, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, "the adoptive daughter of America," Bergman not only abandoned her family for Rossellini, she abandoned the ideal of the sexual and the home romance as something worth fighting for.43 Her journey back to Europe, although not to the country of her birth, was partly a search for what had been lost, not only in her transformation for Hollywood, but in the voluntary exile upon which that transformation was predicated.

Stromboli, land Of God (1949). In the remainder of this essay, I will explore how Rossellini, in his first film with Bergman, Stromboli, land of God, released in 1949, draws in particular on those aspects of Bergman's star persona-her intense, even scandalous sexuality, her attraction to pain and suffering, her anger-which, though certainly central in a number of her Swedish films, were foregrounded only later in her Hollywood career, and most forcefully in her films with Hitchcock. Yet Rossellini puts these features of the Bergman persona to a very different use. In Stromboli as well as subsequent films Rossellini made with Bergman (such as Europa '51 [1952] and La Paura [Fear, 1954]) her figure as the site of pain, suffering, and anger becomes linked in new and interesting ways to the directors depiction of the traumatized condition of the of the postwar European subject. Furthermore, Rossellini draws not only on characteristics connected to Bergman's Hollywood persona, but also on editing patterns and framing devices conventionally used in classical cinema to film the female star-such as the close-up and the immobilization of the frame in relation to the woman's figure. However, in Rossellini s films, these aspects of the woman's image, which in Hollywood tend to be contained within the "single voiced" narrative trajectory of romantic love, instead become linked to the director's use of Bergman as a surface upon which is reflected the damaged fabric of the postwar European milieu.44

The seven years Bergman spent in Italy with Rossellini-a time in which she starred in five of his feature films and bore him three children, the first out of wedlock-at least temporarily ended her Hollywood career. This was a consequence, on the one hand, of the scandal that ensued in the States when it was discovered that Bergman and Rossellini had started an affair during the filming of Stromboli. She was still married at the time to the Swedish doctor Peter Lindstrom, who had stayed behind in Los Angeles with their daughter. The public scandal, along with Rossellini's disagreements with RKO over the reedited and English-dubbed version of Stromboli, contributed to the box office failure in America of the couples first collaboration. Rossellini, furthermore, was intensely possessive of his actress wife, and would not allow her to work with other directors during their years together.

In Italy, on the other hand (as to some extent in France), the focus was less on the couple's personal relationship than on the status of these new films within the Neorealist aesthetic. The Italian discourse was for the most part critical of the films, claiming that the director had betrayed the Neorealist movement by importing the Hollywood star into his Italian landscape. Many in Italy perceived all the films Rossellini made with Bergman to be regressive, shifting the theme of inspiration away from the Italian landscape and back onto the female star, one of the features of the Hollywood style against which Neorealism was reacting. My own reading of Stromboli will focus on the cinematic effects of the transplantation of the star into Neorealism s rural landscape. What happens, I ask, in this first experiment of inserting the image of the female star into a setting and mode of depiction not only radically different from that of the classical Hollywood style, but one which was founded in part on the very rejection of the Hollywood star phenomenon? I am not arguing, however, as Gian Piero Brunetta and others have claimed, that what the film aims to achieve is a destruction of the Hollywood-created star aura in order to bring to the surface the real Ingrid Bergman.45 In Stromboli, the thematic and editing patterns that mark Bergman's Hollywood star persona are not abandoned, but they are freed from their function within the confines of the classical paradigm; they become linked in compelling ways to the film's depiction of the female subject's connection with the environment and with the community that is still being constituted. At the same time, this work is important for another reason, distinct from the issue of stardom although, in this instance, providing a context for it. Stromboli challenges the idealized concept of a pure, uncorrupted Italian national collective. In its breakdown and then rediscovery of the link between character and setting or material context, this film represents a destabilization of the notion of imaginary links between the national territory and its inhabitants.

