Rendering 9

The article which is called Journey To Italy: the Italian film that kickstarted the French New Wave was pulished on Saturday 4 May 2013  in The Gardian. The author wrote that Roberto Rossellini's half-improvised neo-realist masterpiece uses the ruins of Pompeii as an unforgettable metaphor for a marriage. In terms of cinema history, Roberto Rossellini's Journey To Italy  is one of the most important films you've never seen. The third part of an informal trilogy of Italian movies starring his wife Ingrid Bergman – the others are Stromboli  and Europa 51  – it follows an English couple (Bergman and George Sanders) visiting Naples to sell off an inherited villa, as their unfamiliar and enforced intimacy starts eating away at the fabric of their union. As he idles with other expats and their marriage proves a transient, temporary thing, she immerses herself in the ruins around Pompeii and Herculaneum, all the while feeling rebuked and chastened by the ancient permanence of everything around her. Rossellini, the grand old man of Italian neo-realism, is the only film-maker of 1945 to hold true to its tenets throughout his creative life. Here, he redirects that ethic away from the grand social concerns and contemporary history of his postwar neo-realist trilogy – films shot, to adapt Irène Némirovsky's phrase, on the still-moving molten lava of great and terrible events – and into the private sphere of intimacy and personal relationships. The rational and irrational are in conflict at every level, and language and imagery are haunted by death and entropy. In one searing moment, the couple, their marriage now a ruin too, are taken to an archeological dig at Pompeii and watch as a hollow place in the cold lava – where the remains of the dead have left an imprint – is filled with plaster and then excavated. A cement couple is disinterred, perhaps a husband and wife, and the guide comments, "They found death together – united." Bergman can't help but fall to pieces. It flopped at the box office, but critics at Cahiers du Cinéma – the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol – all saw it as the moment when poetic cinema grew up and became indisputably modern. Journey To Italy is thus one wellspring of the French New Wave. A film convulsed by themes of sterility, petrification, pregnancy and eternity, it finds its echo in such death-haunted Nouvelle Vague masterpieces as Chabrol's Le Boucher and Truffaut's La Chambre Verte. Hopefully its UK cinema rerelease on Friday 4 May will bring the wonders of the Bergman-Rossellini collaboration back from the dead, too.

Very interesting article! For me it is important to know different facts about different films. I did not see direct attitude from the author. As for the film may be it will interesting to watch this film.