Voyage in Italy
Voyage in Italy is the key link between Neorealism and the subjective cinema of the early Sixties. It was the third, and best, of the five very personal features Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman. Here, Bergman is the wife of George Sanders, and they are an English couple visiting Italy to sell a family mansion. The film is “about” the disintegration and regeneration of their marriage; on a deeper level, it is about the spiritual needs of modern men and women in a world in which men, due to their roles in capitalist society, are seen by Rossellini as more alienated (and psychologically handicapped) than women. If this theme anticipates Antonioni, so does the treatment which rejects “plot” for a direct, intuitive cinema which exploits the tensions between actor and character, characters and landscape, documentary and symbolic shots, in a way that is (for 1953) nothing short of revolutionary.