The story of the film is a simple one. Stromboli opens in a displaced persons' camp in Italy in 1948. Ingrid Bergman plays Karin, a refugee with a vaguely defined Eastern European background, who is waiting for an interview to obtain a visa to Argentina while being courted through the openings in a barbed wire fence by Antonio (Mario Vitale), an Italian soldier on his way back to his native island of Stromboli. Antonio asks Karin to marry him, and she confides to a fellow refugee she will do so only if her visa is denied. In the course of the interview with the Argentinean consulate, we discover that she was born in Lithuania, lived in Czechoslovakia before the war, then went to Yugoslavia and finally Italy. As she expects, her visa is not granted, and the following scene shows her exchanging marriage vows with Antonio. Thus, the premise of the film is established early on: the unlikely union between the primitive Southern Italian man and his fair, Northern European bride. It becomes apparent almost immediately on their journey to the island that Karin and Antonio are completely incompatible, in both physical appearance and temperament. Their differences are only accentuated once the couple arrives on the volcanic island. The ties that bind Antonio to Stromboli and the few people who are left there are contrasted to Karins restlessness, her desire to leave as soon as possible and start a new life elsewhere. The people of Stromboli, especially the women, openly show their disapproval of Karin for her divergence from the age-old customs of the island. She is told she is immodest; she is criticized for her efforts to decorate the interior of her home according to her own tastes rather than accepting the simple furnishings and family photographs her husbands family provides; and, most seriously, she is perceived-through her flirtatiousness-to have made a cuckold of Antonio. The marriage is an unhappy one. Her dissatisfaction with Antonio and with life on the island fuels the husbands acts of violence in an effort to control her. Finally, a volcanic eruption disrupts the prosaic struggle between man and wife, and ultimately precipitates Karins decision to leave her husband and the island, even though she has just revealed to Antonio that she is pregnant with his child. The film ends with Karin s ascent up the side of the volcano, her fate uncertain; the last shots show her crying to God as she lies on the grassy mountainside of the volcano's crater.46

Stromboli is a film structured around a series of encounters, less between characters in the narrative than between Bergman s character, Karin, and the landscape of Italy. This is not to say that the land she encounters is an unpeopled one, but rather that the characters with whom she comes into contact are strongly identified with the Italian soil. Karin s otherness in relation to that landscape contributes to the radically different function her character plays in this film. (Another factor, which will be considered later, is the tension between her character in the diegesis and Bergman as star). Rossellini explained in an interview how he conceived of this contrast between Bergman's and the Italian characters' connection to the land:

If the protagonist was a borderline case, so was the island. So I first reduced the series of events my character was going to live through to their barest structure, and focused the tragedy on her and her torment. Then, for counterpoint, I needed nature, awesomely hostile, and people, totally uncomprehending and unsympathetic. Stromboli provided me with both, perfectly.47

The encounter between Bergman s character and the material landscape of the island-the volcano, the dry, hard soil, the bare trees and cacti, the simple white adobe houses-is for most of the film primarily one of resistance and incomprehension. The conflicts that arise between her and the villagers are tied to the differences in their relationship to the time and space of Stromboli. The depiction of the island in Stromboli might be understood as a radical reconfiguration of the scenario of the classical triangle-man, woman, and third character. According to Alain Bergala, the third term in Rossellini 's film "is not the good old rival of the classic triangle but an element that apparently has no link with the scenario of this couple in crisis, an element fundamentally heterogeneous, irreducible to any psychology.... the volcanic island of Stromboli [is] an absolute dead end of meaning, the solidified lava as the thing in itself, the least able to be recycled."48 This third term in Rossellini-which, as Bergala is correct in pointing out, has little connection with the rival of the classical scenario-is deeply psychological, but of a kind that is played out less in dramatic situations between characters than in their encounter with the landscape. The struggle of wills the film depicts between Karin and the villagers is as much a struggle between her and the island. The landscape is not a neutral setting or backdrop (what Deleuze would call a determined space, or state of things), but a constantly shifting, unstable, heterogeneous spacetime. And in this sense, it allows for a radical opening up, a renegotiation of the star's visual presence, her "otherness."

