Review: Stromboli (1950)

 

The war between humans and nature is endless, with the victory of one implying the defeat of both. This rather frightening truth cannot be more understated, especially in light of today’s global environmental crisis, which seems all but irreversible. The prospect of restoring the supposed equilibrium we have with the natural world has at the most an equivocal basis: has humanity ever conformed to any state of existence other than itself?

 

In Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), the first of the Bergman-Rossellini collaboration, the contrast is made starkly clear: the outsized ego of mankind versus the impregnable, and impenetrable, all-powerfulness of Mother Nature. Bergman played Karin, a Lithuanian exile dreaming of a better life but marrying an ex-POW fisherman out of desperate need to be released from the refugee camp. Her husband takes her back to his home, the volcanic island Stromboli, where a bemused Karin is greeted by its dour-faced people - mostly elders with a smattering of English, who speak of America with a nostalgic spark in their eyes - and a dilapidated house which teeters precariously beneath the volcano. The locale is desolate and yet not without its primal charm if the person is in a receptive mood. Karin is by no means in such mood and assumes herself a haughty alien from the outset (“I know I’m different from these people,” is how she likes to attribute to her chronic discontent).

 

The photography is of the same grainy-white that dominates Rossellini’s war trilogy - black is a colour of false security in the director’s visual palette, and pure white intrinsically defilable. By jettisoning chiaroscuro lighting, Rossellini, especially in those films with Bergman, endows the style with a gritty realism that informs the subject matter. Stromboli consists of a cast made up mostly with nonprofessional actors - some of them residents of the island - and, for good measure, documentary-like sequence of the fishermen in their daily toils. Karin, the real centre of the drama, is trapped, metaphorically and physically. We feel her distress when she negotiates the labyrinthine pathways of the village, when, trying to comfort a crying child, she fails to break down the language barrier between them; encountering confusion and hostility at every turn, Karin rubs a leaf against her cheek, a rare semblance of tenderness in this harsh world. 

 

But nature is largely indifferent, as Karin will learn in time. Not inclined to the play of signs and symbols in his storytelling, Rossellini depicted the place and the people as they were, against a backdrop that seems ever removed from the procession of time. Indeed, in many respects the film does not age well: we may wince at its frank portrayal of provincialism and misogyny; the story follows a well-worn template of framing the narrative around the clash of contrasting voices and values; most of the characters seem to carry with them a hollow core. But what earns Stromboli a special spot in Rossellini’s filmography is that it marks the director’s shift to what may be termed a “modernist” approach of filmmaking: the search of an abstract feeling, the setting of a scene, the maneuvering of technical devices, are more interesting than how the story pans out. 

The real subject of Stromboli, then, is neither men nor nature, but a process- a process of bridging the unbridgeable gap, of individual will coming to terms with its ultimate powerlessness and nullity, a process that represents only one cog of a chain of its similar kinds in human history. It is reasonable in such light that the film ends in an open question: Karin, surviving a minor volcanic eruption on the top of the mountain, is caught: should she continue on her reckless trudge through the mountain to find a possible route of escape, or should she go back to the village and submit to a life that she resents? She casts a despairing look at the volcano: a mother (she finds out she is pregnant) calling out to the Mother for strength and guidance.