Roberto Rossellini's 'Stromboli'

The rest would be history. Rossellini himself was looking for something different; he could not, he said, go on making movies about ruined postwar cities. He found it in Stromboli, set on the bleak volcanic island of that name north of Sicily. The story he filmed — of a simple fisherman who brings a foreign woman out of a displaced persons’ camp to share his life — was also the one he lived, for he and Bergman commenced an affair that led to a pregnancy, the breakup of both their marriages, and, for Bergman herself, an exile from Tinseltown that lasted eight years.

Stromboli, which had been financed by Howard Hughes, was brutally cut in its American distribution, and Rossellini’s ending changed without his knowledge or consent. By this time, word of Bergman’s scandalous affair had come out, and she was denounced in, among other bastions of morality, the United States Senate. America had welcomed her to its shores and adopted her as the new Garbo; it had embraced her as the beautiful but troubled Woman with a Past who would be redeemed by true love. Instead, she had run off with a raffish Old World director and broken up a respectable home. If worse were needed, in Stromboli she would play a woman who rejects the love of a good if simple man and turns an entire community against her. It was as if she had dictated her own punishment in advance.

Film lost, film found

Stromboli itself would disappear after its disastrous American release, and the print, although not lost, badly decayed with the years. It was patiently and lovingly digitized in 2012, and International House brought it to Philadelphia for a one-time showing on January 17. The original title was restored — Stromboli: Land of God — as was the original Rossellini version and ending. It is a cinematic curiosity to be sure, but is it, after all, a good film?

The plot is simply told. Karin, a Lithuanian, finds herself behind barbed wire in an Italian displaced persons camp at the end of World War II. We don’t know how she got there, but that would have required no backstory in the late 1940s, when tens of millions of people, uprooted by every sort of circumstance, had been cast like so much flotsam across one border or another. We know nothing of Karin herself except for the affair she confesses to having had with a young German officer who seemed “sympathetic.” Given the Nazi record in Lithuania — and the collaboration of many Lithuanians themselves in a particularly brutal and genocidal occupation — we understand that Karin is, at the least, not politically correct. Nor does politics concern her now: She only wants to escape. Rejected in an effort to emigrate to Argentina, she accepts a proposal from Antonio (Mario Vitale), who offers her life on his island.

Karin is appalled by Stromboli, a rock rendered barren by the active volcano that dominates it like an angry god and bursts out in full eruption midway through the film. This would be done with simulation today, but Stromboli did erupt during the filming, sending cascades of rock and lava upon its inhabitants. They flee into the sea, where boats rescue them in a quite orderly and choreographed fashion: clearly a practiced routine. For Karin, who realizes she has only exchanged one prison for another, nature seems to have conspired with history: Between them, there is no way out.

The sea around

Stromboli’s only source of wealth — indeed, of sustenance — is the sea. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Antonio and his fellow fishermen land an abundant catch of tuna and wrestle the big fish into their boat. The tuna thrash in the nets that have trapped them, and the sea comes violently alive with their struggle — as violently, in its way, as the volcano. One sees in these moments that Rossellini’s protagonist is nature itself, in whose processes life and death are two sides of the same coin.

Karin is appalled by the spectacle of the catch, as she is when Antonio, who’s bought a ferret to hunt rabbits, turns it loose on one. These terms of life are not for her, nor is Antonio’s rough ardor. Shunned by the villagers for her city ways, rebuffed by the priest to whom she turns for comfort, and trapped all the more by a pregnancy, she flees, trying to cross the volcano to the other side of the island. The climb is arduous, and, overcome by the volcano’s fumes, she collapses in exhaustion and despair, losing consciousness.

When Karin comes to, the air has cleared and the stars are bright. Their radiance moves her in spite of herself, and she prays for help to a God whose existence she doubts. With dawn and the returning life of swooping seabirds, she feels something like grace. Nothing has been solved for her, but she is awake to a beauty in elements that had only been desolating before. The camera follows the arc of the birds’ flight, which seems to bring the very landscape to life. It is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, in which the camera tells a story to which words can add nothing.

What happened next?

This is where Rossellini left the film. In the Hughes version released in America, Karin goes back down to rejoin her husband, God having instructed her in the supreme virtue of fidelity. Rossellini protested, to no avail. Both versions vanished from sight. It is good to have the original back. Flaws and all, it is a significant work and perhaps the most lyrical of all Rossellini’s films. It also gave Ingrid Bergman a chance to portray something other than wounded innocence on screen. “They are horrible,” her Karin says of the villagers who shun her, “but I am worse.” Redeemed or not by her night on the hillside, her character comes brutally to terms with herself.