Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21111 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-11-17
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: English, Italian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 80 minutes

Synopsis
George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman play Alexander and Katherine Joyce, a bored married couple in Naples, waiting around for an inherited house to be sold. With time on their hands the cracks begin to show in their marriage. Rejecting Hollywood norms, Rossellini uses periods of pure cinematography, in this case of Naples and Mt Vesuvius, to illustrate the passage of time and moments of ennui. The director also deliberately kept the actors uninformed about the script and story, and with this enforced improvisation, he was able to bring out a realistic disorientation in their performances befitting the nature of the film. Interestingly, George Sanders had recently won an Oscar for ALL ABOUT EVE.

Customer Reviews

Journey To Italy
This, in my opinion, is one of Rosselini's finest works. The BFI edition is a very good transfer however it was a disappointment to learn that it has been dubbed into english.

Journey to Italy SPOILERS
"Journey to Italy" is arguably the crowning achievement in the career of a much-maligned director. It was voted the greatest Italian film ever made by the esteemed critics at Cahiers du Cinema eight years after it was made.

The film traces the journey of married couple Alexander and Katherine Joyce, on vacation in Naples to see to the sale of the villa of a recently deceased Uncle. Whilst there, their relationship begins to disintegrate once they find themselves in a mileu alien to the one that has conditioned their existence and are confronted with culture and beliefs antithetical to their own. The film contrasts decadent, alienating, prosaic modern values, represented in the characters of Alex and Katherine, with the sensuality and poetry of Naples. The Joyces have become inured to a rather mechanical existence. It is a marriage that seems more a mutually beneficient business venture than an amorous, spiritual union. They are emotionally and spiritually impoverished middle-class characters who find themselves lost without their rigid work-related daily routine which represents normalcy for them. In "Journey to Italy", Rossellini challenges these characters to abandon reason and preconceptions, and to surrender to impulse, a challenge that might be aimed just as much at our modern society.

The film is inspired with the kind of textured, realistic characterization that we find in so many of Rossellini's films. The methods Rossellini used to get more instinctive, authentic emotions from his actors posit the man's remarkable faculty for innovation and ingenuity. George Sanders, the famous British actor who portrays the lead male, was constantly bilked quite sadistically by Rossellini who would demand that cast and crew ostracize him so that he could really become the frustrated, perplexed character we see on the screen. He also kept him in the lurch concerning the plot and the character Rossellini wanted. This isn't merely a performance crafted from conventional dramaturgical skills but the creation of a believable character. The actual environment in which Sanders, and Bergman worked, was no less disconcerting or alienating
than the one in the film itself, which is what gives their characters a rare authenticity.

The main focus of the narrative is on Bergman's character and the excursions she takes into the city, a vast terrain of cultural and archeaological splendour where Rossellini would have us believe miracles are endemic. I suppose you could say that the film is about a series of miracles that rupture a character's consciousness, a spiritual journey from alienation to grace, like in Stromboli.

She goes to the National Archaeological Museum, famed for having some of the finest statues in the world. In this scene, Katherine stares with great anxiety at the statues of Emperors and mythological characters, at their sensual, carnal beauty. Death is a perennial theme in the work of Rossellini and the spiritually impoverished Katherine is mortified by images of a no longer extant world. In this deeply Catholic film, Rossellini questions our materialistic ideology that has lead us into a void by imbuing his images, such as these inanimate objects, with the Christian idea of immortality. The statues come to life in the frame, and this is one of many near-epiphanies Katherine experiences before she surrenders to impulse. Rossellini's miracles are not great, supernatural events, but experiences contingent upon our perception of life.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in the film is where the Joyces go to witness the excavation of two bodies unearthed at Pompeii. Rossellini actually filmed a real excavation of a couple together. It's a particularly eerie image. The couple are facing each other, crouched together. Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried after a particularly violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. You can conjecture on the visual symbology but one things for sure, its a haunting image.

Like all great works of Catholic cinema, be it "Ordet" or "Journey to Italy", the power of the film lies in its ability to make you believe in a world where miracles are a part of and sustain creation, even when you are an atheist like myself.

Highly recommended.