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Eternal brilliance: the revolution of Ingrid Bergman

She was one of the most celebrated actresses in Hollywood. She had played Ilsa Lund in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and she had worked with Leo McCarey, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock. She didn’t need any more fame or money, so after watching Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist films she chose risk. Moved by the portrait of a country at war and their innovative cinematic style, the star wrote the director a letter which is well worth quoting:

“Dear Mr. Rossellini,

I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only “ti amo,” I am ready to come and make a film with you.

Ingrid Bergman”.

In his long reply Rossellini told Bergman that he recently had seen a group of women in a camp in Italy waiting to be returned to their countries. He narrated how he managed to talk to a Latvian woman who barely spoke Italian but a guard interrupted them. Some time later, Rossellini went back to the camp looking for her and he was told that she’d left with a soldier to an island close to Sicily called Stromboli. The story and the name of the island would be the same as those of the first film Bergman and Rossellini would make together. That first collaboration would also be the beginning of an extramarital relationship condemned by puritanism and that would turn Bergman into a symbol of evil. In response she married Rossellini and didn’t shoot a film in Hollywood until 1969. Watching her work it can be easily said that she was the winning party.

Europa ’51 (1952, dri. Roberto Rosellini) Europe ’51 (1952, dir. Roberto Rosellini)

I’ve seen intense analyses of how Marlon Brando plays with Eva Marie Saint’s glove in On the Waterfront (1954), but I’ve never seen something of the sort on Bergman’s change between the first scene of Journey to Italy, where she drives a car, and one of the last ones in which she nervously plays with her hands in the passenger’s seat. At first we see her wearing a leopard coat in a commanding position, showing much self-confidence, but as her marriage falls apart and she feels humbled by the wonders of Italy throughout the film her attitude changes to one of submission and anxiety. In her last car scene Bergman does with her hands something very similar to what Brando does with the glove: she extends her acting to the least focused parts of her anatomy and represents subtly her character’s mental state.

Nowadays we see Nicole Kidman, Rachel Weisz or Cate Blanchett making similar contributions to the films of Hollywood outsiders like Yorgos Lanthimos, Paolo Sorrentino and Todd Haynes but perhaps they would be unimaginable without the risk Ingrid Bergman took out of her own will. By doing so she attracted undeserved attacks and judgements but she also became one of the great revolutionaries in Hollywood cinema: a star whose light didn’t fade as another one came by but one among the kind that shines through time.