Stromboli's opening scenes immediately distinguish the character played by Bergman from the film's other characters. The gulf that separates her and her future husband Antonio, for instance, places him on the side of a small-minded, patriarchal, and provincial world that is contrasted with the complicated worldliness of the Bergman character. The differences in their spoken Italian is one indication of this separation. Karins speech is marked as perfect Tuscan Italian, the language of Italy's political unification, and a sign of the more industrialized, northern part of Italy. Antonio, on the other hand, speaks in thick dialect, interspersing his speech with expressive gestures. Karins physical appearance is also, in virtually every aspect, the opposite of Antonio's. Where he is dark, short, and muscular-traits that mark him as typically Southern Italian-she is tall, slim, blonde, and pale-in every way, Northern. Rossellini s correspondence with Bergman makes clear that Mario Vitale, whom Rossellini found in Salerno on his way to the island of Stromboli (along with the other male lead, Mario Spanza) was chosen precisely because his physiognomy was in such stark contrast with Bergman s and was perceived by the director to be vitally connected to the harsh physical landscape of the South:

I tried to imagine the life of the Lithuanian girl, so tall, so fair, in this island of fire and ashes, amidst the fishermen, small and swarthy, amongst the women with the glowing eyes, pale and deformed by childbirth.... You mustn't think that I approve of the behavior of HIM. I deplore the wild and brutal jealousy of the islander. I consider it a remainder of an elementary and old-fashioned mentality. I describe it because it is part of the ambience, like the prickly pears, the pines and the goats.49

Rossellini distances himself, almost to the point of disdain, from the film s Italian characters, identifying them with a wild, uncultivated island hostile to its inhabitants' efforts to tame it; whereas Karin represents for him a more generalized human condition, that of the displaced postwar European citizen. He sees her as the victim, as he puts it, "of small, stupid things: a crude husband, a small island without vegetation."50

One of the first things that we learn about the island, after Karin s discovery of the presence of the eruptive volcano, is that "So many people have left ... or are waiting to leave ... to Argentina, America, France, England. Wherever they have a relative who can send them money for the trip." These are the words of the village priest to the newly married couple, as he meets them upon their arrival. He continues, "Life is hard here. And also the land is hard ... But our patron, Saint Bartolo, will protect you. He saved our houses from the lava and the fire in the eruption of 1941." The comments of the priest initiate two related themes that will run throughout the film. The first has to do with the many references in the film to those who have left the island permanently, for America and other places, and also to those who have returned from these places, who have come back to Stromboli to grow old and die. Related to the "absent presence" of these foreign countries, of which America is the most prominent, is the apparent distance of the islanders from the events of World War II. It is significant that the year of the eruption mentioned by the priest-1941-for Karin and for many viewers speaks of the horrors of the war that so dramatically changed the face of Europe and its inhabitants. The fact that the island seems in some ways to have been left untouched by the war is something that comes up often in the film and is contrasted to the indelible mark it has left on Karin's consciousness. For the inhabitants of Stromboli, the reality of the war exists insofar as it has driven men (primarily) and their families (sometimes) away from the island. The people of the island talk constantly about the other places the villagers have left for. Yet paradoxically, the island itself is portrayed as existing in a time and space that is in many ways completely isolated from these foreign lands. The world outside of Stromboli speaks through the absence of those who have left, and through Karin s presence. In other words, it is precisely the desertion of the island that reflects the world beyond, the modern world. Those who have stayed-or even those, like Antonio, who have come back to Stromboli-are shown to live in a world of the past, a world in which the passing of time is marked by natural events such as the volcano's eruptions or the arrival of the annual fishing seasons.

Antonio's introduction of the island to Karin captures the struggle between the foreigner and (in Rossellini's words) the "awesomely hostile ... totally unsympathetic" island and its people.51 When Antonio talks to Karin about the land, the story he tells is one of desertion and destruction. The overwhelming power of the volcano is felt in the dried lava that covers the island, having destroyed, Antonio tells us, "everything, the houses, the fields ..." The house given to them is empty of furniture. Antonio's boat, in his absence, has rotted. Karin openly shows her disgust to Antonio for having brought her to "this cursed island." But he is uncomprehending of her dissatisfaction, her rejection of the good earth. His response to her asserts his right to force her to accept the island on his terms, "this is my home, and as my wife you'll stay here with me," It is his unquestioning allegiance to the island and its customs that defines his character most strongly. Karins encounter with the island environment, and Antonio in his connection to it, is thus completely free of idealism or nostalgia, and, in fact, what is emphasized for much of the film is her utter alienation from it.

