Stromboli

(Stromboli, terra di Dio, Roberto Rossellini, Italy/USA, 1950)

Space, Landscape, Environment (Notes from a 1982 lecture in this series)

In our consideration of time in cinema, we split it between history and memory.

We are going to make another cinematic distinction today, between space and place.

And also between landscape that is natural; and the built environment that is cultural.

Discussion of space in film may seem, at the outset, rather abstract. It doesn’t mean simply air (the space around us); nor does it refer to the vastness of ‘outer space’. But space, in terms of the measurable or intuitable (feel-able) distance between things (people, objects, fixtures in the landscape) is absolutely central to the art and craft of mise en scène in cinema. Some critics and theorists (Jean Douchet, for instance) refer to these distances as intervals. And these distances/intervals are not fixed – or rarely remain so; they can, at any moment, become dynamic. This why and how filmmaker-writers like Alexandre Astruc spoke of cinema (and especially its mise en scène component) in the 1950s as the art of bodies in space.

Where places are (generally) concrete and fixed in cinema (although we can find many canny manipulations of this ‘fact’), spaces are constantly open to revision, redefinition, shift of perspective, literal re-drawing – not only though the movements of bodies and the camera, but also in tandem with editing. This gives rise to concepts such as scenic space and narrative space (see Stephen Heath) in film theory of the 1970s and ‘80s.

In particular, cinema is frequently based on the interplay – which is, except in extreme cases, inevitable and inescapable – between what is, at any given moment, on screen and off screen, and how this dynamic can constantly change and fluctuate. Just to take the most obvious cases, the popular genres of horror and thriller make extensive, fundamental use of this dynamic. But it’s literally everywhere in narrative film (and documentary, too!). So, the art of framing – both including and excluding from the picture, in the same moment – is equally crucial.

Once we reach the level of speculating on the meaning of places and spaces in cinema – both inherent meaning and expressed meaning – we enter a rich field of cultural associations and connotations. There is open space and closed space; public space and private space; inner space (of the mind or body) and outer space (in every sense). Recall how commonplace designations of difference such as ‘city and country’ or ‘here and abroad’ shape so many films, TV shows and literary forms. All of these designations (or basic structural oppositions) can, naturally enough, be confused, complicated, reversed, mediated, fused, and so on. That is where the thematic singularities of individual films, rising above the given cultural clichés, comes into play. That’s the art of cinema, or at least one important aspect of it.

The element of the human body, in all its semantic associations, has already come up a few times here. Contemporary film theory often evokes the similarity, homology or even interchangeability of the ‘film as text’ and the body. The film is (like) a body, behaves like a body in all its dimensions (including what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith posits as the hysterical, symptomatic body); and the body itself can have the layers and effects of a film: these levels of body/film reflect and reinforce each other. Just as we can evoke dyads like private/public and city/country in our discussion and interpretation of films, the complex idea of ‘the living and the dead’ structures many of our experiences with movies. Recall, for example, the shower scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), with its dialectic of frantic movement – of body parts, murderous objects, and editing patterns – and the eerie quality of the finally inanimate corpse, a literal type of freeze-frame.

Once again, many cultural associations come into play in the relations between body, space and place: remember how the desert centre of Australia is often referred to as its ‘dead heart’!

Stromboli achieves a richness of metaphorisation on this integrated level, particularly in its closing section: the body of Karin (Ingrid Bergman) interacting and fusing with the landscape of the island; the film itself becoming wholly concentrated in the spectacle of this body as a complex screen image. Rossellini’s other films sometimes approach this level of intensity – think of the role of grisly physical torture in Rome, Open City (1945), the brutally matter-of-fact murder of partisans that closes Paisà (1946), or the elaborate medical, bloodletting rituals in The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966).

