Love is stronger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title Love is stronger
Original title Viaggio in Italia
Country of production Italy , France
original language English , Italian
(post-dubbed)
Publishing year 1954
length 105 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Roberto Rossellini
script Vitaliano Brancati
Roberto Rossellini
production Alfredo Guarini
Roberto Rossellini
music Renzo Rossellini
camera Enzo Serafin
cut Jolanda Benvenuti
occupation

Love is stronger (original title: Viaggio in Italia ; German title also Reise in Italien ) is a married drama by the Italian director Roberto Rossellini from 1954.

action

A British couple, Katherine and Alex Joyce, are on their way to Italy to view and sell the luxury villa he inherited from Uncle Homer near Naples . The couple have no children. Alex wanted a child while Katherine never wanted children. You drive bored on the country road, the journey is slow and comes to a halt due to wandering herds of cows and sheep, undisciplined drivers and careless people walking around on the road. Alex reacts irritably. It's cold in Italy, you wear fur or a winter coat, and you need a woolen blanket in a deck chair on the sun terrace. The relationship between the two is also cool, the dialogues are full of barely concealed points against the other.

In the evening they go to the bar for a drink, they meet friends from England, and Alex passes the time flirting. The next day, Katherine speaks to him about it, but he reacts indifferently and dismissively. You drive to the property of the deceased uncle together with the administrator of the villa, an archaeologist. You visit the villa with its treasures, enjoy the view from the terrace of Mount Vesuvius and spend the night in the guest rooms of the villa. After dinner, while sunbathing on the terrace, Katherine remembers a poem by Charles, an old friend she knew before Alex and who died two years ago. She enthusiastically praises his poetry, while Alex does not like the poem and reacts with sarcasm. Annoyed by her husband, she later drives to the museum alone. In the museum she is fascinated by Greek and Roman statues. The bronze statues in turn seem to direct inquiring looks at them and worry them, as does the blind look of the marble statues.

They are invited to a celebration by a friend of the deceased. Soon Katherine is surrounded by charming Italians, chatting, young women gather around Alex, and both watch each other suspiciously. Back in the apartment, the relationship conflict comes to the surface. They blame each other, Alex blasphemes Katherine's "romantic weirdness" while she condemns his biting irony, which makes her feel hurt. Alex leaves Naples early in the morning, drives to Capri and only leaves a note on the breakfast table. Then Katherine drives to Cumae with the car . On the way, her gaze falls again and again on pregnant women or women pushing prams. A chatty old man shows them around. In the barren walls, where the echo seems to come from all corners, she feels uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Alex is visiting friends in Capri. When he accompanies a young woman home in the evening, the two engage in conversation and arrange to meet for the next day. Katherine goes to Vesuvius that day. She visits the fumaroles in Pozzuoli and then waits for Alex in her room.

Back in Naples, Alex swamps through the night clubs, finally runs into a prostitute, hesitates whether to speak to her, and hesitantly gets into his car. As she tells him, she has lost interest in life and she tells him that she lost her child four years ago. He lets her get out, but gives her money and doesn't come home until late at night. Katherine was waiting for him in bed. She puts away her solitaire cards and turns off the light. They greet each other briefly without the conversation going beyond the banal. Alex leaves the room, but comes back one more time, only to tell her that he wants to be woken up on time the next morning. The following day, Katherine and the manager's wife drove to the Cimitero delle Fontanelle , where bones are piled up and the skulls seem to be staring at them with dull eyes. The woman tells Katherine that she and her husband want a child.

Upon arrival at home, the couple argue because Katherine took Alex's car without asking. The dispute escalates, Alex proposes a divorce, and at that moment the archaeologist breaks into the conversation to take her to a sensational excavation in Pompeii . There they watch as the plaster cast of a dead couple is gradually exposed. Katherine is shaken, bursts into tears and wants to leave the place immediately. In the labyrinth of the deserted ruins of Pompeii, they try to talk about their relationship crisis. A sarcastic allusion by Alex to the poet and his poem is what ultimately triggers Katherine to agree to the divorce.

On the way back, Katherine talks about the fact that they could both have had a child, which she regrets now, but he finds it reassuring. With the car you get into the San Gennaro procession . When they get stuck, they get out and are separated from each other in the crowd, which is completely out of control because a “miracle” has just occurred behind the Madonna. Katherine calls Alex for help, and as if by accident, the couple are driven back together. They hug and reassure each other that they love each other.

production

The film was originally intended to be shot on the basis of the story Duo by Colette . But Rossellini had failed to secure the rights and was forced to redevelop the story with the help of Vitaliano Brancati . Colette's plot is basically retained in the film, but her name is not mentioned in the credits. There was no fixed script for the actors, they often only received their text the day before and were forced to improvise while shooting. Rossellini himself “didn't want any samples”.