While the volcano itself functions as the most potent symbol of that which, for Karin, is absolutely other, it is significant that this force of nature, whose presence is so strongly felt throughout, is shown on screen only in the beginning and very end of the film. Our first view of the volcano takes place as Antonio and Karin first approach the island by boat. Antonio proudly points to the immense crater that extends out to the sea, and Karins response is full of reproach and resistance. She openly refuses to recognize the power of the volcano as the villagers do, as a force that one accepts unquestioningly and does not try to "escape." The volcano also becomes a symbol for the differences in Karins and the villagers' relationship to the past. For Karin, the strongest marker of the past is the war. Karin is constantly emphasizing in her relations with the islanders the gap that cannot be bridged between her past experiences and her present life on Stromboli. On the one hand, the war represents for her the traumatic break between her former life and what she has become. Her loss of innocence, her sense of guilt, are attributed to the effects of the war. Yet, at the same time, she is protesting the islanders' ignorance of and indifference to the war's devastation. For them, the war is a distant event, forgotten in the face of the force of nature that has defined the history of the island for time immemorial. When Karin tells Antonio that she wants to leave the island, after a violent eruption has forced them-along with the entire village-to spend the night out at sea, his answer to her-that this is nothing compared to the eruption of 1930-again asserts this power of the mountain as defining the islands history. Her response, that she has had enough of yesterdays, that she does not care what has happened here in the past, shows that Karins time on the island has brought her no insight into the ways of its people. Her recognition of the volcano's power will come about not through a reconciliation with her husband and the other islanders, as one might expect, but rather, is a consequence of her complete withdrawal from them.

Thus far, I have focused primarily on the presentation of Bergman s character in relation to the films other characters. As I have shown, the interaction is not one in which her figure becomes a part of the dramatic action of life on the island. Although the film is full of what we would call narrative events, overall it is not driven by the kind of forward narrative movement typical of the classical style. Rather, it is a sustained tension based on the radical incommensurability the film constructs between Karin and the people of the island. The cameras intense focus on the isolated face and body of the Bergman character for long periods in the film has the effect of further loosening the plot structure, of producing an alternative rhythm of camera movement and shot structure that is not determined by the action/reaction schema (i.e., the constant linking of one shot, or set of spatiotemporal coordinates, to the next through the development of narrative action). The many long takes of Bergman's figure in the landscape have a number of important features. First of all, she is the only character in the film that is granted this kind of insistent framing and editing rhythm. Her figure as object overwhelmingly functions as the centripetal force that drives the camera's mobility and defines its field of action. In the sequences depicting Karins solitary figure alone within the landscape of the village, Rossellini does not define the surrounding space and then her place within it so much as the space is given form by her presence and movement. The environment, the "spatio-temporal coordinates," are not fixed, but rather are shifting; they are an extension of the depiction of the affect, of the "pure possibility" Bergman expresses, giving it its "proper moving context."52

Rossellini's "excessiveness" with respect to the intense focus on Bergman's figure has been commented upon by a number of critics. Jacques Rivette writes about the portrayal of Bergman crying, "I am not likely to forget the disgusted expressions with which, not so long ago, some spoke of Bergman's weeping and sniveling in Stromboli. And it must be admitted that this goes (Rossellini often does) to the limits of what is bearable, of what is decently admissible, to the very brink of indelicacy. The direction of Bergman here is totally conjugal, and based on an intimate knowledge less of the actress than of the woman."53 He is referring here to the film's final, most striking sequence, which shows Bergman s character ascending the side of the erupting volcano after leaving her husband and the village. Yet, it is important to point out, Rivette was among Rossellini's greatest admirers, calling him the most modern filmmaker of his time; a master whose films, Rivette said, "contain the only real portrait of our times. ...The accusing image," he said, "of our heteroclite, dissident, discordant societies."54

