Journey to Italy (1954)

 Roberto Rossellini's "Journey to Italy"

Released in 1954, Roberto Rossellini's "Journey to Italy" marked a landmark transition in cinema. Loosely basing the film off of Colette's 1934 novel "Duo," Rossellini opted for a very loose storytelling format. In doing so, he created a seminal work in modernist cinema. 

The film stars Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a childless married couple visiting Italy to sell their vacation home near Naples. While in Italy, all they do is complain about the country and its people. They also are insufferable to one another and their marriage begins to disintegrate rapidly. While George Sander's Alex goes off partying with 'friends,' Katherine attempts to tour Naples. Unable to connect to anything around them, including with each other, the couple reach a breaking point and decide to remain married together.

I think that in order to truly understand the intention of the film, you must first realize that, despite its English speaking characters, this is first and foremost an Italian film. The primary thematic interest of Italian films during this time was tied to the philosophy of realism, in that films were about people on the street. More specifically, the spirit of Italian cinema centered on the poor and downtrodden, and more specifically, how the war created a chasm of challenges the average person was unable to overcome.

The reason "Journey to Italy" is so starkly different than most Italian works at the time is that it did not center on the poor or the downtrodden or even the people of Italy themselves. Rather, the film focuses on a rich, well-off English-speaking couple whose troubles and issues are so distant from that of the common Italian person. It is important to understand this notion in order to understand the context of film. The two protagonists are meant to be antithetical constructs. Their spoiled behaviors and their surface-level marriage problems are meant to create a disconnect between themselves and the audience.

The disconnect in the film is not exclusive to the relationship between the characters and the viewer. There is a disconnect between the characters and everything else in the film, including each other. They are surrounded by beautiful vistas, historical monuments, people with tales about the war, and many other existential interests that would normally draw a level intrigue or emotional connection. Rather, the couple fail to connect to anything at every turn, even despite Katherine's superficial interest. 

Through this focused attention on disconnect, Rossellini begins to pull away from his roots in realism and opened a door into a new avenue of cinematic modernism. To achieve a theme involving disconnect, Rossellini allows the plot to become loose and almost immaterial. This allows the film to meander about aimlessly. The narrative itself begins to dissolve completely in favor of atmosphere. Rather than having to follow a constructed narrative that illustrates a larger point about a complex theme, you instead feel the film as an atmospheric texture. 

This texture allows the film to journey into the new realms of modernism. While watching the film, one feels a general feeling of malaise and a boredom with the film. This allows the viewer to feel as disconnect as its central characters. Through these concepts, Rossellini taps into a general sentiment in the new post-war landscape of the Western world. As the 1950s were starting to provide more comforts to the average consumer in a growing capitalist utopia, the average person began to become more spoiled, more detached, and more disconnected from the world around them. Rossellini signals the new temperament of existential malaise, class boredom, and a general feeling of loneliness and isolation.   

This new, modernist lens was perhaps one of the largest influences on the global cinema that would arrive in the coming years. One notable director who took this format and completely expanded it to new and exciting places was one of Rossellini's contemporaries, Michelangelo Antonioni, who made works throughout the 1960s that alienated its viewers with bored, uninterested, and meandering pieces that tapped into the existential psyche of the modern world. "Journey to Italy" was also a profound influence on the French directors of the New Wave movement, like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol, who all saw the film as "the moment when poetic cinema grew up and became indisputably modern." The film's stark fixation on death, sterility, petrification, pregnancy, and eternity and its peripheral association with characters who can't quite tether themselves to these concepts became a wellspring of influence for films to come.

"Journey to Italy" was a commercial failure, both in the Italian and foreign markets. The continued lack of success for Rossellini would start to crater his ability to make more artistically viable works. However, the success of the film does not lie in the box-office receipts, but in the profound influence it had in the cinematic works that would succeed it. It was one of the first examples of modernist cinema that ventured away from realism and theatricality and into domains of abstract textures and mood that future innovations would appropriate.