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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,...