In the film's extraordinary long closing sequence depicting Karin s escape from her husband and the village, she sobs wildly, calling out to God, coughing, and grasping at the rocks as she moves up the mountainside towards the crater's edge. The billowing smoke of the volcano, the black ash on the mountainside foreground Karin s anguish, her isolation, and the startling beauty it expresses. If a struggle is here depicted, it is, as José Luis Guamer puts it, "expressed with outstanding sensuality. The tears of an actress are never likely to be as carnal as Ingrid Bergman's in Stromboli, terra di Dio."55 The mountain is in this scene deterritorialized, broken away from its link to the seasonal and historical time of the villagers. In this encounter, the awesome beauty of the volcano becomes linked to Karin s anguish, which throughout the film has been expressed by her as a consequence of the unbridgeable gap between who she was before and who she became after the war. Up until this moment, her encounter with the mountain had been mediated by the villagers, whose connection to it is bound by tradition, the past. As a result of the destruction wrought on the island by the volcano in the past, the villagers' relationship to it is understandably dominated by fear, by a refusal to look at and confront its immensity and awesome power in the present, an attitude that is illustrated by the fact that-up until the final scene-the mountain is constantly talked about, but shown only once (in the scene of her arrival with Antonio on the island). Karin can look at and confront the volcano's terrifying power because, for her, the trauma of the past lies elsewhere. The physical beauty and force of the erupting volcano is commensurate to Karin s disturbing energy, an energy that, in her contact with the villagers, had been expressed as simultaneously aggressive and hostile.

The intense sexual energy and anger that Bergman exhibits in Stromboli were not "discovered" by Rossellini. As I demonstrated in my discussion of Bergman's Swedish and her Hollywood career, these qualities were central to a number of her most interesting and important roles. However, in these and other films I have not had time to discuss in detail in this essay (e.g., Spellbound, Saratoga Trunk [1945]), much work ultimately goes into containing or neutralizing the disturbing aspects of her personality-her "scandalous" sexuality, her defiance. In Notorious, as I have shown, Bergman's character "is tortured for and purified of her sexual past-and nearly blinded in the process."56 In the film's final scene, Alicia's anger towards Gary Grants character, Devlin, has completely disappeared, replaced by the submissiveness and gratitude of a woman on the brink of death. My reading of the ending of Notorious is not meant in any way as a dismissal of the strength of Bergman s performance in this film. The character of Alicia is undoubtedly, as many have asserted, one of the actress's most powerful and enduring roles, and it must have influenced Rossellinis own conception of Bergman's screen persona. Yet Rossellini, I am arguing, transforms and, in a sense, "politicizes" aspects of the Bergman persona, which in Hollywood were confined within a narrative and visual economy governed by sexual difference.

Rossellini s aim in Stromboli's closing sequence is to endow the image of Bergman's face as well as the Italian landscape with a sense of ambiguity. He does this by way of the logic of the "encounter," which, Deleuze suggests, "is ... a suffusion of the new spaces available to the camera in its new exterior mobility: from studio set and montage to location shooting and the long take, as Bazin observed."57 These techniques release cinematic space from its subordination to narrative, and thus have a greater capacity to depict the openness of the subjects connection with the environment and with a community. In the case of Stromboli, the encounter depicted is a surprising one, in that it is only fully realized in the moments when Bergman's character is isolated from the community of the village. This encounter is based not so much on the drama of Karins situation-her inability to conform to life on the island-as on an exploration of the potential for newness or change in the image of the Italian landscape and of the Hollywood star. What better way to discover this than by representing her confrontation with that object in nature which is the very symbol of radical contingency?