Fumaroles at Pozzuoli

The film was shot in black and white in 35 mm format .

The locations of the film were in addition to the Titanus Studios in Rome a. a. a villa near Torre del Greco , Pompeii and Herculaneum , Cumae , the fumaroles near Pozzuoli as well as Capri and Naples ( Cimetiero Fontanelle ). Ingrid Bergman wears clothes from the Fernanda Gattinoni house. Giacomo Rondinella sings the Neapolitan folk songs. The arrangements of the songs come from Rossellini's brother Renzo Rossellini. Foto Film Ricordi produced a record of his own compositions. The Rome Symphony Orchestra plays under his direction.

The language in the film is English, the Italian version was dubbed.

Publications

There are a number of variants of the film of different lengths and widespread under different titles. The first version of the film premiered in Milan on September 7, 1954. In Germany, the film was released on November 9, 1954 in a shortened version of 81 minutes. The film was shortened by 17 minutes in France in April 1955 and shown as “L'amour est le plus fort”. The most radical cut down to 70 minutes was the British version entitled "A Lonely Women" (1954).

In 2012 Films sans frontières , Paris, published a DVD entitled “Viaggio in Italia = Voyage en Italie” (97 minutes). In 2012, a restored version in English was released with the support of Cinecittà Luce, Cineteca Bologna and the Centro sprerimentale di cinematografia as part of the Progetto Rossellini (length 1:26:08). The version released by Koch Media in 2012 as part of the “4 films by Roberto Rosselini” series entitled Reise in Italien in German and partially subtitled has been shortened to 82 minutes. A digitized and restored version was published in the USA in spring 2013, and The Criterion Collection , New York, also produced a DVD, which they marketed together with “Stromboli” and “Europa '51” as a Bergman trilogy. At the Cannes Film Festival on May 24, 2019, another extended version, length 97 minutes, which was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with the Istituto Luce di Cinecittà and the Cineteca Nazionale, was shown. During the recent restoration, particular care was taken with Enzo Serafin's work with the camera and with the film's rich soundtrack, which was neglected in the various previous edits.

reception

Reise in Italy flopped at the box office and was largely rejected by Italian critics. Marino Onorati, a critic of Film d'Oggi , recommended Rossellini to change careers. However, employees of the Cahiers du cinéma and directors of the Nouvelle Vague such as Jean-Luc Godard , Jacques Rivette , François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol recognized that a trend reversal was heralding in this film. In his letter about Rossellini , Jacques Rivette stated that with a trip to Italy all films had suddenly aged ten years. In 2005, Dan Callahan of Slant Magazine described the film as "a key work in film history. Strange, repulsive, with him began the exquisite discomfort of the art cinema of the 1960s ”. The restored version of the film from 2013 then achieved a top rate of 95% among the critics (22 votes) at Rotten Tomatoes .

Luca Guadagnino called his film A Bigger Splash “an homage to Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy with Ingrid Bergman . Bergman was a real diva and we wanted Marianne to be such a diva. "

The title of Martin Scorsese's documentary My Italian Journey (Il mio viaggio in Italia) on Italian post-war cinema is a reference to the Rossellini film.

In the endless conversations between the couple in Richard Linklater's film Before Midnight , the protagonist alludes to Rossellini's film.

Others

In the German dubbed version, George Sanders is not called Alex, but "Axel". He is dubbed by Paul Klinger , Ingrid Bergman by Eleonore Noelle .

Viaggio in Italia was the third of a total of seven films that Ingrid Bergman made between 1950 and 1954 exclusively with Rossellini as director. From 1956 she played again in Hollywood, in 1958 the marriage with Rossellini was divorced.

During the filming, a Swedish team led by Gert Engstömer shot the short documentary A Brief Encounter with the Rossellini Family on the set . Besides Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini and their children, the actor George Sanders is involved. The narrator is the Swedish film composer Nils-Gustav Holmquist.

Reviews

In 2007 the film was shown at the Documenta . The program booklet says: “A mysterious key work, for Roberto Rossellini's work as well as for European cinema: Neorealism is turning into a modern subjectivity that Rossellini's critical admirers in France will develop in the course of the Nouvelle Vague . After this film, Jacques Rivette saw all previous films differently - they suddenly aged by a decade. Viaggio in Italia tells of a new beginning and is one itself. "

"The film concludes with their love mysteriously renewed in the warm climate of Naples, which might not be believable unless you saw for yourself how convincing this seemingly unconvincing resolution really is." Writes Dennis Schwartz.

