Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism

In this exciting new book, Gelley both considers the significance of the collaboration between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in light of the neorealist aesthetic, and re-examines the director's immediate postwar works in relation to the contemporary discussions on Italian national identity. She argues that rather than marking a radical break with the director's early neorealist successes, Rossellini's films with Bergman in fact extend the boundaries of the concept of neorealism and challenge the standard reading of some of its basic tenets, especially regarding the relationship between character and depicted settings, both urban and natural. Gelley also aims to reassess the relationship between European postwar and American cinema by looking at the ways in which the image of the Hollywood star was translated and transformed when it was imported into Rossellini's Italy. Rossellini's insertion of the Hollywood star into the native landscape, Gelley shows, had a significant influence on the evolution of the director's approach to the neorealist aesthetic. His filming of the encounter between Bergman and the Italian landscape involves not only a re-interpretation and transformation of the Hollywood star persona, but also a challenge to the idealized notion of an authentic Italian national collective free from foreign influence. The disruption which Bergman's character introduced into the Italian landscape became one means whereby the director was able to explore the ambivalence inherent in any attempt to construct a national identity.