In Stromboli as a whole, but especially in the final scene of Karin on the volcano, the film's space-time is not driven by narrative action, yet neither is it what we normally call spectacle. The camera's "insistent" focus on the actress in her encounter with the volcano, I want to suggest, are evidence of an alternative rhythm and view of the world which challenges the causally linked time/space of the narrative action. In other words, the fixation on Bergmans figure here is not contained within the kind of conventional (or "classical") narrative patterns described by Laura Mulvey and others, patterns that often serve to naturalize or mask the disruptive or excessive aspects of the image of the woman.58 In this sequence, when Karin abandons everything that ties her to the world beyond the mountain-not only Antonio and the villagers, but as she gets higher, also her suitcase, her purse, and the money to finance her escape-the striking image of Bergman against the black ash and billowing smoke becomes the camera's sole focus. Her movement through space is not progressive; it is not depicted as a journey towards some destination-such as the other side of the mountain, or an escape from the village-but transcends narrative chronology. As Deleuze puts it in his description of the time-image of the modern cinema, "it goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time-past-present-future. It is, for example, a coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration; a single event can belong to several levels: the sheets of the past coexist in a non-chronological order." The confrontation between Bergman and the mountain-lasting a full ten minutes-is, to use Deleuze's terms, a pure optical-sound situation, established in what we might call "any-space-whatever."59 The meaning that had been associated with the volcano prior to these final shots-as a destructive force to be feared, as a symbol of uncomprehending nature-recedes. In this scene, the volcano is seen anew, rediscovered and, in a sense, universalized in its connection to Bergmans figure.

Yet the film does not aim to achieve, as Brunetta has argued, a destruction of "the mythical aura created by Hollywood, in order to bring to the screen ... the more authentic aspects of [Bergman's] personality."60 Her glamour or star qualities are, if anything, heightened rather than diminished in Stromboli. However, by freeing her image from classical cinema's rigid narrative structures and gender roles, and reinscribing it into the deterritorialized, nonnarrative, and lacunary space-time of Rossellini's Italy, it gains the capacity for a new set of functions and significations.61 The Italian landscape is also transformed in this encounter, from what Deleuze would call a determined space or state of things to a shifting, unstable, and heterogeneous space-time. The Hollywood star's encounter with the mountain becomes a means by which the director attempts to break down and then rediscover the link between character and setting. For Deleuze, Neorealism is a cinema of "see-ers," of outsider characters caught in pure optical and sound situations.62 The location and its inhabitants in this reading do not represent an autonomous, material reality with which the protagonist comes into contact, but rather, one element of a whole that encompasses "successive planes and independent circuits" interacting dynamically with one another. Just as the character passes through and is affected by the geographical and social setting, so also the landscape passes through the zone of associations, preoccupations, dreams, and affects of the character and/or actor/star. The relationship between actor and landscape is in Stromboli (and, in fact, in all the films Rossellini made with Bergman) fundamentally reciprocal. Both actor and landscape, while different in nature, refer to each other, and reflect each other, without it being possible to say which is primary, and tend ultimately to become fused to a point of indiscerniblity.

Footnote

Notes

1. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 311.

2. See, for example, Adrienne L. McLean, "The Cinderella Princess and the Instrument of Evil: Revisiting Two Postwar Hollywood Star Scandals," in Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal, ed. Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), and David Smit, "Marketing Ingrid Bergman," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22 (July 2005): 237-50.

3. See, for instance, Jacques Rivette, "Lettre sur Rossellini," Cahiers du Cinéma 46 (April 1955), reprinted in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (London: Routledge, 1985): 205-8; and Eric Rohmer, "The Land of Miracles," Cahiers du Cinéma 47 (May 1955), reprinted in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave; and André Bazin, "Defense of Rossellini" (1955, an open letter to Guido Artistarco printed in Cinema NUOOO), trans. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, reprinted in Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, ed. David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: British Film Institute, 2000): 157-61.

4. This means (in the case of looking at Valentine's reception), she continues, "tracing the contradictions of female spectatorship both inside and outside the films," while not treating "the films as texts and the publicity discourse as a seemingly given, stable, and accessible context. On the contrary, when we consider the diversity of materials, interests, and ideological mechanisms operating in that discourse, both levels emerge only through an effort of reading" Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 253.

5. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Pub., 1998).

6. Donald Spoto, Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 54.

7. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940's (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 41.

8. According to Gilles Deleuze, the American grudge against Neorealism comes from the fact that the Italians "dared" to instigate another conception of the cinema. And the Ingrid Bergman scandal, he says, "also had this aspect: having become the adoptive daughter of America, she did not simply abandon her family for Rossellini, she abandoned the cinema of the conquerors." Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [1983]), 242 nl8.