In 2013, the New York Times reviewer wrote on the occasion of the showing of the restored film in New York: “The treason of time - the unwelcome intrusion of the past, the empty indolence of the present, and the terrifying uncertainty of the future - this is one of Rossellini's themes, and an aspect of the film - with all its magical glimpses of a bygone era - that makes it so unnervingly contemporary ”.

In the criticism, attention is drawn several times to the proximity of Kiarostami's film Die Liebesfälscher to Reise in Italy . Kiarostami himself has seen the film twice 20 years apart and says in an interview with SF Said that Rossellini had a great influence on his own style.

literature

  • Jim Hillier (Ed.): Cahiers du Cinéma. The 1950s Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave . Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard Univ. Press 1985. Originally publ. in French in Cahiers du cinéma , nos. 1–102. April 1951 – December 1959. ISBN 0-674-09060-8 . In this:
Eric Rohmer : The Land of Miracles . May 1956. pp. 204-208.
Francois Truffaut , Fereydoun Hoveyda , Jacques Rivette : Interviews with Roberto Rossellino. July 1954 – April 1959.
  • Jacques Rivette: Letter on Rossellini ; in: Center d'Information Cinématographique de Munich, Revue CICIM 24/25 of January 1989 (editing and translations: Heiner Gassen and Fritz Göttler), therein pp. 72–90.
  • András Bálint Kovács: Screening Modernism. European Art Cinema, 1950-1980 . Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press 2007. In it: Rossellini. The Neorealistic Miracle. Pp. 260-271.
  • Matthew Fox: Pompeii in Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy . In: Shelley Hales, Joanna Paul: Pompeii in the Public Imagination from it's Rediscovery to Today. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-956936-6
  • Enrico Vettore: Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy. The First Modern Film . L. Graziado Center Lecture. California State University, Long Beach, Cal. 17th October 2011.
  • Day Gallagher: Les aventures de Roberto Rossellini . Paris: Scheer 2015. ISBN 978-2-7561-0774-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thilo Wydra: Ingrid Bergman. One life. Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt 2017.
  2. ^ “Viaggio in Italia” fu girato tra Torre del Greco , accessed on April 24, 2019
  3. ↑ Renzo Rossellini - Viaggio in Italia discogs.com,
  4. ^ Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia), Original Movie Soundtrack
  5. ^ Il Viaggio in Italia 1953, Italian YouTube, accessed on April 24, 2019
  6. ↑ Journey to Italy, 1954, English YouTube, accessed April 24, 2019
  7. ↑ A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman criterion.com, accessed April 26, 2019
  8. ↑ A Journey to Italy, Symbolic of Modernity , Festival de Cannes, accessed on April 22, 2019
  9. ↑ Cannes Classics, Restored Prints
  10. ↑ Geoff Andrew: Realer than realism: Journey to Italy , BFI, April 24, 2019, accessed April 25, 2019
  11. ↑ Quoted from: Stefano Masi, Enrico Lancia: I film di Roberto Rossellini. Roma: Cremese 1987. p. 63.
  12. ^ Jacques Rivette: Writings for the cinema . CICIM Revue pour le cinema français, No. 24/25, p. 90.
  13. ↑ "[...] a key work in the history of film: thorny, alienated and alienating, it inaugurated the exquisite unease of the sixties art film" You Must Change Your Life: The Films of Roberto Rossellini & Ingrid Bergman Slantmagazine, November 15th 2006, accessed April 23, 2019
  14. ↑ Journey to Italy, Viaggio in Italia , accessed April 23, 2019
  15. ↑ AnOther Magazine, 2015 accessed on April 27 of 2019.
  16. ^ “Il mio viaggio in Italia” (1999) - Il documentario di Martin Scorsese sul cinema italiano Rive Gauche, film et critica, accessed on April 27, 2019
  17. ↑ IMDb
  18. ^ Documenta Kassel 2007, Viaggio in Italia
  19. ↑ German: “The end of the film, in which their love mysteriously flares up again in the warm climate of Naples, may not necessarily be believable if you haven't seen for yourself how convincing this apparently unconvincing solution actually is.” Ozus' World Movie Reviews September 2, 2006, accessed April 23, 2019
  20. ^ AO Scott: Revisiting a Rossellini Classic to Find Resonances of Today in: The New York Times, April 30, 2013, accessed April 27, 2019
  21. ↑ Filmmakers on film: Abbas Kiarostami The Telegraph, September 28, 2002, accessed April 27, 2019