With a cycle of projects starring his wife Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini began to lose some of the critics whose attention he had grabbed with Rome: Open City (1945). Moving away from the neo-realist movement’s unflinching depiction of post-war social realities, he was beginning to chart the emotional relationships between his characters.

Katherine and Alexander Joyce (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) are an English couple holidaying in Naples whose marriage starts to fracture under the strains of mutual boredom and resentment. The striking looseness of Rossellini’s storytelling suggests the subjective textures of life, encompassing periods of dead time that anticipate the modernist art films of Michelangelo Antonioni.

“‘With the appearance of Journey to Italy, all films have suddenly aged ten years,’ Jacques Rivette wrote. Narratively open and fragmented, driven by melancholy, astonishment and the disruptive force of reality, it is the ideal junction in Rossellini’s filmography between the neorealist experience, his artistic collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, and the adventurous, avant-garde nature that would guide the great Roman director throughout his career.” Giulio Casadei

Film	Year	Director
The River	1951	Jean Renoir
Journey to Italy	1954	Roberto Rossellini
News from Home	1976	Chantal Akerman
Tokyo Story	1953	Yasujirō Ozu
Diary 1973-1983	1988	David Perlov
A Portrait of Ga	1952	Margaret Tait
Yi Yi	1999	Edward Yang
The Green Ray	1986	Eric Rohmer
Nostalgia for the Light	2010	Patricio Guzmán
My Very Private Eros: Love Song 1974	1974	Kazuo Hara

Edward Lawrenson

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