9. Screen Guide c. 1945-46, for instance, places a photo of Bergman next to one of Garbo, with the commentary, "The goddess type is Sweden's gift. Ten years ago we watched Garbo's unearthly beauty. Less classical but needing no artifice, tall but splendidly proportioned. Bergman is an ideal nearer to reality." The author of the text accompanying a Photoplay layout entitled "The Missing Bergman Pictures," identifies Bergman as "real, reasonable, and wise," while Garbo is "irrational, romantic, tragic,... a lonely creature." Bergman's success, the author concludes, can be explained by the "remarkable way she meets the needs of our tormented, modern world." Constance McCormick Collection. Smit cites a memo from Selznick to William Hebert, his director of Advertising and Publicity, in which he states that promoting Bergman's "sweetness and consideration and conscientiousness" would not only be "in keeping with the fresh and pure personality and appearance which caused me to sign her," but would, perhaps more importantly, distinguish her from "Garbo, Dietrich, and other exotic numbers with whom she cannot compete, any more than, in my opinion, they can compete with her ..." (cited in Smit, 244). Newspapers and fan magazines often referred to Bergman as "The Palmolive Garbo." see, for instance, Time magazines cover article, August 2, 1943.

10. Smit, "Marketing Ingrid Bergman," 237, 239, 240.

11. Mclean, "The Cinderella Princess and the Instrument of Evil," 165. Also see Joe McElhaney, "The Object and the Face: Notorious, Bergman and the Close-up," in Hitchcock: Past and Future, ed. Richard Alien and Sam Ishii-Gonzales (New York: Routledge, 2004), 73.

12. Smit, "Marketing Ingrid Bergman," 237.

13. Ibid., 238.

14. Spoto, Notorious, 106.

15. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 195-96.

16. Ibid., 196.

17. McElhaney, "The Object and the Face," 67.

18. The uniqueness of Notorious was noted by many at the time of the film's release. Louella Parsons, in her "movie citations" for the month of August 1946 in Cosmopolitan, refers to Bergman's performance in this film as "her most magnificent piece of work" thus far: "She is everything as Alicia-impulsive, amorous, sulky, moody, a drunk, an innocent, a lady in distress, a master spy." Spoto, reviewing the near-ecstatic critical reception of Bergman's performance in this film, concludes that "only the most ungenerous, cheerless cynic could fail to find in her performance [in Notorious] one of the most memorable achievements in the history of film acting." Spoto, Notorious, 203.

19. See, for example. Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, especially 303-35, and McElhaney, "The Object and the Face," on this issue.

20. Fawell, John, "Fashion Dreams: Hitchcock, Women, and Lisa Fremont," Literature Film Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2000), 275-76.

21. Pascal Bonitzer, "Hitchcocldan Suspense," in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slajov Zizek (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 17.

22. McElhaney, "The Object and the Face," 72-73.

23. These kinds of tiny local movements are, according to Deleuze, usually kept hidden by the rest of the body (Cinema 1, 87).

24. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Nethuen, 1988), 67.

25. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol referred to both this film and Under Capricorn as being "the story of a face, that of Ingrid Bergman. It is to this face that the homage of the most beautiful effects is made." see Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, trans. Stanley Hocman (New York: Ungar Pubishing Co., 1979), 102.

26. McElhaney cites an interview with Godard in which he asks, "If you remember Notorious, what do you remember? Wine bottles. You don't remember Ingrid Bergman," whereas with Neorealism, "it's exactly the contrary," you remember only people, you remember feelings, "the death of Anna Magnani." "The Object and the Face," 64.

27. McElhaney, "The Object and the Face," 75.

28. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 3.

29. Ibid., 60.

30. Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, 196.

31. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 60.

32. Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, 310.

33. Bonitzer, "Hitchcockian Suspense," 17.

34. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 67.

35. Ibid., 60.

36. A 1946 story in LOOA: is typical. "The complete naturalness that distinguishes Ingrid Bergman is the result of a well-integrated personality free from the complexities that harass most public figures, especially screen stars. Acting is important to her, but it runs a definite second to her happiness as a wife, mother and human being," Look (February 19, 1946): 37-38. A New York Times Magazine story of two years earlier, with the title "In, But Not Of, Hollywood," states that Bergman has had an apartment in Beverly Hills every since the filming of Casablanca, "where she lives with her daughter. Dr. Lindstrom is an intern in a San Francisco hospital. Nevertheless Miss Bergman is still the housewife and her husband the master of the house." New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1944, 12-13.