One thing to be wary of, though – as 1980s science fiction is constantly reminding us – is a too hard-and-fast distinction between real and artificial bodies. This is not only because of rapidly unfolding, futuristic technologies involving robotics, holograms, video game simulations, and so forth (already the sophisticated subject of fiction in the 1940 classic novel Morel’s Invention by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a key influence on Resnais’ and Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad [1962]). More crucially for us as cinema students, film has been, from the moment of inception, based on the confusion of the ‘ghostly’, technological body (as projected on screen) and the real body of the actor standing in front of the camera. It was from the start (as Maxim Gorky testified) and remains today the “kingdom of shadows”. The body that is ‘captured’ by the camera and ‘imprinted’ on film in order to be (potentially) infinitely reproduced is already a transformed body, located in-between diverse states of concrete, materiality (such as ‘flesh and blood’) and new-fangled ‘virtual realities’. Jean-Louis Comolli has always insisted on this necessarily transformative aspect of cinema.

Let’s return to Stromboli. Even more than landscape – sometimes a rather distant, background, merely ‘scenic’ concept in cinema (like the infamous student whose evaluative comment on every single film was: “Good scenery”!) – Rossellini’s film emphasises, more specifically, land, even earth. And this earth possess both materially real and metaphorically powerful aspects. (I need hardly remind you of the filmmaker’s link to the neo-realist movement, already in full mutation by 1950.) On a primary level, Rossellini is drawn to the textures of material surfaces: walls, rocks, flesh … But beyond that surface, ‘bodies’ of matter such as sea and island wield their full poetic force here, as they do in Boris Barnet’s Russian classic By the Bluest of Seas (1936).

There is, as well, a dynamic interchange between the inside of the body (thoughts, emotions, reflexes) and the environment external to it. And cultural associations immediately come into play, in the way Rossellini depicts, for example, the island community: it is a fiercely closed society, the model of a certain kind of patriarchal, limiting, conformist repression. This is among the richest paradoxes of the film: the return to a supposedly natural, primitive way of living is also to submit to the degradations it dishes out – especially to women.

"Life on earth" – this earth, at any rate – is (as we learn) hard; and this toughness and difficulty is reflected in built features of the environment (the houses) as well as its natural characteristics (the cactuses). This type of barely civilised wilderness is large, violent in nature, and the great leveller of all lives and problems. The people of the island hold, steadfastly, onto their cultural traditions, but those traditions are marked (as in Pasolini’s films) by savagery, stupidity even. This is also, at this level of philosophy, the type of religious or spiritual metaphor that Rossellini will explore further in Europa ‘51 (1952): Simone Weil’s intransigent notion of the distant, harsh God and what he bequeaths as suffering and affliction to the human race.

Feminist criticism has alerted us to a disquieting mirror-effect underlying all of this: it is the director Rossellini who, in one sense, forces his real-life partner into undergoing such monumental suffering (Stromboli was a supremely difficult task for Bergman as an actor, used to a very different regime of production in Hollywood). There’s an implicit note of sadism – specifically Christian sadism – here. And the node of an intriguing paradox: the ‘natural world’ for Rossellini is the place of primitive passions, but it also hands out Divine Judgements.

Stromboli is ultimately about what we could describe as the threat of difference. Karin, as outsider, as city person and as woman, represents the ‘foreign element’ in this tale, and in so many ways. She inhabits a private, domestic space – take note of her interior decorations. Spoken language becomes an insistent marker of difference and distance (doubled in its alienation-effect by the sometimes odd practices of post-synchronised dialogue that we find in many Rossellini films, and indeed in much Italian cinema of all stripes). The civilised and the savage enter into an almighty (and often ambiguous) tussle. As in the films of Frank Borzage, there is tension – or is it equilibrium? – between the real and the romantic, the material and the spiritual, the here and the hereafter.

The film’s ending is justly famous: Karin against the world, and the aftermath of this primal encounter. But is it transcendent, or not? That’s the big question that all commentators have paused on and pondered (usually depending on their own, personal belief system!), often arriving at the provisional conclusion that what really matters is the fundamental undecidability of this screen event.

Does Karin decide to stay or go; has she had a spiritual awakening, or not? Is she ultimately alone, or trapped for eternity … or now connected to a higher power, after an experience of revelation?

Rossellini frames, films and edits her movements and gestures in a deliberately ambiguous way. Maybe the scene is like a Rorschach test: you see in it what you want to see, you take it wherever you want it to go. Is this the very definition of what Umberto Eco called the open text?

MORE Rossellini: Voyage in Italy

© Adrian Martin 6 July 1982