37. Denby, "The Natural," (review of Donald Spoto's biography of Bergman, Notorious), New Yorker, July 28, 1997, 72.

38. Bonitzer, "Hitchcockian Suspense," 16.

39. Denby, "The Natural," 73.

40. Rivette, "Lettre sur Rossellini," 202. Americans on the whole expressed incomprehension at the films Bergman made with Rossellini. Stromboli's technique was described as "fragmentary," "fitful, inconclusive," (Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1950) and Bergmans manner as "irresolute" (Bosley Crowther, New York Times, quoted in Quick, February 27,1950). Critics commented on the island's "bleak, barren surroundings, so peculiarly without props to an actress accustomed to moving amongst them" (Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1950). This film was, according to the New York Times' Bosley Crowther, "a bleak and banal affair" (February 19, 1950). The actress appeared to them unmoored in the barren Italian landscapes favored by Rossellini, her "flagrantly melodramatic" acting out of place against the starkness of the black volcanic island. Almost every American critic cited the lack of a decent story as the greatest failing of not only Stromboli, but of all the films Bergman made with Rossellini.

41. A Motion Picture story of 1949, for example, puts it this way, "[Bergman] was Hollywood's leading lady. She owned all the material things that make for success. But she was an unhappy woman. She had, onscreen, the power to make millions of movie-goers forget their troubles. But she couldn't forget her own! She was tired of the silly posturings and carbon copies of life that were cut out of the Hollywood film factories. She felt that making films was an art first and a business second, and that a movie, like a work of art, should have what Italians call anima." A Los Angeles Daily News piece quotes Bergman, "I am tired of Hollywood's way of doing things after so many years. I wanted something different and new, and I have found this with Roberto" (May 3, 1949).

42. Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 13.

43. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 242 nl8.

44. Polan has written about the tendency in many Hollywood films of the 1940s to subsume everything within the forward move to a single-voiced ending: "the accomplishment of a final stasis in which the levels of psychology and sociality finally, irremediably, come together in the formation of a couple." Power and Paranoia, 113.

44. Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del Cinema Italiano: dal 1945 agli anni ottanta (Rome: Editori Ruiniti, 1982), 257.

45. The ending I have described is of the Italian version. The differences between this version and the American RKO version, which was not approved by Rossellini, are substantial.

47. Roberto Rossellini, My Method. Writings and Interviews, ed. Adriano Aprà (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995), 29.

48. Alain Bergala, "Celle par qui le scandale arrive," Cahiers du Cinéma 356 (February 1984), 10. My translation.

49. Quoted in Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 118.

50. "Rossellini/Ten Years of Cinema," in Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism, trans. and ed. David Overbey (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1979), 106.

51. Rossellini, cited in Aprà, 29.

52. The affect in cinema, Deleuze states, "is like the expressed of the state of things, but this expressed does not refer to the state of things, it only refers to the faces which express it and, coming together or separating, give it its proper moving context." Cinema 1, 106-7.

53. Rivette, "Lettre sur Rossellini," 201.

54. Ibid., 202.

55. José Luis Guarner, Roberto Rossettini, trans. Elisabeth Cameron (New York: Praeger, 1970), 42.

56. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 62.

57. I am quoting John Beasley-Murray s reading of Deleuze here, from "Whatever Happened to Neorealism?-Bazin, Deleuze, and Tarkovsky's Long Take." Iris 23 (Spring 1997), 48.

58. See Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 203, 205. Also see Mary Ann Doane, "Gilda: Epistemology as Striptease," in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York, Routledge, 1991), 101; and Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 214.

59. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London, Athlone, 1986), 5.

60. Brunetta, Storia del Cinema Italiano, 257 (my translation).

61. D. N. Rodowick, describing Deleuze's deterritorialized image, says that "When the image is no longer used up in the accomplishment of an action or conflict ... both the function and the potential signification of the image change." Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 75.

62. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 46.